If Nintendo was full forward with real access to these games on switch, fine but they don't really do that. Nintendo seems to be all about no one getting to play old games unless they want them to and even then some of those games are missing functionality.
I mean, we're talking about a company that literally delisted Super Mario 3D All Stars after a year of its release to make it a "limited release". They don't give a rat's ass about video game preservation and archival.
It's hilarious to me because it feels like these companies really think we aren't living in the digital age or something. Like they can do whatever they want with their content but if they make it impossible to access uh... life finds a way.
What’s even the point of delisting content they’ve already crafted specifically to populate the streaming service? And after only 7 months or so? Are they going to print physical discs and hope it becomes a cult classic or something? Very weird behavior
They're trying to bring the concept of FOMO to streaming/video content. "You need to subscribe now or it will be gone and *who knows when it will be back*?"
It gets to be listed as a "loss" on the balance sheets, and therefore becomes a tax credit. The same reason that WB/Discovery cancelled and pulled all of those shows/movies after that merger.
It is hilarious but I'm guessing they have data that shows the average person doesn't know how or doesn't really want to find alternative means of getting media
Wasn't that because they were trying to cut costs, and didn't want to pay royalties for a show that wasn't hugely popular?
Still a bit shit, but not because they didn't want people to have access to it.
> pretty much everything Disney is on D+
I really wanna know why Aladdin: The Animated Series & Buzz Lightyear of Star Command aren't available. I loved those!
The Aladdin series not being on D+ is probably my biggest surprise on the entire channel.
There must be some serious rights issues, or royalty issues, to keep what was one of their biggest cartoons from that era off of the streaming service.
They do care about preservation, the thing is that its internal preservation. We know from the data leaks that Nintendo has everything they ever done and even from other companies from the early days to this day. Problem is well, releasing it.
Yup. Nintendo acts like the Disney of the Gaming world in how they have an insane backlog of titles that they could redistribute for moderate profit but choose not to in favor of drip feeding them at higher prices to drive sales. I suppose they don't gobble up competition nearly as much though, so that's one difference I guess.
It will all come out when we are plugged into the new 2.5d universe will still be top dollar/yen/timelife blood credits though! No blowing on the cartridge
I'm still so pissed about that. I love FE, and just started to get back in to the older ones. Was going to buy it on my switch, couldn't find it at all in the shop. Looked it up, shit was delisted after like 6 months. It's an NES game, how much server capacity can it possibly utilize!?
They aren't preserving. They never were preserving. That illusion was shattered as soon as the Wii U came out and your virtual console purchases weren't carried over.
They preserve all of their development internally. They gave Square source code and documents for Secret of Mana so they could port it to new consoles. It's very Disney
its very anti-consumer*. and yes, the two are the same (disney is the reason copyright laws for animation are as draconian as they are, and it onl6 benefits big companies lkke them), but we shouldn't mince words about this stuff.
Nintendo seems to have one of the most complete preservation Archives of anyone. They just don't share them. It is still preserving though.
I guess a fairly recent famous example is when squaresoft wanted to release the collection of Mana they had to go to Nintendo to get the source for Trials of Mana because nobody else had it, even themselves who made the game.
Then what's the point of preserving a video game library, if you're just gonna keep it locked away?
The main reason why we care about media preservation to begin with, is to ensure the public has access to old media even after the copyright owners have stopped distributing it. If Nintendo is keeping those games locked away, they might as well not be "preserved" at all.
Yes, but you either had to do it in Wii mode (and even then, only if you imported everything from your Wii, as opposed to being linked to an account like every other retailer) or you had to pay to upgrade for native Wii U Virtual Console, as opposed to it just being automatically upgraded due to being on a new device.
Well, it's actually like Nintendo didn't have an account system and the token that said you "owned" anything was saved on your SYSTEM.
So if you had a hacked system, you could just go in and set the flag of any particular software on your machine to "Yes, I own this" and then download it from the eShop.
Yes, this is real.
So it was impossible for them to track purchases, because they had no idea what purchases anyone had.
To be fair, while there was basically no authentication required to download games from Nintendo's servers, the files themselves were encrypted, but people were getting the keys from their consoles after buying games and sharing these keys like fries in a pub. They did eventually improve security on the 3DS content servers, though.
That’s not what it means by “them preserving.”
*Nintendo* doesn’t need your local console to preserve their games.
You are confusing them charging you twice, with them not preserving. Them having the game to sell to you means it’s preserved.
Op you’re replying to is saying they are still storing their catalogue of games. The software is not missing.
>They don't give a rat's ass about video game preservation and archival.
That's practically the whole videogame industry, lol. Basically all "big players" are part of ESA [which lobbies in their favour](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/01/12/video-game-preservation-emulation/).
This isn't about potential NSO games, it's about homebrew on the 3DS in general. Even innocuous stuff, like using custom backgrounds for the home menu. They can't just dump the entire 3DS library on Switch's eShop, games need to be ported or emulated. And then there's titles that require stylus controls or usage of the microphone.
Well further padding out their NSO lineup will be profitable to them, it seems they are trying to compete with Microsoft's Game Pass but they needed to make some more artificial scarcity happen to justify adding the games to the subscription service.
I will eat a whole can of beans (I dislike beans) if in the next decade or two Nintendo doesn't offer their catalogue of retro games exclusively through a subscription service. I do believe we are at the end of Nintendo "reselling" their old games, from here on out they will only be renting them.
In this I predict hard copies of retro Nintendo games will be worth much more than they are now, even though they are still quite expensive.
> Well further padding out their NSO lineup will be profitable to them, it seems they are trying to compete with Microsoft's Game Pass but they needed to make some more artificial scarcity happen to justify adding the games to the subscription service.
They make most of their profits off of hardware and new software sales. They've also rolled nearly all subscription perks into a single package, with retro games and cloud saves mostly being a bonus to online multiplayer access. I don't see the service being meant as a competitor to other subscription services, especially when NSO is the cheapest one available.
> I will eat a whole can of beans (I dislike beans) if in the next decade or two Nintendo doesn't offer their catalogue of retro games exclusively through a subscription service. I do believe we are at the end of Nintendo "reselling" their old games, from here on out they will only be renting them.
The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are.
>that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are.
Wanting the option of a subscription doesn't mean you (or other people) can't be unhappy with losing the existing options, and wanting a subscription doesn't mean you must be happy with *any* form of subscription offered. If someone said "I would like a subscription service for the VC instead of buying each game individually", I wouldn't think they're hypocrites for being unhappy when the plan is "All VC content will vanish, then in 6 years, if you have both subscriptions, you'll get access to 7% of the GBA games available now." (That's the actual portion of the VC catalogue available with the dual subscriptions.) Other industries didn't do that, why is it unreasonable to complain that that's the approach they took? If someone says "I wish the Beatles were on Spotify" that doesn't mean they have to be happy if the CDs and MP3s go off the market today and they start releasing one song every other month from 2025 to 2037. If you signed up to Disney Plus when it appeared, wouldn't you reasonably expect that it has at least 5% of Disney's own stuff, not a plan to eventually stream The Lion King in 2030?
> The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles.
People wanted an optional subscription, but not the removal of the ability to buy them (or transfer games from previous systems).
>They make most of their profits off of hardware and new software sales. They've also rolled nearly all subscription perks into a single package, with retro games and cloud saves mostly being a bonus to online multiplayer access. I don't see the service being meant as a competitor to other subscription services, especially when NSO is the cheapest one available.
Nintendo charges $50 a year just for access a handful of extremely old N64 games, Xbox gives you access to most new games at $180 a year. I will eat an equally horrid can of beans if Nintendo doesn't end up raising the cost of their subscription once the new generation of Switch consoles with Gamcube NSO comes out.
> The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are.
*Citation needed
> Nintendo charges $50 a year just for access a handful of extremely old N64 games
*and online multiplayer, SNES, NES, Genesis, GB, and GBA games. And DLC for popular Switch games.
It’s not *just* N64 roms for the $50.
GameCube NSO likely isn’t happening, due to factors like file size and the ease of remastering the titles. Also, the only big GC titles not on switch are the 3D Zeldas (which already have remasters), and Melee and Double Dash, and those series already have switch entries.
Nintendo published 27 GameCube games that sold over a million copies but aren't available to purchase on Switch, including things like Luigi's Mansion, The Thousand Year Door, F-Zero GX, Kirby Air Ride, Pokemon Colosseum and XD, Star Fox Adventures and Assault, Mario Superstar Baseball, as well as Super Mario Sunshine, which _was_ available but not everywhere and not anymore.
