[buildbuildbuild]

This an evidence of gaping holes in digital consumer rights. People bought eShop software and physical hardware that they can no longer use or update.

Regulators should force companies to open source any games and associated server software that consumers paid to "own", yet companies are no longer willing to maintain.

[filoleg]

> People bought eShop software and physical hardware that they can no longer use or update.

Yeah, about that - ‘FAQ from Nintendo says that players will be able to download patches and redownload games purchased from the eShop “for the foreseeable future.”’ Directly from the link in the OP.

[HideousKojima]

If the original Wii and DSi are any indication, the store shutdowns should follow in just couple of years.

[filoleg]

I will complain about it once I see it happen.

Wii and DSi were released during the time when digital game stores were just emerging and were not nearly as commonly used as they are now, so, at the time, it felt like they were an afterthought. It was the first generation of consoles that even had digital stores in the first place (as Wii and DSi were a part of the same generation as Xbox360 and PS3, and GameCube/PS2/Xbox [from the prior generation] didn’t have digital stores).

Almost 2 decades later, in the present, digital game stores are the primary method of purchasing games for tons of people, and their share only keeps growing. I think these days, it is a bit more difficult and damaging to just abruptly sunset them the same way it went with Wii and DSi.

We will see how it goes, but I will save my outrage until Nintendo actually does or announces doing such a move. Otherwise, I would just be fighting the windmills created by my projections of what Nintendo might theoretically do in the future.

Love your username btw.

[goosedragons]

Games can still be updated/redownloaded at least for now. It's really just online servers for games going down and for /most/ Wii U/3DS games it's not a huge deal. That said you are right and it is frustrating that companies can pull this crap. There is at least some effort already by the community to recreate the Wii U/3DS servers with Pretendo. Sucks that everything has to be reverse engineered though!

[VyseofArcadia]

I wonder, if there were legal requirements to maintain services like this, would we see fewer of them? Suddenly, your service becomes, after a certain point, a liability.

[Pxtl]

Honestly, I hate blockchains, but I feel like they're the ultimate solution for digital goods. I don't want to own NFTs for their own sake as "speculative assets" or "stores of value" or nonsense like that, but an NFT that is my certificate of ownership of a copy of like a videogame or a streamable movie, etc. would just make sense. Combine that with a requirement that (a) binaries be freely redistributable, and (b) binaries must authenticate against a blockchain and not against private servers.

I mean that still doesn't solve the problem of games that require servers to operate for online play, but at lest that would return digital goods to near-parity with physical media in terms of copy-protection and transferability and ownership.

If you go the extra mile and require that companies publish free dedicated-server-binaries for end-of-life products and allow clients to point to custom servers, you could still run the game while still protecting the seller from piracy. I mean, you'd have no security patches so if you're running eg your own Star Wars Galaxies server you'd want it to be invitational-only and secured with a VPN, since playing with strangers would get the server and clients hacked.

That seems like it would be a reasonable compromise for video-game preservation - old games are therefore available indefinitely to anyone who purchased access to them (and this is transferable), but without companies having to abandon their copyright protections.

I mean this approach would probably have to be mandated by a government or a near-monopoly e-store like Valve, so I'm sure it would get screwed up and fail, but a boy can dream.

[Cerium]

Why should society protect copyright for goods that are discontinued? Discontinuation of a product is generally a financial decision; in essecne you are making a public declaration that the product is unprofitable and throwing up your hands.

Your right to protection against piracy should end when you discontinue a product.

[Pxtl]

That argument extends far beyond digital goods. There are a myriad of great physical books, albums, games, boardgames, etc. that are out-of-print, and so the only legal way to experience them is to find somebody with a copy and borrow/rent/buy it from them. The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more. So the problem you describe is exactly the same for physical media.

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong but that this is scope-creep.

[autoexec]

> The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more.

That's rarely the case. Most of the time rightsholders want to keep old works out of circulation because they would compete with the new works they are promoting and want people spending their money on instead.

There are some physical works that are expensive enough to produce that profit can be an issue, but things that are extremely inexpensive to produce such as paperbacks or disk media (CD/DVD/bluray) still go out of print all the time. It's not that those artistic works couldn't make the corporation a profit. It's just that the company is betting that they can make higher profits by keeping those works out of the hands of the public, which is deplorable.

I can't blame a company for not producing something that actually won't make them money, but corporations locking away our culture for more than a century just so that they can maximize their profits is a sickening example of pure avarice that copyright law wasn't originally intended to allow for.

