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Nintendo to Discontinue Online Play for Wii and DS

posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Saturday March 01 2014, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the thank-you-mario-but-wireless-connectivity-is-in-another-console dept.

GungnirSniper writes:

"Nintendo has announced the discontinuation of their Wi-Fi Connection Service for the Wii, DS, and DSi systems. Over 400 titles are affected, including Mario Kart Wii. Engadget reports that the services that will keep working on the DS after May include the DSi Shop, DS Browser, and DSi Browser, while the Wii will keep Netflix, Hulu, Wii Shop Channel, Internet Channel, Pay & Play, and YouTube.

Could the slow sales of the Wii U be motivating this move? Will casual gamers be instead put off by this, and hurt the company's future sales?"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Debvgger on Saturday March 01 2014, @11:17AM

    by Debvgger (545) on Saturday March 01 2014, @11:17AM (#9058)

    Thank you for reminding me why I'm switching to PC gaming.

    Well, it is also because I'm developing stuff with the Rift and that's clearly the future for gaming :-)

    Tragedy here is, most gamers were deterred from gaming on Nintendo systems because their online support was so weak/weird.

    Also, from a developer's point of view, Nintendo policies on online stuff were so fucking retarded. The last 3DS game I worked on was rejected a ton of times at Nintendo's Lotcheck because we were trying to read stuff from the server (less than 1kb of data) more than the allowed 20 or 25 times PER FIVE MINUTES. Yeah, we needed about 20kb per five minutes and that was TOO FUCKING MUCH. We joked they were using unsold consoles to run the service and that's why it was needed to limit the number of connections. Maybe we were right. Maybe their servers were Beta.

    I wonder if they will reimburse me the extra 600$ the DS dev kit cost with Wifi (yes, you had to buy it as an *expensive* option). Although that was nothing compared with the many hours trying to make it work. I have never seen C code with so many goto statements in my whole life.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:07PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:07PM (#9068) Journal
    PC gaming doesn't necessarily help you avoid this. If you're buying a game where the online component is important, then it should have either complete peer-to-peer support, so you can play against friends without needing a central server, or the server software should be available so other people can host it once the original company stops making money from it. I played Quake I online many years after iD stopped caring about it, for example. I largely stopped buying online games once they started requiring you to use the company's servers.
    --
    sudo mod me up

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Debvgger on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:27PM

      by Debvgger (545) on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:27PM (#9073)

      Yes, that was what I was referring to with PC gaming: To at least have the option to not to use the developer, publisher or whoever else servers if you don't want to. Anything else means soon or later the game is not going to give enough money to maintain a server and die.

      This topic burns me so hard I maybe wrote too fast...