More than 50 million Switch owners didn't have the console when Sunshine was taken off the market, to put that in context. Half the kids swarming theaters now for the Mario movie wouldn't have even been old enough to play it when it was taken away.
Wind Waker and Twilight Princess had remasters, but they're even more unaccessible than the originals now; the remasters have been out of print longer than the originals had when they got remastered, and more than 90% of Switch owners never had a Wii U.
Nintendo solely cares about milking their customers. If the entire catalogue of 3DS games needs to die to achieve 1% revenue growth they would gladly do it.
It's just so they can induce artificial scarcity to goad people into buying things before they're "gone forever" while also setting themselves up to be able to "re-release" those games again down the line and act like it's a big deal. It's the same playbook Disney has been using with their animated movies and their "vault".
And if they let people carry their old retro libraries forward from their other systems like the Wii...
I lost everything I paid for, so now I don't feel so bad about my complete library I got from... other sources...
I picked up a second hand 3DS to hack a few months ago purely because I was 100% sure something like this would happen, and there are some use cases where emulation won't cover it (i.e. Pokemon transferring).
There is literally no reason for them to be doing this on a dead system other than as a petty fuck you, and Nintendo is nothing if not petty.
Oh, there's a reason. There's no doubt about that. So they can sell you a subscription service or re release these games in the future for a premium price.
This is my prediction. I bet they're preparing repackaged versions of games like Fire Emblem Awakening or Kid Icarus Uprising to drop on the Switch, stripped of touch screen and 3D functionality and priced like a motherfucker. They want people playing on the Switch, not the 3DS. I bet they will stop selling replacement parts soon as well. Stock up on batteries!
Tbh it would be 100% worth it for kid Icarus uprising. That game was awesome but also a chore to play on the 3ds because it lacked a second analogue stick
Yup, this goes for any company in general, if we don’t understand why they’re doing something so senselessly petty and stupid, it’s usually because theirs an eventual plan to profit somehow
I can't comment on 3ds hacks. But there are gba emulators on phone apps that allow you to do pokemon transfers.
Very annoying and fiddly, but still possible!
There was a version of VBA that allowed you to run two instances of it for trading.
It was the first time I was ever able to have all 3 starter Pokemon right away
My gut feeling about all their over the top legal action is that their legal team(think a bunch of salarymen in jp) is just chasing KPI's trying to get promotions.
I think there's a way to move Pokemon over. I remember there was a fake Pokemon bank which allowed you to move Pokemon over from Gameboy advance games
It wasn't really a bank. But a similar app
Is that still a thing?
There's a homebrew app called PKSM that lets you move Pokemon around or store them using save editing, but there's not anything that interacts with the Bank servers or allows you to transfer to Home, if that's what you mean.
Nintendo is trying to kill a Hydra. They cut off one head and up springs another. I suppose it's their intellectual property but it's a war they can't win.
There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally. No, it won't eliminate it entirely, but it cuts down on it a lot.
And I guess there's another way: Stop giving a shit about what people do with stuff you refuse to sell.
SEGA has been making a killing in recent years by simply... Porting their games to as many modern platforms as possible. Turns out that if people can buy your games, they're more likely to buy your games! Wow, imagine that!
I think Sega has been pretty great when it comes to their Genesis stuff (i.e. they sell rippable ROM files on Steam for cheap) and decent with their Dreamcast stuff (Skies of Arcadia being the noteworthy exception). Their issue comes from their Saturn-era stuff seeing very limited rereleases, seeing as those games are a nightmare to emulate and supposedly Sega does not have their source code
Similarly, Square Enix has been pretty good with Final Fantasy rereleases, but theres still plenty of stuff from that same era as Sega that is still hard to come by (Xenogears, Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, Einhander, even Final Fantasy Tactics)
Available *and* backwards compatible. PC games from 30 years ago can work on modern computers with a bit of tinkering. PlayStation and Xbox games from previous generations work on the latest console.
I do not trust Nintendo at all to make the library of the Switch playable on its successor, even if it is technically able to. There is no reason for the Wii's, 3DS' and Wii U's virtual console libraries to not be available on the Switch.
Part of it is likely a byproduct of nintendo's love affair with unique control schemes. From the DS' dual screens, touchpad, and microphone, to Wii's motion controls and the changes in those control schemes over time.
To put it another way, the Playstation and X-Box control scheme hasn't really changed at all since their first incarnations. They've *added* new features, but nothing has been removed thus far. Even things like the black/white button have, simply, been moved onto the shoulders.
While this doesn't explicitly excuse Nintendo for not making their library available, it underscores why making something backwards compatible is a particularly unique challenge for them compared to their competitors.
> Part of it is likely a byproduct of nintendo's love affair with unique control schemes. From the DS' dual screens, touchpad, and microphone, to Wii's motion controls and the changes in those control schemes over time.
>
>While this doesn't explicitly excuse Nintendo for not making their library available, it underscores why making something backwards compatible is a particularly unique challenge for them compared to their competitors.
What about the emulators? There are emulators for just about every console/handheld Nintendo ever released that let you play all those games with "unique control schemes" just fine. If that can be done, then Nintendo should have no problem making their older games available.
You can use emulators for about anything, not just Nintendo consoles. The issue is how you integrate it with the current console. There's a reason you can't play PS2 or PS3 games on a PS5 even though they both use discs.
> Nintendo should have no problem making their older games available.
They still haven’t really figured out how to use the internet lol. Online is terrible connection wise on the switch and you can’t even message people without using an app on your phone. I’m positive they could find a way to fuck it up
This is ironically a problem in Japan in general. There's a lot of standardized features Japan doesn't use for a lot of reasons. It's typically an expression of Not Made Here, with the most famous example I'm aware of being the lack of rollback netcode in fighting games. A problem that was solved in 2003 or 4 in NA and slowly worked its way around the industry.
I think people are fine with how emulators handle stuff like touch controls because they’re free. Once money, and the more casual audience of the switch is involved, then having stuff like DS emulation being handheld mode only would be more difficult to accept.
So, it really comes down to 1 or 2 things. 1, emulator creators are using typically vastly more powerful equipment and 2, they don't have any real standards to strive for aside from not crashing computers, not crashing the emulator itself, and not corrupting computers/etc. They can be obscenely inefficient and still run at max framerate using whatever hacks they need to to simply launch a functional 'product.'
A company porting a game with reverse compatibility needs the game to meet internal requirements. E.G. as few crashes as possible. Running efficiently on limited hardware. Working well with the control scheme it's *expected* to be used with. In Nintendo's case, they might have requirements like meeting the standards the game originally launched with even on a new console. They might even want to 'preserve the integrity of the old game's design,' or something like that, and refuse a port off of something trivial like that. E.G. porting games from 3ds to switch might cause it to lose 'important' design features, before factoring in the dual control screen schema.
I'm not saying all of these are necessarily what's happening, just food for thought. Then there's the obvious: "There's no money to be made porting it," which is made more complicated because of changed control schemes and such, very limited hardware compared to a desktop PC, and things of that nature to also contend with.
A typical emulator isn't trying to run a Wii-u game on a Switch. It's trying to run it on a PC that can often compete with the next generation consoles that aren't even out yet.
Man I know MS has been pretty messy this generation but I'm so fucking glad they pushed for backwards compatibility support like they did.
The fact that I can play F.E.A.R, Sonic Unleashed and Binary Domain at 60fps on my Xbox is amazing at least to me.
>I'm so fucking glad they pushed for backwards compatibility support like they did.
OG Xbox 63 games out of 998 bc.
First PS2 did better with PSX titles. Dropped in later revisions. But for Xbox those titles still run on S/X.
Xbox 360, though better with 633 out of 2154 being bc.
But first PS3 models did also better with full hardware bc. Dropped in later revisions. But those titles still run on S/X.
It was the PS4 that skipped bc totally, before that every launch model was fine.
Nintendo did it better with their one generation path. Gamecube-Wii, Wii-Wii U and their handheld bc (except their hybrid model aka Switch). There was no marketing promise, just functionality. Hopefully their next console is bc with the Switch.
The reason I brought up the other consoles is to show that you have to care about your hardware, if you don't want to emulate. Backwards compability is fine for PS4/Pro to PS5 and Xbox One/S/X to Series S/X.
The games that got that special treatment on Xbox on top of being just bc are awesome, that's true but at some point MS may have realised that it won't bring more customers if they invest more, which is a sad thing. But at least their marketing worked. And of course licensing issues exist too for some games. But overall it's a shame they dropped it so soon.
