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Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

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Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#191

Post by slowhadoken »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #166
slowhadoken wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Deck just runs all those old windows games using proton. I mean, Windows subsystems runs Linux. You don’t even need VMs anymore. It’s not magic it’s just portability.

Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older. A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state. Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping…

With a little fiddling most of those DirectX games work on the Deck. Again not perfect but absolutely functional. And never say never, fans find solutions to dead games all the time.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#192

Post by slowhadoken »

prmoustache wrote: post #135
slowhadoken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s within the scope of the discussion. Nintendo should centralize its games into a single universal platform like Steam. Now that Valve has a successful handheld console it’s even more relevant than ever.

I think most nintendo users are kids and most of the games are given as gift and purchased in cartridges anyway. And people want to be able to buy and sell their games second hand. The nintendo network really is about online gaming in the context of the nintendo DS products.

Kids and adults play Nintendo games. I played them as a kid and now I play them as an adult.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#193

Post by mattl »

saghm wrote: post #183
Aerroon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes, but their strategy for this sort of thing is pretty inconsistent. You have stuff like the bundle of Super Mario 64/Super Mario Sunshine/Super Mario Galaxy which got ported pretty much as-is, warts and all (except for maybe the infamously misheard line in Super Mario 64 after beating Bowser), without even minor quality of life or graphical improvements, "deluxe" versions of Wii U games like Mario Kart 8 tha…

They did do some limited patches for 3D All-Stars to offer 16:9 resolution and patched the games to show Switch controls, but yeah... it all felt a bit lacking.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#194

Post by selfhoster11 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #101
saghm wrote: 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.

The Wii was designed with digital content delivery from the very start, from what I know.

The NAND was only 512 MB, but it was easily expanded with a memory card for downloads. The security model worked somewhat well, with jailbroken consumers having to keep an eye out for Nintendo's retaliation during the active part of the console's life. While it didn't have a hypervisor (well, it sort of did - if you squint just right, the ARM processor was a hardware bus access arbitrator that would lock you out if you were accessing things you weren't privileged enough to access), it definitely did have an OS - multiple concurrently installed copies, in fact.

IMO, there is nothing miraculous about Wii's ability to support paid digital games. We don't find it miraculous when a hypervisor-less PC can run games purchased off Steam that were downloaded to an external USB drive. Why should we think it's miraculous when a games console does something nearly identical?

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#195

Post by herbst »

test6554 wrote: post #176
herbst wrote: post #137

I still own the first steam game I ever bought and sometimes play it. Nearly every game I own just works on any machine I own. Interface is my choice. At this point I could even argue that the console they offer has more bang per dollar. I don't really get why people willingly joined walled gardens like that.

Try playing two steam games you "own" on two different PCs at the same time. Get a friend, child, or sibling, log into your steam account from both computers and open up two different games. It doesn't work. Also try creating a separate steam account for each game you buy. Then see how easy/hard it is to switch between steam accounts on the same computer.

> Try playing two steam games you "own" on two different PCs at the same time.

If that's an actual issue for you. You can trick most games by just going offline on the computer where the game is already running in the moment you start it on the second machine. Some games are 'tricked' by starting the exe directly.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#196

Post by prmoustache »

slowhadoken wrote: post #192
prmoustache wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most nintendo users are kids and most of the games are given as gift and purchased in cartridges anyway. And people want to be able to buy and sell their games second hand. The nintendo network really is about online gaming in the context of the nintendo DS products.

Kids and adults play Nintendo games. I played them as a kid and now I play them as an adult.

I am also an adult who played Zelda today.

And I said "most", not "all".

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#197

Post by CatWChainsaw »

Overall the gaming industry is a peek into what many media industries want your life to be like. You have access to their IP only as long as they want to support it, no local copy to keep forever, always online, kernel-level permissions to detect cheating software, DLC dribbles and microtransactions and lootboxes everywhere. It's problematic and only getting worse and I've given up on games for the most part.

If aspects of culture can be memory-holed because people aren't allowed to retain copies (and I mean popular shows and movies, books, music, not just games), the only winning move is not to play.

Abandonware should be open-sourced, copyrights should be capped at around a decade, and corporations should stop competing with each other to be the biggest asshole.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#198

Post by nottorp »

slowhadoken wrote: post #190
nottorp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used steam lately? They did something to it on Mac that made it reset to the store page every time it loses focus and gains it back. Including when you try to read the code in your mail to be able to login, or when entering 3d secure codes for a purchase. Basically you can't use it without another device to check your mail/texts. It's been going on for at least 2 months.

I use Steam regularly, I don’t game on a Mac regularly. To be fair I don’t think most people use Macs for gaming. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

> Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

It's not gaming if it has IAPs. I've given up on even reading about mobile "games" when they all went IAP. I'm too poor to afford that.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#199

Post by slowhadoken »

prmoustache wrote: post #196
slowhadoken wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids and adults play Nintendo games. I played them as a kid and now I play them as an adult.

I am also an adult who played Zelda today. And I said "most", not "all".

Yeah, I get what you’re saying but you’re incorrect. Kids 12 and young only make up 5% of their market. Most Switch users are 25 to 34.

Re: Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end

#200

Post by zamadatix »

manymatter wrote: post #148
zamadatix wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood accounting is about hiding profit by making it look like all of the revenue was used for expenses. Hiding all of your revenue outright is a different ballgame and if it were easy to do legally Nintendo wouldn't be paying billions in taxes on it already.

This is unrelated to the thread. The point was obfuscation of the fact that the profit is from a specific copyrighted work. I.e. selling 600 versions of a game each with a different default skin hides no income from tax authorities.

You're referencing profit instead of revenue, which the thread was referring to. Again, you can't hide revenue as easily. Splitting it up 600 ways doesn't solve the problem that game XYZ sold 10 million copies from the 600 subsidiary distributors. Nintendo could hide the profit that way, saying the subsidiaries took 100% of the revenue as costs, but the total revenue can't be hidden. It's either a reported sale or not, there's not really a way to fudge that.
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