Archive link: https://archive.ph/aWo6a
In early April 2024, online play and other functionality that uses online communication will end for Nintendo 3DS* and Wii U software. This also includes online co-operative play, internet rankings, and data distribution.
We will announce a specific end date and time at a later date.
Please note that if an event occurs that would make it difficult to continue online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software, we may have to discontinue services earlier than planned.
- This includes software exclusive to New Nintendo 3DS
There really should be a law requiring companies which provide online services to be required to release self-hosted server software once they discontinue the provision of the service.
Why though? Why not just acknowledge that these services are ephemeral?
They don’t have to be. 30 year old PC games have their server software bundled with the game; the ephemeral aspect of current online services is entirely artificial.
And it’s incentivized by the people buying into it. If people collectively woke up and started asking questions, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Instead, we buy into them and then try to force them to open up through legislation.
Imagine if cars were really unsafe. Would you say, “we shouldn’t legislate car safety, we should all just wake up and start buying safer cars!”
Okay, you’ve got a point there.
When was the last time Mario Maker killed a man?
Imagine if cars were really unsafe.
This requires no imagination, but the analogy falls apart when you realize the only way to make them safer is to use them less.
To be fair, cars having safety measures now are the reason why poor people can’t afford them anymore though.
You can buy a brand new Dacia Sandero for 12000€, hardly expensive for a car.
A few reasons - preservation is one of them
Why not just turn to services that actually value preservation, instead of sticking with those that don’t?
When books are published in the US, they’re required to submit a copy to the library of congress for preservation purposes.
It shouldn’t be left to corporations to decide whether or not the cultural artifacts they own are worth preserving or not.
Such as?
These days I certainly do, but it would be nice if we didn’t just have an entire dark age of video games lost to time as well.
We don’t choose what we value.
This question, I can’t deal with it. It just kills a bit more of hope for the future that people are thinking like this.
First of all it’s trivial to copy and distribute digital media. There’s no great obstacle that impedes players to run games effectively indefinitely, it’s a matter of unwillingness. The game is not ephemeral, company support is ephemeral.
Don’t you like the games that you play today? Do you really think nobody will want to play them in the future?
There are people running Quake 3 Arena servers still today. That’s a game from 1999. That’s not even bringing up how people figured out how to run even older couch multiplayer games online.
Can you imagine if that was said out of any other medium? “Why not just acknowledge that books are ephemeral?” That would be an outrageous notion and it would be regarded as a massive failure of society towards culture. Yet we have a whole new medium that would be trivial to preserve if not for deliberate obstacles put in the way, and there are people treating it as a lost cause. It boggles my mind!
If you think it’s not a lost cause, then tell us what we can do!
How do we convince politicians to turn this into a law? The same politicians that don’t understand technology and still think that FPS games breed terrorists. Once it’s a law, how do we make sure it’s enforced worldwide?
Do not lump me in with the consumers that created this future. I am already preserving what I can. I am the weird kid in the corner who advocates for DRM-free games on GOG and gets called crazy for having a 16TB hard drive full of offline backup installers. I legally back up what I can, and obtain what I can’t. I play Warframe and other live service games knowing well that they’ll be gone one day, unless someone manages to hack together a private server. I can’t help but still enjoy some of them.
Being a hoarder and advocating for game preservation in front of average Joes is thankless and exhausting. I can’t help but stare reality in the face. You seem to know the situation a lot better than me, so tell me, what else should I be doing?
so tell me, what else should I be doing?
Mindset. In a way the defeatism is what allows it to happen as everybody else begins to feel the same way.
In other words, stay optimistic and speak positively towards your hopes. It’s true that the sad reality is that many people don’t care, but as long as we continue to let corps get away with it and not speak out about our passion for this then the chances of it actually happening dwindle more and more.
Warframe is popular as hell. It seems likely a game like that will continue. Planetside 2 as well.
A game like nexons Ghost in the Shell hero shooter, by the book but fun as hell, that game seems like it would be truly gone forever sadly. Except even the likes of Nexon’s rehashing of games gets private server emulation treatments!
The thing about our work is that we are quite literally going against the massive corporations so a lot of these projects either stay low key or risk getting shut down.
So yeah, it’s true that not everyone feels how we do. That doesn’t change the fact that if we stop talking about it and doing what we can the corps get exactly what they want and the efforts fade away forever. I think another good example is the ElDewrito Halo 3 rewrite which was effectively Halo PC until MCC finally released. The likelihood of MCC coming to PC was really high already but with all the reception it got over the years I really feel like ElDewrito pushed MCC to fruition sooner
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Shin Megami Tensei Imagine online is still going thanks to release of the source. Legends.