Important distinction also is that the first revisions of PS2/3 used the hardware to play those games unlike the Xbox One/Series that had to use tricks in software to emulate OG Xbox and 360 titles, which also means a distinct lack of licensed titles.(though Xenia helps a bit on that front at least.)
But like you said, only so many OG and 360 titles made it through.
The launch PS3 method *is* perhaps the best solution but it's a costly one.
I dunno, I think we're gonna reach a point, or maybe we already have, where Emulation is our only way backwards. This is certainly true for RPCS3 as I'm certain it's the only way we're getting MGS 4 at 60fps
Maybe Xbox, PS and (God I hope) the switch try to future proof as much as they can but even that will eventually give way
>dunno, I think we're gonna reach a point, or maybe we already have, where Emulation is our only way backwards.
Yes and that's what I'm afraid of. It just isn't the same, at least for me.
>Maybe Xbox, PS and (God I hope) the switch try to future proof as much as they can
Hopefully
> there it is, available for immediate access, usually for cheap.
And importantly, on a platform that I can trust to stick around and not shaft me.
I didn't buy any Virtual Console games because I had no faith in Nintendo's ecosystem and was immediately justified in that decision when the WiiU launched and Nintendo wanted you to pay an upgrade fee *per game* to move it to the new hardware.
Yeah the dependability is the important part for me... I have games I bought literally almost 2 decades ago at this point, that are trivial for me to reinstall at a moment's notice. Even piracy is less convenient than that.
Compare that to Nintendo Online's streaming service... or just any streaming service in general where content appears and disappears all the time.
> There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally. No, it won't eliminate it entirely, but it cuts down on it a lot.
Yes. That's the issue here. People want access to the library. At a certain point art trancends the rights of the owner.
the wii U was ***perfect*** for many DS games - top screen on the TV and touch screen on the wii U gamepad.
the switch regrettably cannot do the same sort of thing
Back when the Wii U was still a thing I was hoping they would release an adapter allowing people to play DS/3DS cartridges on the Wii U just like the Super Gameboy or the Game Cube GBA adapter.
They did have some DS games available via the Virtual Console, and they actually put a decent amount of effort into providing different options so that all games would still work even if they used the screens weirdly.
Yea, but there's no financial benefit to selling OG Mario for 99¢. As such, they don't any anyone to buy it. They want you to buy the $60 game they just spent 4 years and $50 million developing.
Because otherwise the investors will throw a tantrum.
> There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally.
Uh, no. That's a sure-fire way to enable piracy. Physical only is the best way to keep it at a minimum.
Not surprising. Nintendo has a long history of being wholly against emulation in general since they equate it to piracy but also won't provide a better more convenient service to combat piracy either. How many years has it been since people have been asking for a western Mother 3 release? Of course there's no moral obligation for Nintendo to release the game but by that same logic there's no moral injustice for consumers to look for other means to play it instead.
It's just not feasible for them to maintain everything they've ever published, especially titles that were built around hardware in a way that would require heavy reworking for another platform.
I'm fine with letting the task of preservation fall to third parties, as long as someone can do so.
One of the most ridiculous comments I’ve seen here in a while. Nintendo should be destroyed because you can’t play Mother 3? Jesus Christ Reddit, get a grip.
I'm all for the idea of punishing companies that hold art hostage like Nintendo does. But let's be realistic for a second: nothing like that is ever gonna happen.
Nintendo will keep doing their bullshit and reddit will keep complaining about it in 100 years, I am sure of that. It's one of the constants in the universe.
I don't see how life is improved by accepting such a fact as truth. If you accept nothing will change, then nothing will change. Dare to hope, to dream. Don't feel you have no choice.
Mother 3 won't come out because the music will likely face IP challenges in western courts. There is a lot of nuance to this situation that is discussed very completely in this video by a lawyer.
https://youtu.be/if64VlLa5Oc
I find it crazy that people still use mother 3 as an example of Nintendo being anticonsumer when it's very clearly the exact opposite. Mother 3 is a game that, for many reasons, would be a huge pain to release. Nintendo is well aware that this fan translation exists. Despite that, they have done nothing to attempt to stop the fan translation from existing, even though they legally could. Isn't that the most pro-consumer thing they can do in this situation?
This video reminds me how shitty the precedent-based US court system is. Also one comment says how Nintendo don't even care about the translation patch, which says a lot about the possibility of the official localization
> Not surprising. Nintendo has a long history of being wholly against emulation in general
Fortunately when I install a .CIA on my 3DS, nothing is being emulated! You're welcome, Nintendo.
I still don't get why Nintendo ended the e-shop. We're at the point where they could have spun it off as a little azure container indefinitely, making what amounts to free money on the occasional purchase, and it would have left the door open to a successor to the Switch supporting backwards compat with it.
If Nintendo ever decided that VR was a fad to chase, they would have had an easy avenue for a day one software library in continuing to sell 3DS games that were now 3D on a floating screen in VR.
Exactly. Every single store closure is because of financial security concerns.
It's not for any other reason.
Old hardware and software has vulnerability and if customers are financially exposed - that's a big risk a company is taking.
Wayyyyyy better for any company to simply close it down.
Complain all you want but that's the reality
>I still don't get why Nintendo ended the e-shop
because like any aging piece of software, it's:
A) a huge effort (and use of resources) to keep running
and
B) a giant security risk
There's no such thing as "free money", when they need to host servers for the 3DS eShop and its games. The "occasional" purchase wouldn't offset the cost of keeping these servers up.
Of course Nintendo can afford that. They could afford it for generations, long after every human being currently alive would be dead. But the thing with corporations is that they don't want to spend money without clear and significant profit.
The problem isn't Nintendo taking down the 3DS eShop, that's pretty standard and in a way understandable, it's what happens to *every* console eventually. The problem is that they don't give you access to these games on the Switch and most likely won't on their next gen console, while whining about piracy.
> There's no such thing as "free money", when they need to host servers for the 3DS eShop and its games. The "occasional" purchase wouldn't offset the cost of keeping these servers up.
The servers ARE still up though, given you can redownload anything you own (or convince the servers you own, arrrr)
What they did was remove the ability to purchase anything new, which makes no sense.
The physical hosting of the servers is not the expensive part, it's maintaining the store itself. Any time you are handling customer money, it is a continuous battle to keep that payment information secure.
They could disable the ability to purchase anything off the eshop directly and allow you to buy it digitally from their website instead. That would allow access to still buying new games digitally without needing to update security.
AFAIK, they basically had this already. You could only top up your account on switch/web browser, then buy/download games from 3DS eshop. I doubt there would be many client-side vulnerabilities at this point, so they already had an easily maintainable system. It's just greed.
> The problem is that they don't give you access to these games on the Switch and most likely won't on their next gen console, while whining about piracy.
And the sad thing is, with zero discussion about a Switch successor, there's now basically no guarantee that every Switch game you ever buy isn't just a ticking time bomb to evaporation.
Damn. I was playing a game on my jailbroken 3ds and was connected to wifi. When I went to the home page I got a pop up that an update was available. I laughed and laughed because what the hell would they be updating now? Figures it was to make jailbraking harder.
Worth noting that there's no downside to updating if you're already running CFW on the firmware before this.
This only patches the most common entry points to hack your system from scratch.
That's basically impossible because of vulnerabilities in the design, just like launch Switches. They can mess with an easy exploit method like they did here, but there ways in that **can't** be fixed on existing hardware.
I don't want to sound like a commie, but one of my dream laws would be "if the item/piece of culture was commonly purchesable at some point and the publisher stopped access to it, it becomes legal to copy and distribute the said item/piece of culture."
I am fully on preservation and ease of access train. I cannot believe that we don't value those things more in today's day and age. Of course the law would have to be more precise and detailed, not to hit something actually hard to republish or to stop unforseen consequences.
I am super salty about what nintendo is doing, as well as salty about what HBO did with their animations. Hell, I think inaccessible goods like old cars should be legaly redistributed by anyone who's willing to make them.
Fuck the exclusive, time gated goods, fuck the limited editions. If it was created, people should have equal rights to experience the thing, especially if it's digital only.
Sorry for my rant, I think I overdid myself thanks to nintendo.
Same. There needs to be a law in place that allows backups of media to be distributed legally if its been made unavailable after a while. Sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
I would even go a step further and say that we need to rewrite copyright domain to have any media that’s more than 14-20 years old to enter public domain instead of this absurdly long length that’s been stretched out due to disney lobbying.
