The good news is that it looks like this new patch won't affect anyone who always has Luma3DS custom firmware installed, and there are other methods for hacking your 3DS, but they're a lot more convoluted. The bannerbomb3 method was super easy and essentially foolproof.
Really shitty of Nintendo to sunset the console and then close the door behind them on the way out. Homebrew communities have been doing their damnedest to keep the 3DS (and its extensive library) alive... but that's Nintendo for ya.
> Really shitty of Nintendo to sunset the console and then close the door behind them on the way out.
The age of abandonware[0] is over. The promise of future earnings from streaming/downloads means all major content producers will lock down even out-of-print works, like consoles from previous generations.
This is just another casualty of the fight we were having 20 years ago, re: copyright. We lost. It's over.
I feel like it probably costs them very little to keep every title listed for sale. They could be making revenue from it. Probably not as much as when the stuff was new, but something.
I guess by cutting off supply of the old stuff, though, they can do re-releases and re-masters charging somewhat similar to the price of a new game, or get people to pay a monthly subscription fee for access.
Keeping stuff for sale can be expensive because of licensed assets. Licensed music has taken games down before and it will again. I don't know the publisher contracts Nintendo signs, but if there's a time duration in the contract, that may open up a very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem.
That said, I 100% believe this is just a way for them to make sure you can't mod second hand 3DS consoles in five years time when they bring 3DS re-releases to the Switch.
> Very expensive "deal with keeping track of which developers relicensed their games" problem.
There is tons of licensing issues in the gaming industry under the surface that causes problems all over the place. An extreme example would be Sega's mistakes with Sonic.
Sonic 3, despite not having him in the credits, contains some works by Michael Jackson. That has complicated things tremendously in re-releases, so much so, that Sega has re-released that game far less than Sonic 1, 2, and CD. Sonic Origins, the latest re-release, contains redone music from prototypes rather than solve the licensing quagmire.
But that's not the only licensing quagmire. Guess why the Sonic movies don't have almost any soundtracks or sound effects from the game? According to the Directors, it wasn't a thematic choice, but a legal one. Sonic CD's re-release on smartphones had a similar issue with the opening scene having the vocals removed, because they were from an obscure band that went through a series of legal changes, acquisitions, member changes... This is actually a big problem with re-releases in general. Hunting down who actually owns the rights to a series can be a mess when acquisitions are involved; and you'd better hope the new owners at the end of the road are reasonable and not eager for a quick buck.
And to top it all off, just look up the Kenneth W. Penders story, which single-handedly took advantage of Sega's lax copyright protectionism to "steal" almost 200 characters right from under Sega's feet. Nintendo is no doubt looking at that, and the Sonic music issues, and thinking... man, this is why we protect.
Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 haven't been available on digital marketplaces for a while because both games include real historical footage that Konami no longer has the rights to use. (Off the top of my head, MGS3 used clips of some nuclear weapons tests, for example.)
Additionally, the Metal Gear Solid Main Theme is reportedly not available anymore because of debious copyright battles with a russian composer, which led to MGS4 having the Love Theme instead.
> Wouldn't this be a work of the federal government and in the public domain?
Not necessarily
EDIT: This got prematurely sent and thus was overly terse: contractors and other private parties connected to government test may have been permitted to take photos, and those (even within the scope of work of a government contract) may be subject to copyright. (Also, its theoretically possible that some tests were photographed by people with no formal connection to the test, though the remote locations and lack of announced times make that challenging.)
Have people building games today that use works under license learned this lesson and purchased perpetual licenses, or are they still trying to save money by purchasing narrow licenses that don't work for re-releases or remakes or similar?
If the agency won't offer a perpetual license at a reasonable price, their content shouldn't be included in the game. It's inexcusable that games are still being removed from sale in a medium where the cost of manufacturing a copy is 0 because the makers of the game signed a bad contract on some minor piece of content in the game and don't want to be bothered removing it.
You agree, I agree, but try telling that to the C-level exec who really wants to use "Stressed Out" in part of the game.
If they ARE using licensed things that are non-perpetual, they should arrange for some way to remove them, if possible.
And it sometimes is impossible, the "Poker Night at the Inventory" games are no longer available because the character licenses expired, and they'd be nothing without them.
Its not just an issue of perpetual duration, but the covered media (e.g., when it comes to use in movies), and paying the necessary premium when a future movie is a distant low probability event may not make sense for game publishers.
