Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable
videogameschronicle.com
videogameschronicle.com
The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more forms of monetization. The conversation should be about making games into a digital product that you can download and own the files. Piracy still happens anyway, and maybe this could make companies solve the problem differently, like only allowing digital backup for trusted players.
This is culture and it's part of our patrimony. The privilege of getting to publish thinga and having copyright protection ought to include responsibilities to the society too.
All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.
[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiativ...
I made a small mistake, the response will be from the Commission, not Parliament, because only the Commission can propose laws anyways - but you do get a hearing in parliament.
But essentially, even crossing the million signature threshold doesn't win you anything but a slightly bigger soap box and the promise of the Commission giving you a "no" in writing rather than just ignoring you. There is no requirement to actually act on it, and no way to force it (unlike e.g. in Switzerland where actual binding popular votes can be initiated with enough signatures).
You just get a stock/automated response to most petitions.
That said, they are required to set aside some parliamentary time for it and for petitions to be "debated".
You mean SAAS has a life cycle.
Software itself can be run by people willing to keep it running.
The whole "software should be turned off" comment is you trying to change perception about what software is.
No one mentioned running the code, just persisting it for the future public good
I agree. It should be a requirement to receive copyright protection. The US Copyright Office should also make those copies available for download on their servers the moment that the work enters the public domain.
A lot of games are already nearly impossible to preserve because they use DRM and anti-cheat systems that only a handful of people in the world could crack. Maybe in the future more people will learn, but I think it's more likely the opposite will happen and these people will be fully outcompeted by DRM providers.
I wish there was a way to prevent this, but I don't see it. You would have to outlaw SaaS in general. I mean, that sounds like utopia to me, but there's no chance any country would go for it.
Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no longer the same product. If a single player game becomes a service, it is no longer about a self-contained experience that exists like a movie or book. I guess here is where consumers need to demand that certain game genres be treated as art, and as such be sold like products instead of services.
Split-screen, LAN, and even Internet play without fixed servers all existed once upon a time (and still do, to a limited extent). But they aren't what people usually mean when they say "multiplayer" anymore. However, they all have the advantage of staying playable basically forever, with the only real limitation being the ability to emulate older tech.
Unfortunately this time they’re only offering 64GB cards or these key cards. I’m curious how much storage they have, I’m sure very little.
Not necessarily. Nintendo’s variant is built by Macronix under their XtraROM service; a variant of NAND flash designed to be a reliable Mask ROM substitute (including only being writable once, automatic repair afterwards, etc). Officially, their chips are rated to last 20 years at 85 degrees Celsius, which is insane.
This isn’t your off the shelf SD card chip built by a no-name Chinese design company that fails after 3 years of not receiving power. Combine the niche flash with a custom security chip (Lotus3) on every game card; that’s not cheap.
While we don’t know the exact pricing, the rumors are that 64GB is somewhere in the $15-$25 range per cartridge. At those prices, even if I ran a game company, I’d be reserving the non-game-key versions for a Deluxe Collector’s edition.
To be fair, this was the case for my Joycons too (Calling it drift is branding, they are effectively unusable)
I like Nintendo's games but their QC has always been a little off. I got bad joypads even in the 80s when we got a NES. (Not having the internet and being a dumb kid I thought I was only limited to moving up and left on Zelda for whatever reason)
I cannot understand how we used to engineer controllers that last, and now we just... don't.
I've seen some videos explaining the cause of the Joycon issue and it feels like it must be cost cutting (on the most important component of the device). People even fix it temporarily with a piece of cardboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StRvTiRagPo
Keep in mind, these are 100$+ in Canada. Per my experience, I think it will be another 40 years until I buy another Nintendo console.
Luckily, you can now buy third-party controllers that use hall effect sensors.
It also sounds like you can extend the lifespan my making sure to boot up your cartridge in a 3DS every so often, because Nintendo gave them an error correction routine: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...
It's rare for physical media to be the weak link in console DRM nowadays, when piracy does happen it's nearly always enabled by a full system jailbreak at which point you can just as easily pirate digital games.
There's basically no chance that this scheme will prevent piracy. Once again the pirates will have the superior product and paying customers will be screwed over.