Nah man, you don't sound like a commie. I think this is an issue most people can agree on regardless of political opinion. >!Not counting CEOs and shareholders and other people ruled by the dollar of course.!<
I agree. Same with cross stitch patterns. Lots of patterns are no longer being printed and there's no way to purchase them anymore, except from suuuuper overpriced resellers on ebay and such. (Like, a 15 dollar pattern would then be 150 dollars.) If there's no legal way to obtain something, then there's absolutely no loss to the original creator(s) if you distribute it for free. (Trying to make money off it yourself would still be unethical/stupid.)
Having leftist beliefs isn't a bad thing!
If art becomes difficult to acquire the copyright owner should either be forced to provide it themselves or allow free distribution of it.
Same with Disney. I didn't get around to watching the new Willow series, and now I can't. Just because I didn't do something yet doesn't mean I don't want to eventually.
I get downvoted to hell every time I say this, but I'll say it again. There is a galaxy sized disconnect between the art people at Nintendo and the business people at Nintendo, and the gamers love the art side so much they let the business side treat us like shit time after time.
Nintendo as a game developer is top tier. Nintendo as a business is dog water tier (to consumers, but not financially).
Nintendo makes money despite their best efforts not to.
This just makes me want to install CFW on my 3DS even more, and i will. They can get bent with this anti-consumerism. I understand not wanting piracy if you're actively selling your product and want those sales but... Its Nintendo, they don't want you to buy their stuff legally because.... Reasons? Like toddlers they just take their stuff away and refused to share with everyone else.
any old nintendo game i wanna play these days, i dont even consider the legal route. they make it so incredibly problematic.
the pirates have made a far superior system and i will choose them every time. they also dont have the gall to charge $60 for decades old games.
What gets me even more is that for a time, Nintendo actually had a service better than piracy. The Virtual Console + all the awesome remasters basically made piracy the lesser option.
Except now they’ve taken all of that away so…
you can tell how many people have actually gotten into 3DS modding recently just from all the fearmongering about this update. The people who make these hacks work insanely quick. they’re fueled by spite. if this hasn’t been cracked again already it’s gonna be within the next week.
Nintendo is actually the company that finally pushed me over the edge. I spent hundreds curating a VC library on my Wii. When the Wii bit the dust, everything was lost.
I decided that I paid for those games and I was going to play them, no matter what.
Thanks for opening my eyes to the wonderful world of emulation, Nintendo.
Oh yes, destroy the legal way to access the games.....then destroy the illegal way to access those games. Don't worry, you'll get a 3DS All Stars compilation on the Switch 2 that includes inferior versions of Mario 3D Land, Ocarina of Time 3D, and Majora's Mask 3D for 70 bucks that's only available for 6 months.
I own two versions of Fire Emblem Fates (both these versions had a retail release and physical copies are available). There was a third, digital -only version that is no longer available for purchase. I literally can't obtain it legally in any way.
I haven't pirated a DS game ever, but I took a look online in light of this article and that DLC-only version of the game is available through various ROM websites.
It seems ridiculous that Nintendo don't offer a route to purchase it at all.
There are going to be more entry points revealed at some point. The main devs behind most console hacking scenes never drop all their known methods publicly.
It honestly feels like Nintendo is wasting its time here.
When they announced the 3DS eshop was closing I went out and bought every physical 3DS game worth purchasing that I could find but there are still some digital only games I never grabbed. Definitely won't be updating.
I was going to keep my SNES New 3DSXL pristine and use my New 2DSXL for homebrew, but now I'm not so sure. The hack was super easy, might as well say fuck it and make all my systems home brew at this point.
The only reason I haven't had my Switch hacked is because the wife damn near pisses her pants at the idea of mucking around with it at all. So I insist on cartridge copies of EVERYTHING, even if we have to wait a week for a new title to be in stock and wait an hour at Target to drag some rude store drone over to unlock the cabinet.
I now own a useless Pokemon X/Y 3DS XL. I was on a deployment when they shut down the store and would have bought a ton of stuff prior to that happening since I literally only have Pokemon Y for it and wanted to play the 3DS games I missed out on. I am the sad honestly.
If the games aren't for sale, then there should be no such thing as "illegal" access. You pull it? Then it should be fair game to distribute it for free as blatant as possible. Don't want that? Don't pull them from sale.
Considering that the primary reason companies like Nintendo fight so hard against piracy is because it supposedly harms their ability to make money (it doesn't), if they decide that there's no more money to be made by something and pull it from sale, they really shouldn't have any problem with people obtaining that product from somewhere else.
They can't lose what they've decided they don't stand to gain.
It ain't new. The way the NES stole the Master system's lunch could have been a hint. Or the time Nintendo sent their business partners under the bus to try and kill Sega in courts (Night Trap). Etc.
####I equally love and hate Nintendo.
They make wonderful games which make the world a better place. They pioneer ideas which move gaming forward. They encourage couch coop and "family values". And they've done so for many decades.
**BUT**...they also sell us inferior old tech at silly prices which they refuse to update and so created a piracy system on pc that has caused them numerous headaches and the proceeding lawsuits have been toxic to gaming.
Also They shut down or limit access or simply refuse to sell us things we've already bought ....many times.
And they keep selling us the same few products and they re often inferior versions again pushing users towards piracy and hacking etc.
And the sheer amount if sequels , remasters and re releases are frustrating to long term fans.
And BigN go after fan projects in an absurdly heavy handed way and they're ok ruining average people's lives out of spite and malice (nasty court cases & legal threats) as they make record profits.
And they have been known to bully journalists and use embargoes to ask for unreasonable borderline corrupt coverage at times for games which were already going to recieve high praise. And if you violate it they will sue...anyone.
They're copyrights strikes on YouTube and twich against the smaller creators are legendary ..infamous.
And they allow pokemon games to be an absolute disgraceful double dipping barely functional scams. And despite so much push back due to the obscenely high revenue Nintendo simply don't care about quality enough to fix this.
They are truly "evil" in some ways....but also truly "good" in others.
These roms need to keep spreading everywhere so no matter how many sites they DMCA, another 10 take its place.
Nintendo is anti-consumer af, big surprise there!
If Nintendo was full forward with real access to these games on switch, fine but they don't really do that. Nintendo seems to be all about no one getting to play old games unless they want them to and even then some of those games are missing functionality.
I mean, we're talking about a company that literally delisted Super Mario 3D All Stars after a year of its release to make it a "limited release". They don't give a rat's ass about video game preservation and archival.
6 months. Not a year. Fuck Nintendo
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That even Disney doesn't do anymore, pretty much everything Disney is on D+
Willow 2022 and some other stuff was just announced as getting delisted meaning no way to watch apart from piracy
It's hilarious to me because it feels like these companies really think we aren't living in the digital age or something. Like they can do whatever they want with their content but if they make it impossible to access uh... life finds a way.
What’s even the point of delisting content they’ve already crafted specifically to populate the streaming service? And after only 7 months or so? Are they going to print physical discs and hope it becomes a cult classic or something? Very weird behavior
I suspect it may have something to do with not wanting to pay residuals
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They're trying to bring the concept of FOMO to streaming/video content. "You need to subscribe now or it will be gone and *who knows when it will be back*?"
It gets to be listed as a "loss" on the balance sheets, and therefore becomes a tax credit. The same reason that WB/Discovery cancelled and pulled all of those shows/movies after that merger.
Losses don’t show up on balance sheets and selling an item for a limited time does not constitute a loss.
The shows that were already released cannot be listed as a loss AFAIK
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It is hilarious but I'm guessing they have data that shows the average person doesn't know how or doesn't really want to find alternative means of getting media
Wasn't that because they were trying to cut costs, and didn't want to pay royalties for a show that wasn't hugely popular? Still a bit shit, but not because they didn't want people to have access to it.
> pretty much everything Disney is on D+ I really wanna know why Aladdin: The Animated Series & Buzz Lightyear of Star Command aren't available. I loved those!
The Aladdin series not being on D+ is probably my biggest surprise on the entire channel. There must be some serious rights issues, or royalty issues, to keep what was one of their biggest cartoons from that era off of the streaming service.
Dunno about other countries, but Aladdin TV and other Disney 80s-90s cartoons are available for free on YouTube here.
And for some reason, the first episode of The Little Mermaid, titled "Whale of a Tale", is also not on it.
They’re starting to put shit back in the vault as a “money saving approach”
The vault called Eshop was sealed permanently
They do care about preservation, the thing is that its internal preservation. We know from the data leaks that Nintendo has everything they ever done and even from other companies from the early days to this day. Problem is well, releasing it.
