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Until the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those dig
by teeray 3y ago
Until the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those digital goods isn’t quite making its quarterly targets.
Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.
- crtasm 3y agoWhy wouldn't I be able to boot up my Switch game carts 28yrs from now?
- vages 3y agoBecause a lot of Switch games require downloading the finished game to be playable. See which here: https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions
- Beldin 3y agoThanks! My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.
- crtasm 3y agoThat link does not say the update is required to play all-stars.
- crtasm 3y agoThat's an important point for the games it affects but there's only eight carts there that require an update to play. Any number is too many, I agree.
- CM30 3y agoThis seems a bit misleading, since for many of these games they work fine without downloading the updates. If you don't connect Super Mario Bros Wonder or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the internet, then version 1.0 is a perfectly playable, full version of the game. And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).
- Shawnj2 3y agoIn a month from now Splatoon 1 will basically be unplayable on an original unhacked Wii U. Sure you can do the single player story mode, but the main multiplayer mode is going to be gone by then unless you use Pretendo. I think the Switch is actually in a better situation because it has paid online so as long as enough people pay for online for Nintendo to keep up the budget for server maintenance it could potentially last decades while Nintendo has an incentive to cut online for their older platforms that they are basically paying to keep up for free.
- debugnik 3y ago> so as long as enough people pay for online This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.
- iceflinger 3y agoSplatoon 1 doesn't have dedicated servers, the matchmaking is done on a server but the game itself runs peer-to-peer
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- debugnik 3y agoYou're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services. I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.
- crtasm 3y agoThis does not affect any of my offline games, just as GP could boot up Pokémon Red.
- fydorm 3y agoYou can play Pokémon Red but not save your game, because the batteries inside the game cartridge are dead.
- deergomoo 3y agoYeah but all it takes is a soldering iron, a Philips head, and 2 minutes to put a new one in. Quite different to a modern game where what’s on the physical cartridge/disc may not even be playable without a day one patch from a long-decommissioned server.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- teeray 3y agoMy original game saves are actually still there, miraculously.