CFexpress cards. Basically M2 nvme cards in a external pluggable form factor.
All else being equal, I'm happy Nintendo went with the more expensive media, even if it means some smaller titles likely won't be available physically. (In my eyes, a key card does not count as a physical release.)
I'm mostly just happy the key cards are clearly labeled so I can avoid buying them...
The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since it pretty much prevents piracy and allows them to charge a monthly fee rather than a one time license fee. For movies and music streaming exclusives aren't a new thing and improvements in network latency and bandwidth are making game streaming more and more viable.
Gamepass is the biggest threat in turning games into subscriptions, and unfortunately a growing subset of people will only play games on Gamepass. We've dodged Gamepass exclusives for now, but for how long?
There are logistical challenges that have to be solved, and both upfront and ongoing costs that have to be paid, for every new country that needs to be served, and often these are unlikely to be recouped. If they foreseeably reach 90+% of their potential customer base and revenue (or think so anyway) from those 40 countries then not expanding beyond them is a practical decision that doesn't extrapolate to not caring within those 40.
It seems fairly popular right now. If you are the kind of person who wants to play many new releases it's a great deal.
But I think it's not particularly sticky: it's a great deal for as long as Microsoft invests into it getting many titles immediately. If they stop doing that, that same audience segment doesn't really have a use for it anymore.
Eventually I got a gaming video card and canceled - for now.
While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it.
Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version requires manufacturing, shipping, retail markup, yet costs significantly less than the digital bits that have near-zero marginal cost.
It strongly suggests Nintendo wants the physical retail channel to thrive, or values the perceived permanence/resale value of cartridges.
This context makes the Switch 2 "gamekey" cartridges (physical auth token, digital download) fit their pattern of valuing a physical artifact and retail presence, even if the data delivery shifts.
I haven't read enough about this to know if the gamekey will kill this but it's certainly only a matter of time before they are all coded and bindable to only one account. Technically this has obviously been possible for a long time, they just haven't dared to pull that trigger yet. They clearly want to.
That stopping being true as soon as the DS line started and they switched to flash memory that will degrade over time when they don't have power. People's DS games are already failing. The same will happen to switch games. Only a few hardcore collectors are going to pay money for a cartridge that doesn't let you play the game anymore.
I never buy digitally from Sony, for example. The discs get discounted far earlier than the occasional digital sale.
Plus since we're talking about preservation, I don't trust Sony to make my digital purchases available indefinitely.
The only content you really own is the cracked version from pirate bay...
When I go to virgin mega store, there’s a large section of Nintendo games, but nothing for any PC games.
If it was cheaper to buy online, why would I buy physically, unless I was really into it physical media.
And that segment isn’t big enough to cause retailers to put up a section in the mall, which not only works as a point of sale but also as a giant advertising banner.
From preservation's perspective even the day-one release, no matter how buggy it is, is worth preserved. The speedrun community, for instance, often need to fix on an exact version of the game to compete, and a physical copy (implying a pinned revision) is often easier to agree on.
There are exceptions to this, when the day-one release is not playable. It is the trend happening in the software industry -- release early, even if it is literally unusable, because we can push a patch via the network -- that is disheartening.
With digital games, you're tied to how long the console's e-store lasts, which is guaranteed to be sunset.
Eventually I couldn't justify buying the console version of a game that I was willing to play on Steam.
I do that too but doesn't the same rule apply to Steam, too? (that is if it goes down, you can't download the games anymore?).
I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. So from a game preservation standpoint Steam isn't that bad compared to the locked down consoles and their walled gardens.
I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy. You can't be sure you'll be able to find copies of less popular games in the future, having the control over our own computers to do things like run unauthorized software is being threatened all the time, the ever expanding surveillance over our lives makes it increasingly risky to do anything legally questionable, and the copyright regime is only getting more powerful. I don't think piracy is going to die out any time soon, but I do suspect it's only going to get more difficult as we're increasingly controlled and spied on.
Has anyone in the gaming press asked him if he has a continuity plan, I wonder?
> I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy.
That's the smart thing to do. But Steam/GoG are so convenient...
Plus they are EU-based which decreases political risk in the current political climate.