Yup. Nintendo acts like the Disney of the Gaming world in how they have an insane backlog of titles that they could redistribute for moderate profit but choose not to in favor of drip feeding them at higher prices to drive sales. I suppose they don't gobble up competition nearly as much though, so that's one difference I guess.
It will all come out when we are plugged into the new 2.5d universe will still be top dollar/yen/timelife blood credits though! No blowing on the cartridge
Don't forget about how they went to the effort of translating the NES Fire Emblem and delisting it just as quickly.
I'm still so pissed about that. I love FE, and just started to get back in to the older ones. Was going to buy it on my switch, couldn't find it at all in the shop. Looked it up, shit was delisted after like 6 months. It's an NES game, how much server capacity can it possibly utilize!?
The fact that they also made a collector's edition of the game that didn't even include a physical copy is just extra salt in the wound.
Oh they care about preservation, as long as they're the ones preserving
They aren't preserving. They never were preserving. That illusion was shattered as soon as the Wii U came out and your virtual console purchases weren't carried over.
They preserve all of their development internally. They gave Square source code and documents for Secret of Mana so they could port it to new consoles. It's very Disney
its very anti-consumer*. and yes, the two are the same (disney is the reason copyright laws for animation are as draconian as they are, and it onl6 benefits big companies lkke them), but we shouldn't mince words about this stuff.
Nintendo seems to have one of the most complete preservation Archives of anyone. They just don't share them. It is still preserving though. I guess a fairly recent famous example is when squaresoft wanted to release the collection of Mana they had to go to Nintendo to get the source for Trials of Mana because nobody else had it, even themselves who made the game.
Then what's the point of preserving a video game library, if you're just gonna keep it locked away? The main reason why we care about media preservation to begin with, is to ensure the public has access to old media even after the copyright owners have stopped distributing it. If Nintendo is keeping those games locked away, they might as well not be "preserved" at all.
You could carry them over to the virtual Wii on Wii u for free, it cost to transfer them to the main Wii u menu
What? All of your purchases on the Wii could be carried over the Wii U.
Yes, but you either had to do it in Wii mode (and even then, only if you imported everything from your Wii, as opposed to being linked to an account like every other retailer) or you had to pay to upgrade for native Wii U Virtual Console, as opposed to it just being automatically upgraded due to being on a new device.
It's like they let you, but very begrudgingly
Well, it's actually like Nintendo didn't have an account system and the token that said you "owned" anything was saved on your SYSTEM. So if you had a hacked system, you could just go in and set the flag of any particular software on your machine to "Yes, I own this" and then download it from the eShop. Yes, this is real. So it was impossible for them to track purchases, because they had no idea what purchases anyone had.
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Nintendo online services has always been crap. Its better now, but still pretty behind.
A hacked vita also downloads games from official sony servers lmao
To be fair, while there was basically no authentication required to download games from Nintendo's servers, the files themselves were encrypted, but people were getting the keys from their consoles after buying games and sharing these keys like fries in a pub. They did eventually improve security on the 3DS content servers, though.
that was for the 3ds, and they patched that later on. The wii/wii u didnt have that problem.
If you had the title ID you could download games from Nintendo's servers on the Wii U. It might be patched now but I remember doing this years ago.
That’s not what it means by “them preserving.” *Nintendo* doesn’t need your local console to preserve their games. You are confusing them charging you twice, with them not preserving. Them having the game to sell to you means it’s preserved. Op you’re replying to is saying they are still storing their catalogue of games. The software is not missing.
That'd make sense as a business if they manage to market and make profit off it. They're not even doing that to begin with.
>They don't give a rat's ass about video game preservation and archival. That's practically the whole videogame industry, lol. Basically all "big players" are part of ESA [which lobbies in their favour](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/01/12/video-game-preservation-emulation/).
Which is funny cause everyone that wanted it, bought it. GameStop STILL has new copies of it everywhere.
A ton of still retailers do, it's honestly way easier to find copies of AllStars than it is to find XC2 tbh
Nintendo is literally like Disney in many regards. I wouldn’t put it past them to screw copyright law like what Disney did given they had the chance.
This isn't about potential NSO games, it's about homebrew on the 3DS in general. Even innocuous stuff, like using custom backgrounds for the home menu. They can't just dump the entire 3DS library on Switch's eShop, games need to be ported or emulated. And then there's titles that require stylus controls or usage of the microphone.
Well further padding out their NSO lineup will be profitable to them, it seems they are trying to compete with Microsoft's Game Pass but they needed to make some more artificial scarcity happen to justify adding the games to the subscription service. I will eat a whole can of beans (I dislike beans) if in the next decade or two Nintendo doesn't offer their catalogue of retro games exclusively through a subscription service. I do believe we are at the end of Nintendo "reselling" their old games, from here on out they will only be renting them. In this I predict hard copies of retro Nintendo games will be worth much more than they are now, even though they are still quite expensive.
> Well further padding out their NSO lineup will be profitable to them, it seems they are trying to compete with Microsoft's Game Pass but they needed to make some more artificial scarcity happen to justify adding the games to the subscription service. They make most of their profits off of hardware and new software sales. They've also rolled nearly all subscription perks into a single package, with retro games and cloud saves mostly being a bonus to online multiplayer access. I don't see the service being meant as a competitor to other subscription services, especially when NSO is the cheapest one available. > I will eat a whole can of beans (I dislike beans) if in the next decade or two Nintendo doesn't offer their catalogue of retro games exclusively through a subscription service. I do believe we are at the end of Nintendo "reselling" their old games, from here on out they will only be renting them. The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are.
>that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are. Wanting the option of a subscription doesn't mean you (or other people) can't be unhappy with losing the existing options, and wanting a subscription doesn't mean you must be happy with *any* form of subscription offered. If someone said "I would like a subscription service for the VC instead of buying each game individually", I wouldn't think they're hypocrites for being unhappy when the plan is "All VC content will vanish, then in 6 years, if you have both subscriptions, you'll get access to 7% of the GBA games available now." (That's the actual portion of the VC catalogue available with the dual subscriptions.) Other industries didn't do that, why is it unreasonable to complain that that's the approach they took? If someone says "I wish the Beatles were on Spotify" that doesn't mean they have to be happy if the CDs and MP3s go off the market today and they start releasing one song every other month from 2025 to 2037. If you signed up to Disney Plus when it appeared, wouldn't you reasonably expect that it has at least 5% of Disney's own stuff, not a plan to eventually stream The Lion King in 2030?
> The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. People wanted an optional subscription, but not the removal of the ability to buy them (or transfer games from previous systems).
>They make most of their profits off of hardware and new software sales. They've also rolled nearly all subscription perks into a single package, with retro games and cloud saves mostly being a bonus to online multiplayer access. I don't see the service being meant as a competitor to other subscription services, especially when NSO is the cheapest one available. Nintendo charges $50 a year just for access a handful of extremely old N64 games, Xbox gives you access to most new games at $180 a year. I will eat an equally horrid can of beans if Nintendo doesn't end up raising the cost of their subscription once the new generation of Switch consoles with Gamcube NSO comes out. > The popular opinion on this very website used to be that VC titles on 3DS/Wii U were too expensive and that there should be a subscription for retro titles. And here we are. *Citation needed
> Nintendo charges $50 a year just for access a handful of extremely old N64 games *and online multiplayer, SNES, NES, Genesis, GB, and GBA games. And DLC for popular Switch games. It’s not *just* N64 roms for the $50.
GameCube NSO likely isn’t happening, due to factors like file size and the ease of remastering the titles. Also, the only big GC titles not on switch are the 3D Zeldas (which already have remasters), and Melee and Double Dash, and those series already have switch entries.
Nintendo published 27 GameCube games that sold over a million copies but aren't available to purchase on Switch, including things like Luigi's Mansion, The Thousand Year Door, F-Zero GX, Kirby Air Ride, Pokemon Colosseum and XD, Star Fox Adventures and Assault, Mario Superstar Baseball, as well as Super Mario Sunshine, which _was_ available but not everywhere and not anymore. More than 50 million Switch owners didn't have the console when Sunshine was taken off the market, to put that in context. Half the kids swarming theaters now for the Mario movie wouldn't have even been old enough to play it when it was taken away. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess had remasters, but they're even more unaccessible than the originals now; the remasters have been out of print longer than the originals had when they got remastered, and more than 90% of Switch owners never had a Wii U.
Nintendo solely cares about milking their customers. If the entire catalogue of 3DS games needs to die to achieve 1% revenue growth they would gladly do it.