The real issue with physical products is that they're harder for the public to duplicate. If I could copy a complicated out of print board games as easily as I could an out of print album on MP3, I'd argue that we should have the right to do that too. 3D printers haven't caught on to the point where there's one in every home, or it might even be possible.

[Pxtl]

That's a distinction without a difference, imho. Either IP that the owner has decided to stop selling should be free to reproduce, or it shouldn't, regardless of their justification and the medium.

[blincoln]

> a requirement that (a) binaries be freely redistributable, and (b) binaries must authenticate against a blockchain and not against private servers

If the software runs on general-purpose hardware, it would be trivial to modify it to bypass the blockchain authentication step. If the software is only compatible with some sort of locked-down platform that won't run modified code, then it already has an enforcement mechanism (whatever is used to prevent running modified code), and a blockchain is redundant.

[Pxtl]

Blockchain is not redundant because blockchain provides non-first-party ownership authorization and would enforce the transferability of the product.

Like, right now, if I buy a digital good on a game console, my "ownership" of that good is controlled by the vendor. They can take it away on a whim, or simply because they no longer want to maintain the server that says "yes, Pxtl owns this".

If that ownership is stored on a record outside of the first-party infrastructure and the software must authenticate my ownership against that 3rd-party, then that 3rd party is the one that controls whether or not I own the software, and is responsible for keeping that service live.

And a blockchain, flawed as it is, is a decent solution for managing ownership of goods without having the infrastructure owned by a single entity who has to maintain it and can take it down on a whim.

I mean, an ICANN-style neutral 3rd party with specific policies about lifetime and transferability of ownership that just runs this on a regular-ass SQL server would be fine too.

[jncfhnb]

Nobody is doubting ownership. The problem is your (a).

[Pxtl]

If the binaries are freely redistributable but worthless without the blockchain auth, then it's harmless to let any torrent site host them, right?

[bentley]

> If the binaries are freely redistributable but worthless without the blockchain auth

How can that happen in our right‐click‐save world?

[Pxtl]

Other way around. The idea is that anybody can right-click-save whatever game they like. But when you run the game, the first thing it would do is check your blockchain wallets for authorization to execute this game.

Basically, accept that your game media will be copied willy-nilly and do a "does the user actually have ownership rights to this" check that is already common today, except that do this check against the blockchain so that there isn't a single-point-of-failure by putting all reliance on the vendor's auth servers.

[jncfhnb]

So if one person posts a private key that owns the wallet then anyone can verify that they own the game with a local copy of the blockchain.

[jncfhnb]

Binaries are not freely redistributable

[Zambyte]

Not just open source, it should be in the public domain.

[notamy]

The 3DS launched in early 2011 and the Wii U launched in late 2012. I don’t know that it’s unreasonable to discontinue supporting them after a decade.

[hoherd]

I think you're missing the point of the parent's suggestion.

> Regulators should force companies to open source any games and associated server software that consumers paid to "own", yet companies are no longer willing to maintain.

Nintendo shouldn't be forced to support them, but consumers should be able to continue using them. The hardware still works great, and even if not, we have virtual hardware. This should be no different from me being able to pick up a game of Clue that my parents bought in the 60's and play it. These 3DS and Wii-U games were purchased by millions of people, and they are part of our global culture. People should not have to worry that they are legally prohibited from finding ways to play them.

[paul_funyun]

They didn't buy the games, they just bought licenses to use them in certain ways. Their mistake

[DoctorDabadedoo]

Wonder why digital games usually go the same price of physical media, then if their ownership is conceptually different.

[slothtrop]

They're no longer conceptually different in the case of discs (though maybe for the cartridges Nintendo still uses). Inserting a disc into a ps4 for the first time often just triggers a download for all of the game data, rather than copying from disc. Add to the fact new releases are heavily patched these days which requires download. At least in the ps3 era launch titles were a fairly complete product.

Once Sony phases out support for the ps4, the console is rendered useless for playing anything that isn't already installed. Hence my copy of Bloodborne is staying on there. I know they'll probably release some "remaster" but I'm not keen on re-purchasing what I already own (there are gamers that do this... buying a game multiple times, even in the same console generation, it's crazy).

[DoctorDabadedoo]

I understand and agree, but I cannot fathom why anyone invests on Nintendo's digital platform, as they cycle completely every 5-10 years (e.g. Wii Virtual Console).

The games are great, but the way they milk their pĺayers on recycled content on _____ platform is insane.

[bogantech]

Because enough people don't mind being gouged

[skeaker]

I think this is what's being criticized

[Zambyte]

Victim blaming :\

[goosedragons]

The 3DS wasn't discontinued until 2020 and the Wii U 2017. Games were still released for a few years after too. There are older Switches than some 3DSs.

