[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.

[Pxtl]

Exactly. That's why I come back to a simple set of requirements for "physical media equivalent" software:

- Transferrable interminable software license (blockchain is a decent way to implement this but by no means the only one).

- Free dedicated server binaries for both game-servers and master-servers.

- Configurable server (or masterserver) connection within the client.

Old FPS 90s games actually hit pretty close to this. Binaries were easy to copy, dedicated server binaries were free and you could connect by IP, and realistically if you uninstalled first you could give somebody else the CD key and CD and it would probably work.

The only missing piece is that if the master/auth server went down the party was over.

Yes the security issues would make it unsafe to play with strangers, but the game would exist in an archival form that is no longer a thing for newer 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