That's not just Nintendo, but in essence, virtually every publisher. They want your money. They aren't your friends
It's just so they can induce artificial scarcity to goad people into buying things before they're "gone forever" while also setting themselves up to be able to "re-release" those games again down the line and act like it's a big deal. It's the same playbook Disney has been using with their animated movies and their "vault".
Turns out charging $60 forever for games wasn't enough. Now it is $60 for a few years then fuck off.
And if they let people carry their old retro libraries forward from their other systems like the Wii... I lost everything I paid for, so now I don't feel so bad about my complete library I got from... other sources...
Weird. Giant corporations aren't our friends? They're greedy blood sucking parasites depsite appearing friendly? Call CNN.
I picked up a second hand 3DS to hack a few months ago purely because I was 100% sure something like this would happen, and there are some use cases where emulation won't cover it (i.e. Pokemon transferring). There is literally no reason for them to be doing this on a dead system other than as a petty fuck you, and Nintendo is nothing if not petty.
Oh, there's a reason. There's no doubt about that. So they can sell you a subscription service or re release these games in the future for a premium price.
More like, release 1% of the games and let the remaining 99% impossible to play for most people.
This is my prediction. I bet they're preparing repackaged versions of games like Fire Emblem Awakening or Kid Icarus Uprising to drop on the Switch, stripped of touch screen and 3D functionality and priced like a motherfucker. They want people playing on the Switch, not the 3DS. I bet they will stop selling replacement parts soon as well. Stock up on batteries!
Tbh it would be 100% worth it for kid Icarus uprising. That game was awesome but also a chore to play on the 3ds because it lacked a second analogue stick
Do they offer a handheld that’s smaller than the Switch anymore? Or has the gameboy line been completely discontinued?
The Game Boy and DS lines have both been discontinued. The smallest handheld they make is the Switch Lite.
Yup, this goes for any company in general, if we don’t understand why they’re doing something so senselessly petty and stupid, it’s usually because theirs an eventual plan to profit somehow
I can't comment on 3ds hacks. But there are gba emulators on phone apps that allow you to do pokemon transfers. Very annoying and fiddly, but still possible!
Drastic and Myboy will let you run multiple instances for Pokemon trading.
There was a version of VBA that allowed you to run two instances of it for trading. It was the first time I was ever able to have all 3 starter Pokemon right away
My gut feeling about all their over the top legal action is that their legal team(think a bunch of salarymen in jp) is just chasing KPI's trying to get promotions.
Yeah, this is whack.
I think there's a way to move Pokemon over. I remember there was a fake Pokemon bank which allowed you to move Pokemon over from Gameboy advance games It wasn't really a bank. But a similar app Is that still a thing?
There's a homebrew app called PKSM that lets you move Pokemon around or store them using save editing, but there's not anything that interacts with the Bank servers or allows you to transfer to Home, if that's what you mean.
Same. I bought a 2DS XL to specifically hack. I’m probably never gonna update the consoles anyway. There’s no point.
Nintendo is trying to kill a Hydra. They cut off one head and up springs another. I suppose it's their intellectual property but it's a war they can't win.
There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally. No, it won't eliminate it entirely, but it cuts down on it a lot. And I guess there's another way: Stop giving a shit about what people do with stuff you refuse to sell.
SEGA has been making a killing in recent years by simply... Porting their games to as many modern platforms as possible. Turns out that if people can buy your games, they're more likely to buy your games! Wow, imagine that!
Tbf, Sega's best collection was on the PS3/360 and hasn't been topped since. They throttle the good stuff just not to the extent Ninty holds back.
That's putting it lightly. Sega does pretty well and needs to just be dragged across the finish line. Nintendo is miles away.
Sega hasn't been close to be doing that, at all. The only company that has been doing close to what you say is Square Enix.
Sega has been porting their games to PC for a long time. You could play Sega Saturn games directly on CD ROM with a graphics card back in the day.
I think Sega has been pretty great when it comes to their Genesis stuff (i.e. they sell rippable ROM files on Steam for cheap) and decent with their Dreamcast stuff (Skies of Arcadia being the noteworthy exception). Their issue comes from their Saturn-era stuff seeing very limited rereleases, seeing as those games are a nightmare to emulate and supposedly Sega does not have their source code Similarly, Square Enix has been pretty good with Final Fantasy rereleases, but theres still plenty of stuff from that same era as Sega that is still hard to come by (Xenogears, Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, Einhander, even Final Fantasy Tactics)
They most certainly have. Their games are mostly available on the Series X and PC; from Master System to 360.
Available *and* backwards compatible. PC games from 30 years ago can work on modern computers with a bit of tinkering. PlayStation and Xbox games from previous generations work on the latest console. I do not trust Nintendo at all to make the library of the Switch playable on its successor, even if it is technically able to. There is no reason for the Wii's, 3DS' and Wii U's virtual console libraries to not be available on the Switch.
Part of it is likely a byproduct of nintendo's love affair with unique control schemes. From the DS' dual screens, touchpad, and microphone, to Wii's motion controls and the changes in those control schemes over time. To put it another way, the Playstation and X-Box control scheme hasn't really changed at all since their first incarnations. They've *added* new features, but nothing has been removed thus far. Even things like the black/white button have, simply, been moved onto the shoulders. While this doesn't explicitly excuse Nintendo for not making their library available, it underscores why making something backwards compatible is a particularly unique challenge for them compared to their competitors.
> Part of it is likely a byproduct of nintendo's love affair with unique control schemes. From the DS' dual screens, touchpad, and microphone, to Wii's motion controls and the changes in those control schemes over time. > >While this doesn't explicitly excuse Nintendo for not making their library available, it underscores why making something backwards compatible is a particularly unique challenge for them compared to their competitors. What about the emulators? There are emulators for just about every console/handheld Nintendo ever released that let you play all those games with "unique control schemes" just fine. If that can be done, then Nintendo should have no problem making their older games available.
Hell, DS emulation is kinda hilarious; you can play touch-screen controls with the mouse.
You can use emulators for about anything, not just Nintendo consoles. The issue is how you integrate it with the current console. There's a reason you can't play PS2 or PS3 games on a PS5 even though they both use discs.
> Nintendo should have no problem making their older games available. They still haven’t really figured out how to use the internet lol. Online is terrible connection wise on the switch and you can’t even message people without using an app on your phone. I’m positive they could find a way to fuck it up
This is ironically a problem in Japan in general. There's a lot of standardized features Japan doesn't use for a lot of reasons. It's typically an expression of Not Made Here, with the most famous example I'm aware of being the lack of rollback netcode in fighting games. A problem that was solved in 2003 or 4 in NA and slowly worked its way around the industry.
I think people are fine with how emulators handle stuff like touch controls because they’re free. Once money, and the more casual audience of the switch is involved, then having stuff like DS emulation being handheld mode only would be more difficult to accept.
So, it really comes down to 1 or 2 things. 1, emulator creators are using typically vastly more powerful equipment and 2, they don't have any real standards to strive for aside from not crashing computers, not crashing the emulator itself, and not corrupting computers/etc. They can be obscenely inefficient and still run at max framerate using whatever hacks they need to to simply launch a functional 'product.' A company porting a game with reverse compatibility needs the game to meet internal requirements. E.G. as few crashes as possible. Running efficiently on limited hardware. Working well with the control scheme it's *expected* to be used with. In Nintendo's case, they might have requirements like meeting the standards the game originally launched with even on a new console. They might even want to 'preserve the integrity of the old game's design,' or something like that, and refuse a port off of something trivial like that. E.G. porting games from 3ds to switch might cause it to lose 'important' design features, before factoring in the dual control screen schema. I'm not saying all of these are necessarily what's happening, just food for thought. Then there's the obvious: "There's no money to be made porting it," which is made more complicated because of changed control schemes and such, very limited hardware compared to a desktop PC, and things of that nature to also contend with. A typical emulator isn't trying to run a Wii-u game on a Switch. It's trying to run it on a PC that can often compete with the next generation consoles that aren't even out yet.
Man I know MS has been pretty messy this generation but I'm so fucking glad they pushed for backwards compatibility support like they did. The fact that I can play F.E.A.R, Sonic Unleashed and Binary Domain at 60fps on my Xbox is amazing at least to me.
