8 ms·

> Really shitty of Nintendo to sunset the console and then close the door behind them on the way out. The age of abandonware[0] is over. The promise of future

> Really shitty of Nintendo to sunset the console and then close the door behind them on the way out. The age of abandonware[0] is over. The promise of future earnings from streaming/downloads means all major content producers will lock down even out-of-print works, like consoles from previous generations. This is just another casualty of the fight we were having 20 years ago, re: copyright. We lost. It's over. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

asveikau 3y ago
I feel like it probably costs them very little to keep every title listed for sale. They could be making revenue from it. Probably not as much as when the stuff was new, but something. I guess by cutting off supply of the old stuff, though, they can do re-releases and re-masters charging somewhat similar to the price of a new game, or get people to pay a monthly subscription fee for access.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Keeping stuff for sale can be expensive because of licensed assets. Licensed music has taken games down before and it will again. I don't know the publisher contracts Nintendo signs, but if there's a time duration in the contract, that may open up a very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem. That said, I 100% believe this is just a way for them to make sure you can't mod second hand 3DS consoles in five years time when they bring 3DS re-releases to the Switch.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    > Very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem. There is tons of licensing issues in the gaming industry under the surface that causes problems all over the place. An extreme example would be Sega's mistakes with Sonic. Sonic 3, despite not having him in the credits, contains some works by Michael Jackson. That has complicated things tremendously in re-releases, so much so, that Sega has re-released that game far less than Sonic 1, 2, and CD. Sonic Origins, the latest re-release, contains redone music from prototypes rather than solve the licensing quagmire. But that's not the only licensing quagmire. Guess why the Sonic movies don't have almost any soundtracks or sound effects from the game? According to the Directors, it wasn't a thematic choice, but a legal one. Sonic CD's re-release on smartphones had a similar issue with the opening scene having the vocals removed, because they were from an obscure band that went through a series of legal changes, acquisitions, member changes... This is actually a big problem with re-releases in general. Hunting down who actually owns the rights to a series can be a mess when acquisitions are involved; and you'd better hope the new owners at the end of the road are reasonable and not eager for a quick buck. And to top it all off, just look up the Kenneth W. Penders story, which single-handedly took advantage of Sega's lax copyright protectionism to "steal" almost 200 characters right from under Sega's feet. Nintendo is no doubt looking at that, and the Sonic music issues, and thinking... man, this is why we protect.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 haven't been available on digital marketplaces for a while because both games include real historical footage that Konami no longer has the rights to use. (Off the top of my head, MGS3 used clips of some nuclear weapons tests, for example.)
      - ohgodplsno 3y ago
        Additionally, the Metal Gear Solid Main Theme is reportedly not available anymore because of debious copyright battles with a russian composer, which led to MGS4 having the Love Theme instead.
      - joecool1029 3y ago
        > MGS3 used clips of some nuclear weapons tests Wouldn't this be a work of the federal government and in the public domain? Thinking of all the war movies that used old military footage....
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Wouldn't this be a work of the federal government and in the public domain? Not necessarily EDIT: This got prematurely sent and thus was overly terse: contractors and other private parties connected to government test may have been permitted to take photos, and those (even within the scope of work of a government contract) may be subject to copyright. (Also, its theoretically possible that some tests were photographed by people with no formal connection to the test, though the remote locations and lack of announced times make that challenging.)
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      Have people building games today that use works under license learned this lesson and purchased perpetual licenses, or are they still trying to save money by purchasing narrow licenses that don't work for re-releases or remakes or similar?
      - 3y ago
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    So basically another case study why modern copyright law is broken ?
- hbn 3y ago
  I'm not so sure it would even pay for itself to continue running at some point. It's not like you can just pay to keep the servers running. It's connected to the internet and surely running on a software stack with dependencies that will have CVEs, or language version lose LTS, libraries dropped for support, etc. and need upkeep. How much money in sales could the Wii Shop channel have been pulling in by the time they shut it down? I can't imagine much.
  - dole 3y ago