[bakugo]

> The 3DS wasn't discontinued until 2020

Damn, I didn't realize it happened so recently. So it only took 2.5 years after discontinuation for eshop to be taken down, and 3 years for the remaining online services (other than redownloads of owned games) to be shut down.

At the rate Nintendo is going, I wouldn't be surprised if Switch online services are shut down less than a year after they stop manufacturing it.

[GuB-42]

Nintendo is happy to make money off the NES intellectual property, defending it more aggressively than anyone else in the industry. They will do the same for the 3DS and WiiU.

That they are releasing emulator-based ports shows that the platform is still alive, and yet, they stop supporting the actual hardware.

It is totally within their rights to discontinue support, and it is not even unreasonable, but unlike some companies that offer some nice "parting gifts" when they do that (ex: open source, DRM free version, or just free credit), you will get nothing but lawsuits from Nintendo.

At least, you will still be able to play the game you bought, there are more evil companies out there.

[Pxtl]

The Atari 2600 launched in 1977. If you can get your hands on a working console and cartridge, they will still play regardless of the status of Atari's company software infrastructure. You can even transfer ownership of the cartridge to other people at no cost. The license even permits resale!

Cloud-based software allows corporations to rewrite ownership rights however they see fit.

edit: Aside, marking the lifespan of a product from launch is wrong. It should be marked from the date of distribution of the last product from the manufacturer, because that's the last time somebody was able to buy a "new" one, and a buyer has a reasonable expectation of long-term-support for buying a new piece of hardware. For example, I can buy a 2022 Moto G Stylus from the Motorola website today. They promise 3 years of security updates... but that phone was released a year and a half ago, so they're actually promising 1.5 years of security patches.

[mynameisvlad]

Do you think a person’s cartridge of Pokemon Sun is going to stop working after this?

Online services means multiplayer games won’t work anymore, but single player physical games won’t magically stop working just because the online services shut down.

[bentley]

> Do you think a person’s cartridge of Pokemon Sun is going to stop working after this?

Actually… I have a legitimate question here. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was broken on launch for the Wii U, and required a day one patch to play. It’s been stated that people who bought a game from the eShop will retain their ability to download it. But has it been clarified whether people who buy cartridges or discs secondhand will still have access to patches? (The fine article implies yes. So the obvious next question is, when will those capabilities be shut down?)

[goosedragons]

Yes, there is still access to patches. They haven't announced when that might shutdown yet.

[bakugo]

> Do you think a person’s cartridge of Pokemon Sun is going to stop working after this?

No, but some of the game's features will stop working. It's not a huge deal for Pokemon because it's primarily a singleplayer game, but that isn't the case for all games. Splatoon, for example, is a primarily online Wii U game that will no longer be playable at all after this shutdown (they had already shut down the servers for this game earlier this year due to a security issue, and took 5 whole months to fix it before bringing them back).

As time goes on, more and more games become reliant on online servers to function, more and more of their functionality is lost once those servers are shut down.

[mynameisvlad]

Do you expect companies to keep their online servers running indefinitely? For the benefit of a few dozen players playing at a time, at best? Splatoon was released almost a decade ago, barely has any players active, offers a single player mode and has had two sequels released since.

Also, if online functionality was available 50 years ago, the exact same problem would have hit Atari games. The technology just hadn't matured enough back then.

[bakugo]

> Do you expect companies to keep their online servers running indefinitely?

I expect the games I paid for to continue to be playable with the same features they had when I bought them, I don't care what the developer thinks or how many other people are playing it. If they don't want to host the servers anymore, they should give me a way to host my own. Plenty of multiplayer PC games released 2 decades ago can still be played online just fine today because the developers included the option to host your own games.

[bentley]

My complaint is not that companies shut down their servers, but that reverse engineering to create your own compatible server is likely to get you sued and forcibly shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

[adra]

Yeah, I mean I "bought" my Godfather DVDs two decades ago, so it's totally fine that I lose the ability to watch it now, of course.

This sort of well-we-have-planned-obsolescence-built-into-our-product should be a hard red line that's worth fighting now, because pretty much any game released today from AAA studios have at the very least lip service online functionality. If we continue down this path, it'll be like the dark ages of tv where entire libraries of important cultural works were lost due to neglegent preservation (see BBC tape reuse).

It's likely that when this comes to a head, there will be countless titles gone forever and nobody with the skill/licensing to repair the loss of culturally relevant material. If EA decides dragon age is no longer worth their servers kicking, will I lose my BioWare collection? Probably.