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Comment by Shawnj2 | Hacker News Reader

In a month from now Splatoon 1 will basically be unplayable on an original unhacked Wii U. Sure you can do the single player story mode, but the main multiplayer mode is going to be gone by then unless you use Pretendo. I think the Switch is actually in a better situation because it has paid online so as long as enough people pay for online for Nintendo to keep up the budget for server maintenance it could potentially last decades while Nintendo has an incentive to cut online for their older platforms that they are basically paying to keep up for free.

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> so as long as enough people pay for online

This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.

Splatoon 1 doesn't have dedicated servers, the matchmaking is done on a server but the game itself runs peer-to-peer

You're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services.

I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.

This does not affect any of my offline games, just as GP could boot up Pokémon Red.

In order to get Celebi legitimately in the Japanese version of Crystal, you have to connect your GBC to a phone and use an online service that hasn’t worked for decades. In the VC version they patched the game so that you can get it with a different method but the physical GBC game does not have all of the features it used to once upon a time.

That's an interesting note but sounds like an optional bonus, not something that prevents you playing the game?

It doesn’t but I would point out that older games are not immune to this issue

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