    There was that recent Youtuber that spent a few tens of thousands of dollars on every eShop title before they shut it down, so they made at least that much, but on the other hand, it’s all archived now…
  - asveikau 3y ago
    Firstly, I think you're vastly overestimating these costs. Server resources are pretty cheap. They could probably overlap with online infrastructure of more recent hardware. They probably could also budget a small amount of the dev time to fixing a few bugs with extremely low priority, only the most high severity items prioritized beneath servicing modern stuff. Second, AFAIK they are running those servers right now with no revenue. They blocked new purchases, but you can still re-download existing purchases. I googled around and it seems like that's still the case. I do not know how long they will maintain that.
    - itake 3y ago
      You also have the customer support overhead. People will demand refunds. They will claim the purchase doesn’t work on their broken hardware. There will be fraud where people use the service to test stolen credit card. There is also the staffing element. Maybe the engineers or product people are interested in resourcing a product with no career growth. There is a hefty on-going maintenance cost for these stores.
- blairbeckwith 3y ago
  If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars. I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    > I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever. Believe me; movie studios and game companies have re-releases down to a science. Disney (arguably) perfected it first with their "Disney Vault" scheme. It increases the value to buyers when it's available for sale; and it also helps the company if there is little new content to offer for the year. I'm surprised so few people put together that Super Mario 3D All-Stars is actually Nintendo perfectly following the Disney Vault script.
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      Disney themselves have abandoned the 'Vault' strategy after deciding that continuous sales were more profitable, which probably has something to do with people not recognizing it and/or thinking it's absurd to see in this day and age.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    > If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars. I think they would have. those games are all available on the 2nd hand market easily. I don't mind paying for remasters of games I already own for older hardware, anyway, because remasters are not a big expense for me and by buying remasters I send my vote that I want remasters. I mean, it's Nintendo's IP. they can do what they want. I think the way they do things is very short-sighted, though.
    - astrange 3y ago
- naikrovek 3y ago
  it would cost them very little to keep things online but very little is too much, sometimes. I would GLADLY pay Nintendo for every ROM I want but do not have, if they would only take my money and sell it. they choose not to sell. so I feel it is, at a minimum, borderline ok to pirate things that aren't sold anymore. I would give my money, but these companies will not take it. this is where music downloads were in 2002 or so. maybe a bit later. people were pirating like crazy and record companies would not give users what they wanted: the ability to listen to what they wanted where they wanted. most pirates (those who don't consider piracy itself a hobby, anyway) don't really want to pirate; they want to play a game, or hear a song, or watch a TV show or movie when they want. They want on-demand access to the things they enjoy. they will gladly pay if only the copyright owners would accept the money, but often they won't. so the users take things into their own hands. I'm ok with it. but I'm no one and no media company will ever listen to me so whatever.
ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>The age of abandonware[0] is over. Yarrr matey, no it aint. It has only begone. Gonna take the eye patch and peg leg out of the mothballs and start putting them to good use.
notho 3y ago
It remains to be seen whether the soon to generationally churn will succeed in foisting their ways on the yet to exist. Having a hard time believing a deluge of generative AI content will keep Mickey Mouse worth anything; even if the AI content cannot be copyrighted why would users pay for Mickey Mouse?
- gs17 3y ago
  This will remain to be seen for a decent amount of time. Generative AI is pretty far from making games as good as the new Zelda without a lot of human work involved (hopefully in the short term we see an indie renaissance).
  - notho 3y ago
    Given the results I’m seeing generating individual meshes, textures for characters, less than 10 years and everyone will be generating their own stash of Pokémon to randomly distribute around a digital world. Even with the ornate stable diffusion, mid journey, and all the rest I use, it’s far easier to setup than a Linux project was 10-15 years ago. A few more iterations on nerfs and the proper porcelain is all it seems like we’re waiting on to me.
birdyrooster 3y ago
Except piracy is pretty awesome and works better than the paid alternatives in many cases. It’s just a matter of perspective who is winning and where they are winning.
- routerl 3y ago
  [flagged]
sleepybrett 3y ago
except that the 3ds' unique form factor means that nintendo really can resell 3ds game effectively on the switch unless they perform major hijinks.
skrowl 3y ago
[dead]
sdfhionio 3y ago
[dead]

