LogFAQs > #977062329

dragon504 posted...

If Nintendo doesn't get their shit together with online with their next console, I'm just going to skip them from now on.

You say that like this is an accident. Nintendo's not exactly the most competent when it comes to online stuff, but they know enough to be able to maintain an consolidated eShop that would last forever if they wanted to. That, however, would prevent them from selling remakes or ports of games they've previously discontinued, while providing very little in terms of additional revenue from people buying the older stuff. This is quite deliberate, and I'll be very surprised if the Switch's eShop and servers don't start shutting down by 2030 (assuming we see a successor in the next year or two).

Personally, I think copyright law should be amended to formally identify abandonware by making any media that hasn't been officially for sale for more than a couple years automatically pass into public domain. In the age of all-physical media, that would have been unthinkable, but digital distribution means the only cost to keep any given work available for sale is the storage cost (which is already being spent in the vast majority of cases because copies are being kept). That means the only reason for old media to be removed from sale is if the publisher doesn't want to sell it anymore, and if the publisher doesn't want to sell it anymore, there's no harm in pirating it. But that would require copyright law to A) Realize that it's not the 19th century anymore, and B) Care about consumers and artistic preservation more than corporate profits, and neither of those are overly likely.