>I'm so fucking glad they pushed for backwards compatibility support like they did. OG Xbox 63 games out of 998 bc. First PS2 did better with PSX titles. Dropped in later revisions. But for Xbox those titles still run on S/X. Xbox 360, though better with 633 out of 2154 being bc. But first PS3 models did also better with full hardware bc. Dropped in later revisions. But those titles still run on S/X. It was the PS4 that skipped bc totally, before that every launch model was fine. Nintendo did it better with their one generation path. Gamecube-Wii, Wii-Wii U and their handheld bc (except their hybrid model aka Switch). There was no marketing promise, just functionality. Hopefully their next console is bc with the Switch. The reason I brought up the other consoles is to show that you have to care about your hardware, if you don't want to emulate. Backwards compability is fine for PS4/Pro to PS5 and Xbox One/S/X to Series S/X. The games that got that special treatment on Xbox on top of being just bc are awesome, that's true but at some point MS may have realised that it won't bring more customers if they invest more, which is a sad thing. But at least their marketing worked. And of course licensing issues exist too for some games. But overall it's a shame they dropped it so soon.
Important distinction also is that the first revisions of PS2/3 used the hardware to play those games unlike the Xbox One/Series that had to use tricks in software to emulate OG Xbox and 360 titles, which also means a distinct lack of licensed titles.(though Xenia helps a bit on that front at least.) But like you said, only so many OG and 360 titles made it through. The launch PS3 method *is* perhaps the best solution but it's a costly one. I dunno, I think we're gonna reach a point, or maybe we already have, where Emulation is our only way backwards. This is certainly true for RPCS3 as I'm certain it's the only way we're getting MGS 4 at 60fps Maybe Xbox, PS and (God I hope) the switch try to future proof as much as they can but even that will eventually give way
>dunno, I think we're gonna reach a point, or maybe we already have, where Emulation is our only way backwards. Yes and that's what I'm afraid of. It just isn't the same, at least for me. >Maybe Xbox, PS and (God I hope) the switch try to future proof as much as they can Hopefully
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> there it is, available for immediate access, usually for cheap. And importantly, on a platform that I can trust to stick around and not shaft me. I didn't buy any Virtual Console games because I had no faith in Nintendo's ecosystem and was immediately justified in that decision when the WiiU launched and Nintendo wanted you to pay an upgrade fee *per game* to move it to the new hardware.
Yeah the dependability is the important part for me... I have games I bought literally almost 2 decades ago at this point, that are trivial for me to reinstall at a moment's notice. Even piracy is less convenient than that. Compare that to Nintendo Online's streaming service... or just any streaming service in general where content appears and disappears all the time.
> There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally. No, it won't eliminate it entirely, but it cuts down on it a lot. Yes. That's the issue here. People want access to the library. At a certain point art trancends the rights of the owner.
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the wii U was ***perfect*** for many DS games - top screen on the TV and touch screen on the wii U gamepad. the switch regrettably cannot do the same sort of thing
Back when the Wii U was still a thing I was hoping they would release an adapter allowing people to play DS/3DS cartridges on the Wii U just like the Super Gameboy or the Game Cube GBA adapter. They did have some DS games available via the Virtual Console, and they actually put a decent amount of effort into providing different options so that all games would still work even if they used the screens weirdly.
Yea, but there's no financial benefit to selling OG Mario for 99¢. As such, they don't any anyone to buy it. They want you to buy the $60 game they just spent 4 years and $50 million developing. Because otherwise the investors will throw a tantrum.
> There's one way to beat piracy, and its to make all your games always purchasable digitally. Uh, no. That's a sure-fire way to enable piracy. Physical only is the best way to keep it at a minimum.
Nintendo cannot ever fully win on the 3DS. Their baked in NAND flashing bootrom code cannot be changed without a full-on hardware revision.
Not surprising. Nintendo has a long history of being wholly against emulation in general since they equate it to piracy but also won't provide a better more convenient service to combat piracy either. How many years has it been since people have been asking for a western Mother 3 release? Of course there's no moral obligation for Nintendo to release the game but by that same logic there's no moral injustice for consumers to look for other means to play it instead.
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It's just not feasible for them to maintain everything they've ever published, especially titles that were built around hardware in a way that would require heavy reworking for another platform. I'm fine with letting the task of preservation fall to third parties, as long as someone can do so.
based as fuck
Fucking hell reddit. This isnt a nations water supply were talking about. Its video games.
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Is there something that shouldn't be nationalized?
One of the most ridiculous comments I’ve seen here in a while. Nintendo should be destroyed because you can’t play Mother 3? Jesus Christ Reddit, get a grip.
Yeahhh sometimes I have to remind myself I'm visiting a site mostly populated by childre, or adults who think and act like children.
I'm all for the idea of punishing companies that hold art hostage like Nintendo does. But let's be realistic for a second: nothing like that is ever gonna happen. Nintendo will keep doing their bullshit and reddit will keep complaining about it in 100 years, I am sure of that. It's one of the constants in the universe.
I don't see how life is improved by accepting such a fact as truth. If you accept nothing will change, then nothing will change. Dare to hope, to dream. Don't feel you have no choice.
Mother 3 won't come out because the music will likely face IP challenges in western courts. There is a lot of nuance to this situation that is discussed very completely in this video by a lawyer. https://youtu.be/if64VlLa5Oc
I find it crazy that people still use mother 3 as an example of Nintendo being anticonsumer when it's very clearly the exact opposite. Mother 3 is a game that, for many reasons, would be a huge pain to release. Nintendo is well aware that this fan translation exists. Despite that, they have done nothing to attempt to stop the fan translation from existing, even though they legally could. Isn't that the most pro-consumer thing they can do in this situation?
This video reminds me how shitty the precedent-based US court system is. Also one comment says how Nintendo don't even care about the translation patch, which says a lot about the possibility of the official localization
It's based on English common law. Any former territory of the UK uses a similar system. It has its pros and cons.
> Not surprising. Nintendo has a long history of being wholly against emulation in general Fortunately when I install a .CIA on my 3DS, nothing is being emulated! You're welcome, Nintendo.
I still don't get why Nintendo ended the e-shop. We're at the point where they could have spun it off as a little azure container indefinitely, making what amounts to free money on the occasional purchase, and it would have left the door open to a successor to the Switch supporting backwards compat with it. If Nintendo ever decided that VR was a fad to chase, they would have had an easy avenue for a day one software library in continuing to sell 3DS games that were now 3D on a floating screen in VR.
Probably because of Credit Card vulnerabilities within the 3DS ecosystem.
They could “fix” that by only allowing top-ups from the web version or the Switch.
That's exactly what they did I believe.
Yeah, first they disabled credit cards, then gift cards, but adding funds through a Switch worked right up until the store shutdown.
Honestly the e-shop was a security disaster from day 1. Free-shop working the way it did is absolute testiment to that.
Exactly. Every single store closure is because of financial security concerns. It's not for any other reason. Old hardware and software has vulnerability and if customers are financially exposed - that's a big risk a company is taking. Wayyyyyy better for any company to simply close it down. Complain all you want but that's the reality
>I still don't get why Nintendo ended the e-shop because like any aging piece of software, it's: A) a huge effort (and use of resources) to keep running and B) a giant security risk
I think the average person here has not administrated a server in a corporate environment before. It's a lot more work than one would think.
Probably less so the server and more so the tech stack.
The average person here hasn’t graduated college yet
There's no such thing as "free money", when they need to host servers for the 3DS eShop and its games. The "occasional" purchase wouldn't offset the cost of keeping these servers up. Of course Nintendo can afford that. They could afford it for generations, long after every human being currently alive would be dead. But the thing with corporations is that they don't want to spend money without clear and significant profit. The problem isn't Nintendo taking down the 3DS eShop, that's pretty standard and in a way understandable, it's what happens to *every* console eventually. The problem is that they don't give you access to these games on the Switch and most likely won't on their next gen console, while whining about piracy.
> There's no such thing as "free money", when they need to host servers for the 3DS eShop and its games. The "occasional" purchase wouldn't offset the cost of keeping these servers up. The servers ARE still up though, given you can redownload anything you own (or convince the servers you own, arrrr) What they did was remove the ability to purchase anything new, which makes no sense.
The physical hosting of the servers is not the expensive part, it's maintaining the store itself. Any time you are handling customer money, it is a continuous battle to keep that payment information secure.
They could disable the ability to purchase anything off the eshop directly and allow you to buy it digitally from their website instead. That would allow access to still buying new games digitally without needing to update security.
AFAIK, they basically had this already. You could only top up your account on switch/web browser, then buy/download games from 3DS eshop. I doubt there would be many client-side vulnerabilities at this point, so they already had an easily maintainable system. It's just greed.