asveikau 3y ago

I feel like it probably costs them very little to keep every title listed for sale. They could be making revenue from it. Probably not as much as when the stuff was new, but something. I guess by cutting off supply of the old stuff, though, they can do re-releases and re-masters charging somewhat similar to the price of a new game, or get people to pay a monthly subscription fee for access.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Keeping stuff for sale can be expensive because of licensed assets. Licensed music has taken games down before and it will again. I don't know the publisher contracts Nintendo signs, but if there's a time duration in the contract, that may open up a very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem. That said, I 100% believe this is just a way for them to make sure you can't mod second hand 3DS consoles in five years time when they bring 3DS re-releases to the Switch.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > Very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem. There is tons of licensing issues in the gaming industry under the surface that causes problems all over the place. An extreme example would be Sega's mistakes with Sonic. Sonic 3, despite not having him in the credits, contains some works by Michael Jackson. That has complicated things tremendously in re-releases, so much so, that Sega has re-released that game far less than Sonic 1, 2, and CD. Sonic Origins, the latest re-release, contains redone music from prototypes rather than solve the licensing quagmire. But that's not the only licensing quagmire. Guess why the Sonic movies don't have almost any soundtracks or sound effects from the game? According to the Directors, it wasn't a thematic choice, but a legal one. Sonic CD's re-release on smartphones had a similar issue with the opening scene having the vocals removed, because they were from an obscure band that went through a series of legal changes, acquisitions, member changes... This is actually a big problem with re-releases in general. Hunting down who actually owns the rights to a series can be a mess when acquisitions are involved; and you'd better hope the new owners at the end of the road are reasonable and not eager for a quick buck. And to top it all off, just look up the Kenneth W. Penders story, which single-handedly took advantage of Sega's lax copyright protectionism to "steal" almost 200 characters right from under Sega's feet. Nintendo is no doubt looking at that, and the Sonic music issues, and thinking... man, this is why we protect.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 haven't been available on digital marketplaces for a while because both games include real historical footage that Konami no longer has the rights to use. (Off the top of my head, MGS3 used clips of some nuclear weapons tests, for example.)
    - ohgodplsno 3y ago
      Additionally, the Metal Gear Solid Main Theme is reportedly not available anymore because of debious copyright battles with a russian composer, which led to MGS4 having the Love Theme instead.
    - joecool1029 3y ago
      > MGS3 used clips of some nuclear weapons tests Wouldn't this be a work of the federal government and in the public domain? Thinking of all the war movies that used old military footage....
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Wouldn't this be a work of the federal government and in the public domain? Not necessarily EDIT: This got prematurely sent and thus was overly terse: contractors and other private parties connected to government test may have been permitted to take photos, and those (even within the scope of work of a government contract) may be subject to copyright. (Also, its theoretically possible that some tests were photographed by people with no formal connection to the test, though the remote locations and lack of announced times make that challenging.)
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    Have people building games today that use works under license learned this lesson and purchased perpetual licenses, or are they still trying to save money by purchasing narrow licenses that don't work for re-releases or remakes or similar?
    - 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- m4rtink 3y ago
  So basically another case study why modern copyright law is broken ?
hbn 3y ago
I'm not so sure it would even pay for itself to continue running at some point. It's not like you can just pay to keep the servers running. It's connected to the internet and surely running on a software stack with dependencies that will have CVEs, or language version lose LTS, libraries dropped for support, etc. and need upkeep. How much money in sales could the Wii Shop channel have been pulling in by the time they shut it down? I can't imagine much.
- dole 3y ago
  There was that recent Youtuber that spent a few tens of thousands of dollars on every eShop title before they shut it down, so they made at least that much, but on the other hand, it’s all archived now…
- asveikau 3y ago
  Firstly, I think you're vastly overestimating these costs. Server resources are pretty cheap. They could probably overlap with online infrastructure of more recent hardware. They probably could also budget a small amount of the dev time to fixing a few bugs with extremely low priority, only the most high severity items prioritized beneath servicing modern stuff. Second, AFAIK they are running those servers right now with no revenue. They blocked new purchases, but you can still re-download existing purchases. I googled around and it seems like that's still the case. I do not know how long they will maintain that.
  - itake 3y ago
    You also have the customer support overhead. People will demand refunds. They will claim the purchase doesn’t work on their broken hardware. There will be fraud where people use the service to test stolen credit card. There is also the staffing element. Maybe the engineers or product people are interested in resourcing a product with no career growth. There is a hefty on-going maintenance cost for these stores.
blairbeckwith 3y ago
If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars. I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever. Believe me; movie studios and game companies have re-releases down to a science. Disney (arguably) perfected it first with their "Disney Vault" scheme. It increases the value to buyers when it's available for sale; and it also helps the company if there is little new content to offer for the year. I'm surprised so few people put together that Super Mario 3D All-Stars is actually Nintendo perfectly following the Disney Vault script.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    Disney themselves have abandoned the 'Vault' strategy after deciding that continuous sales were more profitable, which probably has something to do with people not recognizing it and/or thinking it's absurd to see in this day and age.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  > If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars. I think they would have. those games are all available on the 2nd hand market easily. I don't mind paying for remasters of games I already own for older hardware, anyway, because remasters are not a big expense for me and by buying remasters I send my vote that I want remasters. I mean, it's Nintendo's IP. they can do what they want. I think the way they do things is very short-sighted, though.
  - astrange 3y ago
naikrovek 3y ago
it would cost them very little to keep things online but very little is too much, sometimes. I would GLADLY pay Nintendo for every ROM I want but do not have, if they would only take my money and sell it. they choose not to sell. so I feel it is, at a minimum, borderline ok to pirate things that aren't sold anymore. I would give my money, but these companies will not take it. this is where music downloads were in 2002 or so. maybe a bit later. people were pirating like crazy and record companies would not give users what they wanted: the ability to listen to what they wanted where they wanted. most pirates (those who don't consider piracy itself a hobby, anyway) don't really want to pirate; they want to play a game, or hear a song, or watch a TV show or movie when they want. They want on-demand access to the things they enjoy. they will gladly pay if only the copyright owners would accept the money, but often they won't. so the users take things into their own hands. I'm ok with it. but I'm no one and no media company will ever listen to me so whatever.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

