Nintendo has confirmed that online access for the 3DS and Wii U will be shuttering early next year, meaning most games and services making use of this functionality on the platform will cease to operate. This isn’t just individual servers being switched off, Nintendo aims to bring the hammer down on everything. When combined with the obliteration of both platforms’ digital storefronts, it sure feels like these two consoles - 12 and 11 years old, respectively - are set to become useless hunks of plastic before we know it.All those games, all those memories, no longer accessible because of what?

I appreciate the company being upfront about its plans and giving us more than half a year to revisit beloved games like Splatoon and Animal Crossing: New Leaf, but the reactions in the community have been of mourning and contempt. People are angry that, so soon after closing off its digital storefronts, Nintendo is doubling down on the dilution of its own history. Thousands of classic games and forgotten gems disappeared with the closure of the storefronts, and now things are getting worse. So much hard work poured down the drain because time has deemed it irrelevant. I get it, I really do, but it sucks that those at the top aren’t willing to understand the cultural significance of what they’re so happy to throw away. There’s no getting it back, and nobody seems to care.

Related

WarioWare Move It! Preview - The Long Awaited Successor To Smooth Moves

Assume your form and jump into hundreds of cute new microgames.

Posts

Video games have a big problem with preservation, and the core reason is capitalism. I have always viewed gaming as being shackled by its own nostalgia. Much like the worlds of film and television, we exist in a landscape of sequels, reboots, and fan service where the most money is made by appealing to the lowest common denominator or repacking what we already know into the illusion of something new.

As consumers, we also want to be constantly engaging with the next big thing, and so the corporations that control the biggest releases are bound to operate by those demands and shape the market into a homogenous monolith that is desperate to move forward even if it means disrespecting the past that made it possible in the first place. Look at Call of Duty, whose entire multiplayer offering this year is made up of remastered maps from an entry which came out almost 15 years ago. It is taking us for the ride, but the majority of people don’t mind paying the entry fee, so why would they do anything different?

You’d think an industry so obsessed and reliant on the past to maintain its own relevance would do a better job of preserving it. Source codes are lost, digital releases are wiped out, and ageing hardware alongside physical scarcity makes it harder and harder to preserve a game that came out a single decade ago, let alone several. There is no incentive for huge companies to care about this when said games can be repackaged and resold for additional profits either, and they’d rather remodel the past into something more palatable for modern sensibilities instead of acknowledging what games used to be like. It’s a vicious, ignorant cycle perpetuated by a complacency most of us show towards it. It’s only going to get a lot worse.

Unless you’re holding a physical disc in your hand, you technically don’t own any digital games you paid money for. You’re coughing up dough for the licence, which companies have the right to revoke within a certain time period depending on terms and conditions. Even then, the disc might not be enough - just look at Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. We’ve been playing into their hands all this time, and as live-service games and digital distribution become the status quo, we’re only going to see more and more hard work phased out to ensure user retention and maximum profits. The bubble is set to burst, but that isn’t likely to change the destination.

Wii U and 3DS having their digital storefronts and online services brought to a close isn’t the end of this unfortunate path we’re walking down, even if it’s coming much earlier than any of us expected. As new platforms, ecosystems and business models are introduced the past is bound to be cast aside again and again if there’s no way to abuse it for profits. With the amount of software required to run modern consoles, it’s only a matter of time before companies straight up brick old hardware rather than let players continue playing with their old physical collections.

Unless it’s a remaster at full price or a remake that forsakes the original, it feels like many games are going to be lost to history because the companies behind them fail to see the artistic value all of them carry. They deserve to be preserved, but none of us are in the position to achieve this when it comes to digital experiences. Nothing will change unless everything does, and right now I don’t see a way to make that happen.

Next: 2023 Has Been A Horrible Year For Gaming