GOG would be another example since you can get a DRM-free binary.
On the other hand, does it really matter that much? Probably not. It feels good from a hoarding stance to have a bunch of games I'll probably never play but I got for a "good deal", heh.
A counter-point to my comment is that the real goal should be to buy the game on the medium you want to play it on only if you're going to play it, finish as much as you want to, and not care if it goes away because it's all ephemeral in the end.
I barely play games anymore yet I still would get sucked into looking for deals on Switch e-shop and Steam, and that feeling of sheepishness is what I had in mind when I commented.
There already exist games which you can (illegally) play today only because they were archived by pirates. However with the consoles' security getting better, piracy not being as widespread as back in the day and the industry not being interested in game preservation it's also a matter of time before we start permanently losing games again.
Sad but I don't want another device that wants to be more than it is, I basically want an updated version of my gameboy from the 90s and that's it. No downloads, no network, no social, just a game you can quietly play anywhere when you have a bit of time, no nonsense
So essentially this is an improvement and you won't even know it if you only buy first party games.
I imagine that Nintendo want a slice of this subscription based gaming scam. The HD versions already feel like a step in that greed direction. And I think I saw a collection of Mario 3D games that fell into that same repackage-and-sell-again category, with crazy pricing.
You might like the DE10-nano Mister project. I manged to get some old arcade cabinates running on a big monitor, no frame drops or lag like most emulators suffer, and no stream of 10p coins required. FPGA feels closer in terms of preservation.
But you can look at it as a transferable license to otherwise digital games, and that's not bad. A console with entirely (or almost entirely) digital games would have no used game market, and that sucks both for sellers (which I don't do), and buyers (which I happily do).
It would be nice if there was some legal protection for the buyer that, by selling a physical license, that Nintendo be required to make the download itself available for some time period > 20 years.
I don't see why preservation (outside their own archives) would be a goal for Nintendo. The reality seems to be the opposite: They'd like the branding and memory of old games to be preserved, but please not the game itself - because then they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant.
Nintendo's strategy seems to be working. For example, I seem to have purchased Super Mario Bros 3 multiple times, in physical and digital form, for multiple systems (Wii, 3DS, Wii U ...), and I'm also renting it as part of Nintendo Switch Online.
On the up side, I don't have any problem emulating it. Actually all of those versions are emulated, come to think of it.
This lead me think, is there any 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit native handheld (not Pi emulation) market? I guess the primary difficulty is to make games for them, so most likely just a small hobbyist market. I still think kids don't really care about graphics though, at least when they are young.
I think they did a few blogposts about having initial teething troubles getting consistent manufacturing, so they might have a significant upfront expense cost to subsidize (which probably explains why they're raising the price again...)
What hasn't failed me is to hack my devices and use pirated versions of my content. Ironic that this method works much better. All games I want, locally, in a pack of SD cards I bring in my backpack, ready to install and play 100% offline at any moment in a train, a flight, a boat.
Why would one hope that? Nintendo has never ever shown any kind of sign of even remote interest in anybody not-Nintendo doing any kind of preservation.
I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
> I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
This is horseshit.
It's a defeatist attitude, and it's not reflective of reality. Yes - some things go out of fashion for a while, but trends almost always cycle back. You might think something is out of style right now, (and that's fine) but to be facetious: One man's trash is another man's treasure.
Exactly, this is even supported by Nintendo's own services offering emulation of their older systems. There is clearly demand for the ability to older games.
Capitulation to an "inevitable" fate of download only games is just taking the easy way out by not sticking to your own core values. I have personally pre-ordered a Switch 2, but I will not being purchasing any online only cartridges or download only software.
We haven't had the watershed moment that brings it into focus for gamers at large yet, The Crew was close. But Nintendo has kept the download servers going for all of their systems which has provided a false sense of security. Once those start being shut down maybe we'll see some actual response. Though with the introduction of Gamecube emulation on the Switch 2, they are only a small step away from emulating the Wii and giving people another scapegoat for their lazy acceptance of lack of ownership.
Before the Switch, save files were also stored on cartridges, making physical medium far more appealing than the mess digital was on the 3DS (if you owned more than 1 console).