>The age of abandonware[0] is over. Yarrr matey, no it aint. It has only begone. Gonna take the eye patch and peg leg out of the mothballs and start putting them to good use.

notho 3y ago

It remains to be seen whether the soon to generationally churn will succeed in foisting their ways on the yet to exist. Having a hard time believing a deluge of generative AI content will keep Mickey Mouse worth anything; even if the AI content cannot be copyrighted why would users pay for Mickey Mouse?

gs17 3y ago
This will remain to be seen for a decent amount of time. Generative AI is pretty far from making games as good as the new Zelda without a lot of human work involved (hopefully in the short term we see an indie renaissance).
- notho 3y ago
  Given the results I’m seeing generating individual meshes, textures for characters, less than 10 years and everyone will be generating their own stash of Pokémon to randomly distribute around a digital world. Even with the ornate stable diffusion, mid journey, and all the rest I use, it’s far easier to setup than a Linux project was 10-15 years ago. A few more iterations on nerfs and the proper porcelain is all it seems like we’re waiting on to me.

birdyrooster 3y ago

Except piracy is pretty awesome and works better than the paid alternatives in many cases. It’s just a matter of perspective who is winning and where they are winning.

routerl 3y ago
[flagged]

sleepybrett 3y ago

except that the 3ds' unique form factor means that nintendo really can resell 3ds game effectively on the switch unless they perform major hijinks.

skrowl 3y ago

[dead]

sdfhionio 3y ago

[dead]