> Guess why the Sonic movies don't have almost any soundtracks or sound effects from the game? According to the Directors, it wasn't a thematic choice, but a legal one.
Why is this a thing? I've heard of game studios having a movie studio make a movie, but then not allow them to use certain elements from the game. It ruins the movie, IMO, and I've never understood why game studios knee-cap movie adaptations like that.
On the last point, I looked it up and it's an interesting story but it looks like Archie comics is the main culprit behind the lax protection although you could say SEGA is also at fault. Nevertheless, I kind of feel like Mr. Penders won one for the little guy.
If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars.
I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever.
> If they had kept Super Mario 64 and/or Super Mario Sunshine and/or Super Mario Galaxy available for sale since their consoles were discontinued, Nintendo wouldn’t have sold 9 million+ copies of Super Mario 3D All Stars.
I think they would have. those games are all available on the 2nd hand market easily. I don't mind paying for remasters of games I already own for older hardware, anyway, because remasters are not a big expense for me and by buying remasters I send my vote that I want remasters.
I mean, it's Nintendo's IP. they can do what they want. I think the way they do things is very short-sighted, though.
3D All Stars has some remastering, but other parts are worse than the original - SM64 doesn't emulate N64 texture mapping properly, making it too blurry, and Sunshine doesn't emulate floating-point properly, leading to physics glitches.
I'm not sure I follow this. afaik this compilation puts it on Switch, since you previously needed an N64, plus Wii and/or GameCube to play the originals. I guess sm64 was available on Wii and 3ds too. Is the claim that they need to de-list those from Wii stores to get people to buy on switch? Was it available on other means for Switch before?
I think a new port requiring a new purchase seems fair, and there's a target market in that one for those who missed those prior generation of games, or who want it on the switch hardware.
> I bet they make more from re-releasing ports of “vault” titles than they would keeping them for sale forever.
Believe me; movie studios and game companies have re-releases down to a science. Disney (arguably) perfected it first with their "Disney Vault" scheme. It increases the value to buyers when it's available for sale; and it also helps the company if there is little new content to offer for the year.
I'm surprised so few people put together that Super Mario 3D All-Stars is actually Nintendo perfectly following the Disney Vault script.
Disney themselves have abandoned the 'Vault' strategy after deciding that continuous sales were more profitable, which probably has something to do with people not recognizing it and/or thinking it's absurd to see in this day and age.
I'm not so sure it would even pay for itself to continue running at some point. It's not like you can just pay to keep the servers running. It's connected to the internet and surely running on a software stack with dependencies that will have CVEs, or language version lose LTS, libraries dropped for support, etc. and need upkeep. How much money in sales could the Wii Shop channel have been pulling in by the time they shut it down? I can't imagine much.
Firstly, I think you're vastly overestimating these costs. Server resources are pretty cheap. They could probably overlap with online infrastructure of more recent hardware. They probably could also budget a small amount of the dev time to fixing a few bugs with extremely low priority, only the most high severity items prioritized beneath servicing modern stuff.
Second, AFAIK they are running those servers right now with no revenue. They blocked new purchases, but you can still re-download existing purchases. I googled around and it seems like that's still the case. I do not know how long they will maintain that.
You also have the customer support overhead. People will demand refunds. They will claim the purchase doesn’t work on their broken hardware. There will be fraud where people use the service to test stolen credit card.
There is also the staffing element. Maybe the engineers or product people are interested in resourcing a product with no career growth.
There is a hefty on-going maintenance cost for these stores.
There was that recent Youtuber that spent a few tens of thousands of dollars on every eShop title before they shut it down, so they made at least that much, but on the other hand, it’s all archived now…
it would cost them very little to keep things online but very little is too much, sometimes.
I would GLADLY pay Nintendo for every ROM I want but do not have, if they would only take my money and sell it.
they choose not to sell. so I feel it is, at a minimum, borderline ok to pirate things that aren't sold anymore. I would give my money, but these companies will not take it.
this is where music downloads were in 2002 or so. maybe a bit later. people were pirating like crazy and record companies would not give users what they wanted: the ability to listen to what they wanted where they wanted.
most pirates (those who don't consider piracy itself a hobby, anyway) don't really want to pirate; they want to play a game, or hear a song, or watch a TV show or movie when they want. They want on-demand access to the things they enjoy. they will gladly pay if only the copyright owners would accept the money, but often they won't.
so the users take things into their own hands. I'm ok with it. but I'm no one and no media company will ever listen to me so whatever.
