Forum - View topicNintendo Shuts Down Wii Shop Channel for Wii Console in January 2019
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2478 Location: United States |
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Whoa! I sure am glad I caught this news! I better get some games I've been wanting to get off the Wii's VC (Like Pokemon Puzzle League and Harvest Moon: My Little Shop). I already got Secret of Mana. But...can we even send those games to the Wii U? Last I checked, they're not available on the Wii U's eshop, so will the Wii U even accept Wii-VC exclusive games?
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Gemnist
Posts: 1761 |
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I'm surprised this hasn't already happened, honestly.
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5577 |
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This is why I don't buy digital console games. Even on Steam it's risky if developers decide to pull the games, but at least with Steam seems Steam itself like it will last forever.
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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So my Wii's gonna be a paperweight in 2019? I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix eventually is pulled/stopped working since YouTube was earlier this year.
(It's not really a concern since I have a Wii U, but still sad to see.) |
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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I'm surprised that the Wii Shop Channel has been active for this long since the end of the Wii's era...
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0nsen
 Posts: 256 |
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This is why I never started online stuff with gaming. Support doesn't need to last forever, but for at least as long as the copyright of the game.
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nynextew
 Posts: 97 |
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Agreed. However, in the event that Steam shuts down, they said you could download your entire library, without authorization from their software. I would hold them to that, if the day ever comes. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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I bought a Steam game recently. Do customers have any particular rights if individual games go amiss, or is a purchase technically a form of lease? |
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#874409
Posts: 2 |
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why cant they transfer on wii/wii u to the switch? they re just making you spend more money
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4788 |
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I figured we'd get an announcement like this one of these months, but honestly I'm just surprised they gave this much advance notice. I never really bothered with any online purchases on either the old family Wii or my own Wii U, but I guess I'll have to take a look at some point during the next few months and see if there's any exclusive stuff worth buying.
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R315r4z0r
 Posts: 717 |
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You can't just do that though. Your house get flooded? Why not just pick it up and move it away from the water? OSs, like buildings, are built from the ground up. You can't expect something that works on one device to magically work on another. |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4788 |
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No, except we're not talking about transferring a whole software back-end, but instead a mere software library. It's no secret to anyone that Nintendo is going to eventually push out some sort of Virtual Console-esque service for the Switch, and when they do there will be absolutely no excuse for them not to have a user's previous purchases available to them: both the Wii U and 3DS used the Nintendo Network ID, which can be linked to a newer Nintendo Account. It was already absolute highway robbery that there was no cross-play on purchases between a Wii U and 3DS. Steam had people able to play their libraries on multiple PCs in, what, 2005 or so? Sony enabled cross-platform play between PS3 and Vita titles, and Microsoft got backwards compatibility working between games on the 360 and One. And yet here Nintendo sits in 2017, still apparently unable to figure out the most basic mechanics of digital purchases. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Things aren't even as remotely simply as you think. The Switch is a completely different hardware architecture; you simply can't run binaries compiled for the Wii on it, period. Microsoft managed to get around the same problem by packaging tuned ports in an emulator, but the XBone is also vastly more powerful than the Switch and emulating PowerPC on x86 is far more mature than emulating anything on ARM.
As a side note, Steam isn't as magic as you think it is: most titles are still Windows only and will stay that way without developer intervention. Cross play is strictly a feature of multiplayer and completely unrelated. |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4788 |
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...again, I'm not talking about direct software emulation here. I'm referring to the concept of having a digital library of titles available on multiple consoles, compiled natively for each. At some point, Nintendo is inevitably going to make its classic catalog titles available on the Switch in some form. Many Switch owners will have already purchased those titles for the Wii U or 3DS, using a Nintendo Network ID that is linked to the Switch's Nintendo account. In a sane world, Nintendo will acknowledge those earlier purchases and enable users to re-download those previously-purchased titles on the Switch for free, or at the very least for a nominal fee as was done in the Wii/Wii U transfer. (Though to be honest even that fee was questionably nickel-and-diming.) But because Nintendo does not operate in said sane world, I will put money down on Wii U/3DS owners having to re-buy everything on the Switch at full price.
And you're missing the point of the Steam analogy too. Right now, if I so chose, I could install, say, Half-Life 2 onto my 13-year-old piece of garbage Dell, at the same time it's installed in my self-built gaming PC. (I have no earthly idea why I would, but...) The game is tied to my account, not my hardware, and so I'm free to install it on as many devices as I wish, though obviously restricted from playing it concurrently on all of them. Nintendo had the exact same setup going with the Wii U and 3DS, two consoles sharing the same account system that offered many of the same digital titles...and yet there wasn't so much as a sniff of library sharing. It was either incompetence or flat-out greed. (And features like being able to play the same title on multiple OSes with a single purchase only further the argument.) |
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Polycell
Posts: 4623 |
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Are you familiar with the phrase "bug-for-bug compatibility"? Simply put, a single change in the underlying behavior of those system libraries can break things in ways you'd never expect since people will inevitably come to rely on undefined behavior(look at the size of the WinSxS folder if you want to know how bad things can get). However, failure to mess with the belly of the beast means you're left with code that's hand-tuned for other hardware - a sure-fire recipe for performance killing.
The same considerations also apply to the games themselves: they'll have been tuned to the Wii/Wii U's original hardware and won't perform well without adjustment - and if they do anything funny, the differences in hardware behavior can make them crash happy or otherwise unplayable(eg, older PC games written in Pascal will throw a 200 error if you try to start them on modern computers - the processors break the initialization routines simply by being too damn fast). |
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