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Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

pretendo.network

111–120 of 217 posts

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#111
post #83

Now that we've seen this pattern emerge multiple times in the past (people losing a large chunk of their games due to the shutdown of the online catalog), I think it begs for a killer feature in the future: the ability to burn the games you've purchased from the online catalog onto write-once blank cartridges. Distributing games via physical copies is already a profit loss compared to distributing them via an online…

I thought the whole point of download-only games is that they are not borrowable/lendable/resellable, so wouldn't allowing one-time only writes defeat the purpose?

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#112
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of crazy how Nintendo has basically thrown out their entire service for consoles multiple times and started from scratch now. Can you imagine if Xbox Live or the PSN were thrown out and replaced with an incompatible new service after a single generation of use, let alone multiple times? Even ignoring the user experience, it feels like a massive waste of engineering work, with the benefit being...not having…

The Wii was a bit of a special case for how incredibly janky it was to be trying to present a system shell without it being actually backed by a proper OS/hypervisor arrangement like the other platforms of its generation. That it was able to do paid digital games at all is kind of miraculous.

I dunno, miraculous in 1986 maybe, but in 2006?

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#113
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.

I don’t know why this would be a tax? If you’re going to go down this path, why wouldn’t you just require that the title needs to be purchasable on a primary market and usable on hardware/software that is currently supported in order for a copyright to be enforceable. If I can’t purchase and enjoy a copyrighted work legally, the copyright is unenforceable. In response to sibling comments, I don’t know why you’d do a…

I suppose it's so IP holders will have to have an office and revenue in the market it intends to exercise rights, than just outsourcing it to a lawyer and having 12 copies/year at $1k each compliance sales?

Japanese IP holders exercising IP rights solely in moral grounds in markets they have no intention or ability to enter had been a source of frustration to some. Requiring substantial economical involvement sure is one way to force it.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#114
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has the perfect setup right now. Your desktop, laptop, or Deck can connect to Steam.

Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11. So not exactly perfect either as far as backward compatibility is concerned. [1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...

> Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11.

Why wouldn't they work well? Every time backward compatibility is mentionned, Microsoft Windows is praised as the best example of it and people brag they can still run everything they used to run in 1995.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#115
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sort of understand ending life for allowing purchasing on the platform but why would you not create servers for the new consoles in a way that allows you to continue to serve downloads or at the very least whatever licensing necessary to launch the software to old hardware? If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it. If the above is not feasible then strip the drm at the consoles end of lif…

> If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it. unfortunately, this is not the right for which you paid, despite the fact that it is what people believe when they click purchase. That's why i condone piracy. It enables preservation, regardless of the choice of the copyright owner. That's why i would always want to make an offline backup of whatever i buy. It's hard to do sometimes, and the onus bei…

Agreed and why when I do purchase I only purchase physical. The digital downloads of games I have are either games that were so hilariously cheap on sale my moral compass didn’t matter (eg marked down to sub $5) or the free downloads I get from various promotions like the epic store. I don’t pirate video games but I don’t have any qualms with someone who does given the gross anti consumer practices the industry has been getting away with for ages

Unfortunately consumers don’t seem to agree and have no problem shelling out billions of dollars for these things. The current console generation is clearly pushing hard to shift things entirely to digital; it is actually becoming difficult to purchase physical copies of games. The recent yakuza game didn’t get a physical release in the USA and I had to import a copy from play-Asia. It works fine on my us ps5 but they were clear as it’s a region 3 release any future patches/dlc/psn support may not work correctly unless I create a region 3 psn account specifically for that game. Quite a headache. Although funny enough the game itself was $10 cheaper so even with tax and shipping it worked out to be the same as if I had bought it on psn.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#116

I wonder long will the backend infra supporting the Switch will last. Especially now that they’re selling download-only versions of the games. Online services for earlier consoles like the Wii were more basic, and IIRC in some cases were developed and maintained by third parties, not Nintendo themselves? I understand wanting to get rid of that overhead especially if it wasn’t driving incremental revenue. But now the…

Valve has the perfect setup right now. Your desktop, laptop, or Deck can connect to Steam.

Isn't that out of scope of the discussion? Valve doesn't provide the online game capabilities of title and cannot guarantee you will be able to play online to all sort of old titles whose published shut down the servers.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(The following comment agrees with you, it is not intended as an argument against what you’re saying): Technically being able to contain the content and actually being able to boot the game from the disc (after transferring to the console hard drive) are two separate things. Even without counting Day 1/Day 0 patches. Some games refuse to run without downloading additional content that isn’t on the disc, others requir…

These are also systemic issues in the industry. Every game should be able to run with the physical media without any connection to the internet.

Underrated comment

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#120
post #89

I wonder long will the backend infra supporting the Switch will last. Especially now that they’re selling download-only versions of the games. Online services for earlier consoles like the Wii were more basic, and IIRC in some cases were developed and maintained by third parties, not Nintendo themselves? I understand wanting to get rid of that overhead especially if it wasn’t driving incremental revenue. But now the…

It's kind of crazy how Nintendo has basically thrown out their entire service for consoles multiple times and started from scratch now. Can you imagine if Xbox Live or the PSN were thrown out and replaced with an incompatible new service after a single generation of use, let alone multiple times? Even ignoring the user experience, it feels like a massive waste of engineering work, with the benefit being...not having…

Do they port their old games to the new platform and then sell them?
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