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I’m differentiating between products like Pokemon and services like Nintendo running servers that let you trade Pokemon.
Both should ideally be preserved of course, but today’s reality is that it’s much less feasible with the aforementioned services.
How can we change that?
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Then what do we do with these games? How do we discourage live service games?
Are you boycotting them?
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More effort by whom? And how do we incentivize it?
Because they shouldn’t be…
I am having the fun of my life still playing DS games online, especially Metroid Prime Hunters and Jump Ultimate Stars.
On the one hand, they should. On the other hand, we all gave our money to Nintendo knowing that Nintendo was going to Nintendo it up. It’s a shitty company with a terrible take on what software ownership means, of course they’re going to ruin this.
IMO we shouldn’t force companies to keep their servers online forever. That’s a silly law that will hurt gamers. Instead, we should have an expiry date on games. Make companies state beforehand how long their servers will be up and how much functionality will be lost. Then fine companies that shut their servers down beforehand, or even force them to publish the source code to run your own.
Right now online services are in this vague state where nobody knows how long what services will work on what devices. Give people a chance to make that decision beforehand. That’ll cost them sales in the end of their product lifetimes (who’s going to buy an online game a year before server shutdown?) but you can prevent this rug pull situation.
What I’d also like to see is some kind of extra tariff on software and hardware that requires online servers to function with no alternatives. Make games that the plug can be pulled out of less attractive, use it to subsidise games that do come with server software.
IMO we shouldn’t force companies to keep their servers online forever.
That’s not what the person you’re replying to suggested though. They suggested that companies should release self-hostable server software when they discontinue providing the service themselves. In the age of containerized software this wouldn’t even be all that difficult in many cases
That’s fair enough, but I don’t think it’s very feasible. There are a lot of companies using other people’s copyrighted code in their servers that they don’t have the right to distribute, nor are they likely to ever get it.
I’d certainly like an “or-or” situation; either the company is forced to provide a fully hostable version for all online components or they’d need to set an expiry date. I just don’t think forcing companies to provide servers is going to go down well in most governments.
I didn’t say it had to be open source. Copyright is irrelevant as far as this topic is concerned - compiling code into binary is transformative. The only thing that matters here is patent law, and it seems easy enough to just make a law that allows non-profit infringement of patents for this explicit purpose. I don’t think there’s any legal roadblocks to releasing server software.
I didn’t say they should keep the servers up forever, I agree that’s unreasonable. But it isn’t unreasonable to require that they release the software necessary for hosting the servers so that the fans/community can host servers if they so choose.
but you can prevent this rug pull situation.
Seriously this needs to be addressed! Gran Turismo Sport is shutting down in january after, what? 4 years? Insane
I think we all knew this was coming when Nintendo discontinued being able to purchase 3DS and Wii U games on the eShop, but it is still very sad to hear.
Many 3DS and Wii U games have been ported to the Switch over the years, but there will be several games that will likely never get ported because they were incremental series games. Why would they port Super Smash Bros Wii U when they already released Super Smash Bros Ultimate?
A lot of people will probably not care much being on the newest console, with the newest games, but it is truly sad to know that you will never be able to revisit these games again in a few years when you’re feeling nostalgic, or if you just like the old version better.
I can only hope that homebrewers figure out how to spoof their own servers to keep online functionally for these old games.
Pokemon Bank will still continue to work, but who knows how long that will last.
It’s devastating news for Pokemon fans looking to legitimately collect every Pokemon. You essentially need online functionality to obtain every Vivillon form in X/Y. Lack of Friend Safaris is also a devastating blow to anyone trying to complete the Pokedex without importing Pokemon from other games. I
'm going to miss Wonder Trading. That’s how Gen 6 became my most played generation.
The Pokemon community is too obsessed to ignore this. They’ll reverse engineer the protocol and have a community run server in no time. People will need to hack their 3DS, but that’s not too hard and can be done entirely from software.
They are in progress ( pretendo ) still in closed beta.
Guess it’s a matter of time before someone creates a mod for the systems to enable online play again
Is this the kind of thing that RiiConnect24 was for? (just for the original Wii) Or are these online services unrelated
Found it already… https://pretendo.network
Online services for 3DS and Wii U
Will this effect something like usbloader?
