Source about the offline app thing: https://faq.ac-pocketcamp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36353725150489-What-is-the-paid-version-of-the-app#
They will turn off the live service and make it work offline?
I don’t understand. Industry bootlickers told me it was impossible and would cost billions to implement, hurting small indie studios the most. Yet, Nintendo does it voluntarily with seemingly no difficulties.
Nintendo doing something good consumer-wise for once and not being a dick? I’m conflicted.
I would argue Nintendo does do a lot of pro-consumer stuff. Like making actually good games. It’s just their anti-consumer stuff is either so bad or just plain weird that we just scratch our heads and think Nintendo is going off the deep end. Still trying to avoid buying much Nintendo going forward.
Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.
You really have no idea how intellectual property works do you? The reason they’ve gone after emulation and rom hosting sites is pretty obvious, they have to protect their IP.
Why they’ve waited so long only to do it now? I honestly don’t have an answer for you on that one, but if I were to guess it’s because retro gaming has been going through somewhat of a renaissance as of late due to shitty AAA games and indie devs gaining so much popularity.
The bottom line is Nintendo lost the emulation battle once, and they don’t want to lose a second time. They’re more experienced and understand the risks of letting emulation replace services like Nintendo switch online, and so do publishers that own intellectual property from retro consoles. It sucks, but that’s corporate life, and you can’t really get around it without jumping through hoops or doing something illegal.
Your comment is very out of place as a response to mine, but since you brought all this up:
I don’t begrudge Nintendo for getting ROM sites shut down. I begrudge them for shutting them down without also making their games legally available for purchase where their customers want to play them. Those old games aren’t even legally available for purchase at all, because they want to just rent them to you forever, which is an enormous dick move. Then they further that with the dick move of trying to remove the place where we get those games the way we’d like to enjoy them, and getting them that way is a better experience than using their official solution.
So assuming you didn’t get lost and you actually meant to respond to my comment, I can’t consider them pro consumer when they’re not doing what’s in the consumer’s best interests.
Nintendo refuse to ever be predictable
Don’t worry they’ll do a C&D sometime soon to make up for it
Nintendo might be seeing the writing on the wall and looking to see how much profit they can make with this. If it goes well, we might see more of it. Corporations hate regulation and sometimes try and head it off long before it is coming.
i mean iirc capcom already had done something similar beforehand with megaman x dive
You don’t get it bro, Nintendo decimated half of their net worth pulling off this miracle!!! ^^^/ ^^^s
Hi, industry bootlicker here! Nintendo is listening to their consumers. I was told corporations are evil and won’t listen to consumers and must be forced to do things by law. I much prefer consumers remain vocal about their wants because corporations do indeed listen. No government intervention required. I worry government rules could cause unintended problems that don’t benefit anybody.
“A single company does this and while the other 99 won’t, saying pretty please will certainly work. See? No intervention required!”
Bootlicker indeed.
Who are the 99 other companies? Which games have they taken away?
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Category:Unplayable_games
And that’s only PC games.
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
Taking away a game you bought because the game was intentionally made to rely on a server is always scummy behavior. That’s the whole point.
If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
With the possible exception of games that were canceled, those are all examples of super scummy nonsense.
Oh no! Not Microsoft Bingo! That’s a list of D list games nobody has ever heard of that all shutdown years ago. I don’t think the world would be a better place if the devs of Radical Heights, a free to play arena shooter that was launched and shutdown a month later in 2018 were forced to give their game out to everyone for free after.
Hello, sole arbiter of a game’s worth.
Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.
You didn’t create those games. Games are products people work to produce. Radical Heights was a free to play game that was shutdown in a month. What would you force them to do? Release their server code for free so anybody can run a Radical Heights server that people can connect to and play? So a whole bunch of people who never gave the developers a cent have the right to demand the game be given to them simply because it existed for 1 month?
This is the future StopKillingGames wants us to live in.
This is… kind of weird, no? Like why would they pull the plug on an app that keeps the microtransaction money rolling?
I have to imagine the game is no longer making enough money through MTX to staff a dev team anymore.
This seems like a pretty good way to end a live service game, though. This way your game doesn’t just disappear into the ether completely.
That was the most logical answer I came up too. Its just crazy to do the right thing and make if work offline instead of just binning it like so many other live service games.
I mean, I never paid for it but I did the math many years ago, to explain predatory microtransactions, and found out that for a chance - a perfect rolled no dupes chance - it’d be cheaper to buy a 2DS and a physical copy of new leaf.
Like, there’s only so many times they can release a set or do a palette swap for a ‘new’ collection.
I recall Nintendo claiming they wanted to move away from mobile again a while ago but I didn‘t really believe it back then and I‘m still skeptical now. They‘ve received more criticism for their predatory mobile games lately so maybe that got something to do with it or it‘s simply not making enough money anymore to bother with it and they‘d rather get the devs working on something else.
nintendo and DeNA crates a joint venture team last year, so i highly doubt theyre pulling out of mobile, theyre just relying less on it.
I always wondered this myself.
I think I remember reading a while ago that apps need to be updated occasionally to comply with .apk guidelines.
This is presumably dependant on which permissions the .apk requests. So a simple calculator app wouldn’t need to be updated, but the calculator plus app, which tracks my blood pressure, how many glasses of water I’ve drank, and my semen count, would need to be updated occasionally to comply with Google’s privacy policies.
But I’m not an app developer, so don’t trust me on a whim.
I see your post has a few upvotes. Therefore, I will trust you implicitly on this matter. Thank you!
Maybe Switch 2 will be announced around than with a new AC as a launch title?
What is the game like? Basically, this is the first time I’ve heard of it.
It’s a simplified version of animal crossing for mobile, with some microtransactions to speed things up. I played it on release and it’s pretty decent.
Ah, nothing to write home about. Thanks.
