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Announcement of Discontinuation of Online Services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software
(en-americas-support.nintendo.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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There really should be a law requiring companies which provide online services to be required to release self-hosted server software once they discontinue the provision of the service.
Why though? Why not just acknowledge that these services are ephemeral?
They don't have to be. 30 year old PC games have their server software bundled with the game; the ephemeral aspect of current online services is entirely artificial.
And it's incentivized by the people buying into it. If people collectively woke up and started asking questions, this wouldn't be an issue.
Instead, we buy into them and then try to force them to open up through legislation.
Imagine if cars were really unsafe. Would you say, “we shouldn’t legislate car safety, we should all just wake up and start buying safer cars!”
Okay, you've got a point there.
When was the last time Mario Maker killed a man?
To be fair, cars having safety measures now are the reason why poor people can't afford them anymore though.
You can buy a brand new Dacia Sandero for 12000€, hardly expensive for a car.
A few reasons - preservation is one of them
Why not just turn to services that actually value preservation, instead of sticking with those that don't?
When books are published in the US, they’re required to submit a copy to the library of congress for preservation purposes.
It shouldn’t be left to corporations to decide whether or not the cultural artifacts they own are worth preserving or not.
Such as?
We don't choose what we value.
Shin Megami Tensei Imagine online is still going thanks to release of the source. Legends.
Satellaview games are a prime example! So much lost content!
I'm differentiating between products like Pokemon and services like Nintendo running servers that let you trade Pokemon.
Both should ideally be preserved of course, but today's reality is that it's much less feasible with the aforementioned services.
How can we change that?
Then what do we do with these games? How do we discourage live service games?
Are you boycotting them?
More effort by whom? And how do we incentivize it?
You didn't answer my first question, and misunderstood the second.
Who do you expect to do the preserving? And how will you get them to do it?
I can't get to my point if you keep skirting around it.
How will you get profit-driven studios to care about preservation?
Well, you're here seemingly not realizing why studios don't give a shit about preservation. As we can observe in the real world, the branding opportunities and PR are not worth it to them 99% of the time.
Because they shouldn't be...
I am having the fun of my life still playing DS games online, especially Metroid Prime Hunters and Jump Ultimate Stars.
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That's not what the person you're replying to suggested though. They suggested that companies should release self-hostable server software when they discontinue providing the service themselves. In the age of containerized software this wouldn't even be all that difficult in many cases
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I didn’t say it had to be open source. Copyright is irrelevant as far as this topic is concerned - compiling code into binary is transformative. The only thing that matters here is patent law, and it seems easy enough to just make a law that allows non-profit infringement of patents for this explicit purpose. I don’t think there’s any legal roadblocks to releasing server software.
I didn’t say they should keep the servers up forever, I agree that’s unreasonable. But it isn’t unreasonable to require that they release the software necessary for hosting the servers so that the fans/community can host servers if they so choose.
Seriously this needs to be addressed! Gran Turismo Sport is shutting down in january after, what? 4 years? Insane