Then you start to approach the problem that is gaming.
The only real catch has been online stuff and even that is sometimes worked around or recreated. It's not an impossible task to solve the problem of making games playable into the future, but it'll probably require legislation to force game companies to preserve their game and server code to allow for it.
Most single and local multiplayer Switch games are playable offline - which is to say, not useless - without any zero-day patches.
And patches to those games can often (usually?) be downloaded while you are playing the game. (Sometimes there are issues however - I seem to remember some game, maybe SMT5, changing its game save format in some way.)
But it is true that patches can improve performance or fix bugs, and it seems like there is pressure to hit a ship date and assume that bugs can be patched later. It's not entirely bad though - some games that are heavily criticized on initial release (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077) end up fixing bugs and other issues and becoming successful games.
Some single-player games have updates, but I think you can usually play the original version while you download the update, and the update usually isn't 40GB.
https://old.reddit.com/r/NSCollectors/comments/dzquth/physic... is a thread about this, and it lists that the Spyro collection only allowed you to access the first world of each game in the collection without a download.
> may
Weasel 'game journalists' like this is the reason gaming is dying.
The world is WILL not may. It happened before and it will happen again because publications like this are nothing more than pr department for gaming companies.
Edit: I guess not:
“you must have enough free space in your Nintendo Switch 2 system memory or microSD Express card”
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
FFS. I never thought this day would come with Nintendo.
I expect that far more people will suck it up and pay whatever they have to in order to play whatever games they're allowed to today rather than abandon playing video games entirely. I think game companies are counting on that too.
If you're counting on gamers to vote will their wallets in order to save video games I think you're going to be extremely disappointed.
AFAIK this is only in Japan. The Japanese Switch 2 experience is going to be vastly different from the international one in ways the average Japanese player won't immediately notice, because Japan's economy is in the toilet and Nintendo is engaging in several desperation moves to avoid selling a product nobody living on a Japanese wage can afford.
If you're wondering what I mean by "vastly different": the Switch 2 you can buy at Yodobashi or Bic Camera is going to be region- and language-locked to Japanese only. You will only be allowed to sign in with a Japanese account, which can only be funded with Japanese credit cards. You can't change the system language to anything other than Japanese, and any games that rely on the system language will consequently be locked to Japanese, too. In exchange, the system is $100 cheaper[0].
Switch 1 also had Game Key Cards, but they weren't branded this way. Instead they were games that required a software update containing the rest of the game in order to work, with an appropriate warning on the box about this. For the record, Switch 1 updates could be downloaded peer-to-peer, and I'm assuming this carries forward for Switch 2, but I have no idea if Game Key Cards work the same way.
[0] If you live in Japan and want an international-spec Switch 2, that's an exclusive My Nintendo Store item that costs the same as it does in the US.
Firstly is the proliferation of games and their quality. Anyone can make a new game, given an engine and a few art assets. It doesn't take a lot of capital or know-how to release a new game. Therefore, there's a glut of games on the market, from high to low quality, and there are far more than any rational human could ever purchase or play. This was a problem from Day One: When I purchased my Atari 2600 console (or rather my parents purchased for me) my sister and I quickly filled up a 50-cartridge shelf with games where we barely even played or scratched the surface. They were disposable! When we got a Commodore 64, there were more 3rd parties on the market, making games we never heard of, and these games were so deep and thick that one of them could've kept us occupied for 6 months, but still we chewed through them as fast as we could afford.
Secondly, aren't most all the games now oriented around MMOG "communities" and multi-player-based? That makes preservation practically impossible. If you've not only got to keep the game servers running, but you've also got to preserve the community that goes with them... well, forget it. Gamers grow up, their tastes change; they move on.
I enjoyed a few games, years ago, that basically turned into ghost-town servers. Many of us were so tenacious and dedicated to that specific game as it was, yet the new influx of players dried up, and nobody could prevent that from happening. Every newbie was a ban-evader. Every rich opponent was paying real $$$ just to stay competitive. Our precious game jumped the shark and we couldn't let it die. But die they must. I propose that most games are not worth preserving. Perhaps games should be enjoyed where they are, and then left to die, because they will never be the same again.