Poll of the Day > RIP 3DS online

(+) Yeah! (+)

End of an era. I knew thee well

What really bothers me is that there's no real reason for it. You just know that the multibillion dollar company could have kept the network online. It's like they're purposely trying to make the 3DS obsolete. I have to wonder if they're trying to force us into the switch era - and I know I'm beating a dead horse by now, but I really fucking hate the switch. Losing the eshop was bad enough, so now losing online altogether feels like a real punch in the gut.
For pokemon gen4 games people were able to reconnect to online servers by using a mobile hotspot or unsecured modem with the DNS settings available in the 3DS. I hear that fanserevrs like this are in the making for other games, too. My hope is just that we can do that without needing to softmod our consoles because it makes me anxious, especially now that these are retro consoles. I just don't want to fuck anything up.

Anyway, what were your favorite things to do online with the 3DS? Do you think you'll get fanservers for your favorite games?

Yeah fans host custom servers basically for free so that kind of proves that idea. It's not like 4000 people are playing Mario Kart 3DS at any time.

My guess is that
A) what you said is true, or
B) the AWS service Nintendo bought is so overpriced that it actually matters and Nintendo CEOs don't understand that they could do it for less money

They could just have one single instance of a legacy server that hosts all old game servers on the same machine and rely on not that many people using it at once.

Kid Icarus was insanely fun, but it's really hard to play the way you could when it came out.

I can kind of understand not maintaining servers for online play, since as much as Nintendo could afford to keep them up, that's still a cost with no chance of a return, but the deaths of the eshops really bug me. The 3DS and WiiU eshops already used an account service that was integrated with the Switch's, such that there's absolutely no reason they couldn't just use one universal shop server for all of their platforms and keep them supported indefinitely. The only cost to keep those digital titles up would be storage space (any direct costs incurred by downloading games would be covered by the games' costs), and not only is storage space pretty cheap, they're already paying to store copies of all of these games. The only reason to shut the stores down is to make it easier to sell the same games again on later systems, with fewer options for interested consumers to buy an old system and get the games for less.

I've recently heard about something called "Pretendo" that's become relevant to this topic, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

I used to love getting Streetpasses and playing the Streetpass games, but after a certain point it was very rare to find anyone else carrying a 3DS, even at conventions. (And the rate was already much lower than in Japan where it was much more common.)

I had good memories with Swapnote, before they got rid of the ability to share notes. I made a whole month of Smash Bros. Brawl memes in 3D, before Smash 4 came out (made more annoying by the fact that I had to send my 3DS in for repairs in the middle of it).

I never really played any games online, but I got a lot of use out of my system. I actually used 3DS Sound as my music player for a long time, until I finally started using my phone.

Lots of great memories with various games and apps; Badge Arcade, 3DS Video (Dinosaur Office and BearShark were awesome), Ambassador games; 3DS was the first (and probably last) system that I bought at launch.

Yellow posted...

B) the AWS service Nintendo bought is so overpriced that it actually matters and Nintendo CEOs don't understand that they could do it for less money

One of the biggest lies that Amazon and other cloud services have perpetuated is that it is somehow easier to have AWS servers than to just maintain your own.

Like, sure, if you are starting out, it is convenient instead of trying to host your own infrastructure. But once you make any kind of money and actually budget out the costs, you are paying way more than you need to. Like in the old days if you needed a server for something and you didn't have a server farm, then you just put it on someone's desk, or kept it in a closet. My old company had a room that wasn't convenient enough to add cubes or an office in, so they just threw a few dozen machines in there and dubbed it a "server room". Add some window air conditioning units and you have a server room for only a few thousand dollars, and the upkeep is way cheaper then you would get from AWS.

Dikitain posted...

My old company had a room that wasn't convenient enough to add cubes or an office in, so they just threw a few dozen machines in there and dubbed it a "server room". Add some window air conditioning units and you have a server room for only a few thousand dollars, and the upkeep is way cheaper then you would get from AWS.

I'm an on-prem advocate but you can't just throw out "a few thousand dollars" and pretend that's the entirety of the TCO. Just skills alone you're going to need storage/backup specialists, vendor management responsibilities, hardware maintenance, monitoring, the list is long.