It remains to be seen whether the soon to generationally churn will succeed in foisting their ways on the yet to exist.
Having a hard time believing a deluge of generative AI content will keep Mickey Mouse worth anything; even if the AI content cannot be copyrighted why would users pay for Mickey Mouse?
This will remain to be seen for a decent amount of time. Generative AI is pretty far from making games as good as the new Zelda without a lot of human work involved (hopefully in the short term we see an indie renaissance).
Given the results I’m seeing generating individual meshes, textures for characters, less than 10 years and everyone will be generating their own stash of Pokémon to randomly distribute around a digital world.
Even with the ornate stable diffusion, mid journey, and all the rest I use, it’s far easier to setup than a Linux project was 10-15 years ago.
A few more iterations on nerfs and the proper porcelain is all it seems like we’re waiting on to me.
Except piracy is pretty awesome and works better than the paid alternatives in many cases. It’s just a matter of perspective who is winning and where they are winning.
If you don't mind spending around $10 USD, hacking an updated 3DS is simple if you get an ntrboot-compatible flashcart [1] and a small magnet. At the moment, Ace3DS X flashcarts are available on AliExpress and work well.
If the supply of compatible flashcarts ever dries up, it will definitely get harder, though hopefully there will be more software exploits discovered by then.
> The usage of this exploit, regardless of the flashing method, requires access to a small magnet if the target device is of a folding style (any 3DS family system that is not the old 2DS with a sleep switch). This is because the exploit requires your device to enter sleep mode while still having access to the buttons.
That's part of a factory recovery mechanism, basically. The system looks for Start+Select+X+Power and the magnet to be detected and it'll immediately fail over to booting from the DS slot.
In the presentation made when it was discovered[0] they said: “The NTR cartridge was likely meant to be used for either the factory setup or as a means of recovering bricked NANDs. However, we'll never know for sure.”
hah! now I remember what that tiny magnetic that's on one of my toolboxes is! Been looking at it for years every time I go to take something out wondering what it was for
> If the supply of compatible flashcarts ever dries up, it will definitely get harder, though hopefully there will be more software exploits discovered by then.
another area of research is many flashcarts are actually obfuscation around FPGA and integrated flash perhaps if there was more interest a design could be produced in the spirit of open-hardware sans Nintendo property.
I never understood why they harshly crack down on homebrew. Pirated games sure, but homebrew? Maybe they dont want parents finding their kids downloaded some R-rated homebrew content?
Jailbreak to running homebrew is often used as excuse to running "copy". To avoid this, allow homebrew officially like Xbox is a way, but maybe Nintendo think it's not their way and it need much internal work cost unless it's Microsoft (the development tools and security company).
I knew someone who was working on something that was meant to stop piracy over at Microsoft many moons ago. Microsoft realized its not their battle to fight, besides most of the pirated software isn't even theirs.
What you're saying makes some sense to me, but I also don't think you can ever truly stop jail-breaking, unless you guarantee the end user is surveilled at all times and can deploy local law enforcement on them the moment they try anything suspicious, even when the device is turned off... Like it would be insanity levels.
Xbox haven't be jailbroken since Xbox One (prev gen, first homebrew support, with virtualization protection tech), so their track record is pretty good. Perfect jailbreak prevention is impossible, but MS does pretty well.
I had no idea, I gave up on consoles and became a PC gamer, I did buy a Switch because I wanted something handheld, but I'll probably get something like the Steamdeck in the future (though I hope it would be the Steamdeck v2).
I found a video that outlines how and why this is:
tl;dr Microsoft provided incentives for people not to even bother trying to jailbreak the console, especially allowing people to buy developer mode for $20, which allows running homebrew applications including console emulators (which had I known sooner, I would have bought an Xbox One ages back so I can emulate old games I have around the house, but dont want to wire up the various consoles I've got, its nicer to just have the one console).
I don't think fixing RCEs in a network connected home consumer device is a shitty thing to do. A lot of people might say it's actually pretty responsible.
From what I can tell it’s not remote code execution as you need to copy files to and from your SD card. This only affects people who want to get full access to their own devices
This is correct. If anyone's curious, here's a page from a 3DS CFW installation guide that explains how the Bannerbomb3 exploit comes into play: https://3ds.hacks.guide/bannerbomb3.html
Really shitty of Nintendo to sunset the console and then close the door behind them on the way out. Homebrew communities have been doing their damnedest to keep the 3DS (and its extensive library) alive... but that's Nintendo for ya.