I find it funny how some people are surprised over this even though the online for the DS and Wii were taken down like 8 years after launch lmao. It was inevitable if anything, in fact I was expecting them to cut the cord sooner due to the Switch's massive success.
Still, RIP.
The Wii and DS closed because of the GameSpy infrastructure that was the one hosting those systems' servers was going down, because the entire company was shutting down entirely. Nintendo would still have turned off the online functions of both at some point it is inevitable, but not as soon as they did because of GameSpy dying.
This, on the other hand... It's entirely because they want to. Pretty much all these games work on a P2P so it's the players themselves hosting the games, it really doesn't take much money to run from what I understand.
I can't say much about WIi U as I never had one, but seeing the 3DS lose this is pretty sad, and it will get much worse on more modern systems, absolutely crippling them instead of just being sad. I personally fear of what will happen to Monster Hunter XX and its crossplay with Switch.
If anyone wants to actually do something about this, you could try to collect connection data from your 3DS games with HokakuCTR so more games can be preserved and made online with Pretendo in the future.
Edit: I just found out that IGN was actually one of the things to blame for GameSpy demise. They merged with GameSpy and then divided the company in two, sold part of it to a freemium mobile company that then started to screw it up, and by 2014 just shot everything down. The part that IGN kept then was shot down too after Ziff Davis bought IGN.
...Isn't it great? I keep getting surprised by how much damage IGN has done throught its history.
If nothing else this little research served to refresh the importance of GameSpy in the history online gaming, they go back a long way.
I'm sorry, but can you explain this a bit further? I can say that for games for Xbox and Sony (and all those mobile games), but for anything Nintendo, at least it has some worth.
However, NFTs are just useless jpegs that have the cost of a museum
Modern gaming is by and large just digital. You don't own anything, you have, at most, a permit that gives you the right to just play whatever software you paid for, at least until they decide you no longer can't, but you don't own your copy of the game.
Most games' physical releases no longer work by themselves. They require to be either partially or fully downloaded from the digital store. They're no good by themselves like, I don't know, a Wii or PlayStation 1 disc.
And with updates, algonside the amazing combo of games mostly coming out unfinished and buggy, whatever data is in your physical media is most probably outdated.
In fact, modern physical media is worse than digital, because you not only depend exactly as much on digital media as with games bought from digital stores, you're also forced to use the disc as physical DRM, to control that you have your physical copy still. The only positive I can think of is you're able to sell it if you don't want it anymore, but... That's kind of a poor good point to me, "You can get rid of it!" shouldn't be a selling point.
The comment about NFTs I imagine is because you dont' own anything either. At most you have the dubious acknowledgement that you paid for a link to whatever the NFT is supposed to be. You don't own the link, it's... rather muddy, honestly. It's like you paid to say you have bragging rights to have it associated with you. But if that link goes dead, you also lose access to whatever it had. In both cases, you own nothing, end up with nothing.
Laws are made by dinosaurs that don't understand the world we're living in, and corporations that love to crush people beneath them, so rights for digital goods are still... Well, precarious to say the least. People should start moving so these laws change, because going forward they're going to have less and less rights.
...But looking at the gaming community, it's more convenient to shrug their shoulders and just... stand there.
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