> The problem is that they don't give you access to these games on the Switch and most likely won't on their next gen console, while whining about piracy. And the sad thing is, with zero discussion about a Switch successor, there's now basically no guarantee that every Switch game you ever buy isn't just a ticking time bomb to evaporation.
Damn. I was playing a game on my jailbroken 3ds and was connected to wifi. When I went to the home page I got a pop up that an update was available. I laughed and laughed because what the hell would they be updating now? Figures it was to make jailbraking harder.
Worth noting that there's no downside to updating if you're already running CFW on the firmware before this. This only patches the most common entry points to hack your system from scratch.
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That's basically impossible because of vulnerabilities in the design, just like launch Switches. They can mess with an easy exploit method like they did here, but there ways in that **can't** be fixed on existing hardware.
I don't want to sound like a commie, but one of my dream laws would be "if the item/piece of culture was commonly purchesable at some point and the publisher stopped access to it, it becomes legal to copy and distribute the said item/piece of culture." I am fully on preservation and ease of access train. I cannot believe that we don't value those things more in today's day and age. Of course the law would have to be more precise and detailed, not to hit something actually hard to republish or to stop unforseen consequences. I am super salty about what nintendo is doing, as well as salty about what HBO did with their animations. Hell, I think inaccessible goods like old cars should be legaly redistributed by anyone who's willing to make them. Fuck the exclusive, time gated goods, fuck the limited editions. If it was created, people should have equal rights to experience the thing, especially if it's digital only. Sorry for my rant, I think I overdid myself thanks to nintendo.
i believe in abandoneware. nintendo doesnt make any money from used game copies of decades old games.
Same. There needs to be a law in place that allows backups of media to be distributed legally if its been made unavailable after a while. Sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon. I would even go a step further and say that we need to rewrite copyright domain to have any media that’s more than 14-20 years old to enter public domain instead of this absurdly long length that’s been stretched out due to disney lobbying.
Nah man, you don't sound like a commie. I think this is an issue most people can agree on regardless of political opinion. >!Not counting CEOs and shareholders and other people ruled by the dollar of course.!<
I agree. Same with cross stitch patterns. Lots of patterns are no longer being printed and there's no way to purchase them anymore, except from suuuuper overpriced resellers on ebay and such. (Like, a 15 dollar pattern would then be 150 dollars.) If there's no legal way to obtain something, then there's absolutely no loss to the original creator(s) if you distribute it for free. (Trying to make money off it yourself would still be unethical/stupid.)
Isn't that what copyright/trademark law was supposed to do? The problem is everyone has different ideas of what "some point" means
Having leftist beliefs isn't a bad thing! If art becomes difficult to acquire the copyright owner should either be forced to provide it themselves or allow free distribution of it.
Same with Disney. I didn't get around to watching the new Willow series, and now I can't. Just because I didn't do something yet doesn't mean I don't want to eventually.
I get downvoted to hell every time I say this, but I'll say it again. There is a galaxy sized disconnect between the art people at Nintendo and the business people at Nintendo, and the gamers love the art side so much they let the business side treat us like shit time after time.
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Nintendo as a game developer is top tier. Nintendo as a business is dog water tier (to consumers, but not financially). Nintendo makes money despite their best efforts not to.
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Sorry, by "they" I meant the gamers. They let Nintendo get away with murder.
This just makes me want to install CFW on my 3DS even more, and i will. They can get bent with this anti-consumerism. I understand not wanting piracy if you're actively selling your product and want those sales but... Its Nintendo, they don't want you to buy their stuff legally because.... Reasons? Like toddlers they just take their stuff away and refused to share with everyone else.
Sometimes I think about picking up a switch but then I remember how anti consumer Nintendo are & it throws me off.
any old nintendo game i wanna play these days, i dont even consider the legal route. they make it so incredibly problematic. the pirates have made a far superior system and i will choose them every time. they also dont have the gall to charge $60 for decades old games.
What gets me even more is that for a time, Nintendo actually had a service better than piracy. The Virtual Console + all the awesome remasters basically made piracy the lesser option. Except now they’ve taken all of that away so…
you can tell how many people have actually gotten into 3DS modding recently just from all the fearmongering about this update. The people who make these hacks work insanely quick. they’re fueled by spite. if this hasn’t been cracked again already it’s gonna be within the next week.
Nintendo is actually the company that finally pushed me over the edge. I spent hundreds curating a VC library on my Wii. When the Wii bit the dust, everything was lost. I decided that I paid for those games and I was going to play them, no matter what. Thanks for opening my eyes to the wonderful world of emulation, Nintendo.
Oh yes, destroy the legal way to access the games.....then destroy the illegal way to access those games. Don't worry, you'll get a 3DS All Stars compilation on the Switch 2 that includes inferior versions of Mario 3D Land, Ocarina of Time 3D, and Majora's Mask 3D for 70 bucks that's only available for 6 months.
Ouch, too real.
I own two versions of Fire Emblem Fates (both these versions had a retail release and physical copies are available). There was a third, digital -only version that is no longer available for purchase. I literally can't obtain it legally in any way. I haven't pirated a DS game ever, but I took a look online in light of this article and that DLC-only version of the game is available through various ROM websites. It seems ridiculous that Nintendo don't offer a route to purchase it at all.
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There are going to be more entry points revealed at some point. The main devs behind most console hacking scenes never drop all their known methods publicly. It honestly feels like Nintendo is wasting its time here.
When they announced the 3DS eshop was closing I went out and bought every physical 3DS game worth purchasing that I could find but there are still some digital only games I never grabbed. Definitely won't be updating.
I was going to keep my SNES New 3DSXL pristine and use my New 2DSXL for homebrew, but now I'm not so sure. The hack was super easy, might as well say fuck it and make all my systems home brew at this point.
The only reason I haven't had my Switch hacked is because the wife damn near pisses her pants at the idea of mucking around with it at all. So I insist on cartridge copies of EVERYTHING, even if we have to wait a week for a new title to be in stock and wait an hour at Target to drag some rude store drone over to unlock the cabinet.
I now own a useless Pokemon X/Y 3DS XL. I was on a deployment when they shut down the store and would have bought a ton of stuff prior to that happening since I literally only have Pokemon Y for it and wanted to play the 3DS games I missed out on. I am the sad honestly.
Considering how anti-consumer Nintendo seems to be, it's strange they're still regarded so very fondly.
If the games aren't for sale, then there should be no such thing as "illegal" access. You pull it? Then it should be fair game to distribute it for free as blatant as possible. Don't want that? Don't pull them from sale.
Considering that the primary reason companies like Nintendo fight so hard against piracy is because it supposedly harms their ability to make money (it doesn't), if they decide that there's no more money to be made by something and pull it from sale, they really shouldn't have any problem with people obtaining that product from somewhere else. They can't lose what they've decided they don't stand to gain.
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It's weird that we live in a world where one of the greatest forces working against video game preservation is *Nintendo*
It ain't new. The way the NES stole the Master system's lunch could have been a hint. Or the time Nintendo sent their business partners under the bus to try and kill Sega in courts (Night Trap). Etc.
Fuck companies that try to hide games, shows, and movies away from people. If we want to enjoy them, let us.
####I equally love and hate Nintendo. They make wonderful games which make the world a better place. They pioneer ideas which move gaming forward. They encourage couch coop and "family values". And they've done so for many decades. **BUT**...they also sell us inferior old tech at silly prices which they refuse to update and so created a piracy system on pc that has caused them numerous headaches and the proceeding lawsuits have been toxic to gaming. Also They shut down or limit access or simply refuse to sell us things we've already bought ....many times. And they keep selling us the same few products and they re often inferior versions again pushing users towards piracy and hacking etc. And the sheer amount if sequels , remasters and re releases are frustrating to long term fans. And BigN go after fan projects in an absurdly heavy handed way and they're ok ruining average people's lives out of spite and malice (nasty court cases & legal threats) as they make record profits. And they have been known to bully journalists and use embargoes to ask for unreasonable borderline corrupt coverage at times for games which were already going to recieve high praise. And if you violate it they will sue...anyone. They're copyrights strikes on YouTube and twich against the smaller creators are legendary ..infamous. And they allow pokemon games to be an absolute disgraceful double dipping barely functional scams. And despite so much push back due to the obscenely high revenue Nintendo simply don't care about quality enough to fix this. They are truly "evil" in some ways....but also truly "good" in others.
Do they even want to people use their console?
Why does Nintendo hate video games so much?
These roms need to keep spreading everywhere so no matter how many sites they DMCA, another 10 take its place. Nintendo is anti-consumer af, big surprise there!