Live data from Hacker News

Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

pretendo.network

11–20 of 217 posts

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#11
post #3
post #2

This seems like it's only going to get worse many games need online services to function at all. Super Mario Maker as mentioned in the post is one of them, but there are countless others on 3DS and PC that won't function properly. Ideally it would be possible to archive the games (like ROMs or what the Internet Archive does for websites and files) and also the server / database so that the games could be playable in…

I wish there was some way to tie it to copyright where if you want to lock the rights up, you have to provide the game in a playable form at a reasonable price. I’ve seen proposals which would implement that as a kind orphan works tax with a threshold so a small indie game wouldn’t be expected to provide unlimited support.

A tax small enough to not harm indie publishers is almost tautologically unlikely to affect big publishers at all. The incentives created by fines and taxes are greatly overestimated. For something like this to work, it needs to be achievable without the continued cooperation or even existence of the original business

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#12
post #4

I'm heartened, at least, to read that StreetPass will still work after the shutdown. This is such a fun feature, being able to see Mii's from strangers all around the world. Just having a stopover at an international airport was enough to fill my Mii queue with dozens of cool characters.

This is almost certainly because Street Pass is device-to-device, based entirely on proximity to other users. There's no server to shut down, so Nintendo would have to go out of their way to turn it off by releasing some sort of update to have devices kill the feature on some date.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#17
post #11
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was some way to tie it to copyright where if you want to lock the rights up, you have to provide the game in a playable form at a reasonable price. I’ve seen proposals which would implement that as a kind orphan works tax with a threshold so a small indie game wouldn’t be expected to provide unlimited support.

A tax small enough to not harm indie publishers is almost tautologically unlikely to affect big publishers at all. The incentives created by fines and taxes are greatly overestimated. For something like this to work, it needs to be achievable without the continued cooperation or even existence of the original business

To the opposite, the tax should kick in if the operation is large enough. If your revenue from the game exceeds $10M, you should do some minimal continuity work. If it exceeds $100M, you should do much more serious continuity work.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#19
post #18

I hope there is/will be a backup of all the levels uploaded on Mario Maker or it will be an unfortunate loss and Nintendo does not care of course.

Yes, they are all archived

https://archive.org/details/super_mario_maker_courses_202105

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#20
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was some way to tie it to copyright where if you want to lock the rights up, you have to provide the game in a playable form at a reasonable price. I’ve seen proposals which would implement that as a kind orphan works tax with a threshold so a small indie game wouldn’t be expected to provide unlimited support.

The DMCA allows reverse engineering of copy-protected code for abandonware. As a copyright holder you’re not necessarily obligated to maintain working game services, but if you sell a multiplayer game and abandon it, it’s basically free rein for others to make it work again.

So we can play ut24k online again? Someone could setup a master server list?
Post reply on HN