Nintendo silently removes 250 DSi games from purchase on DSi and 3DS

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Nintendo has silently removed 250 digital only DSiWare games from the DSi and 3DS eShops. Existing purchases can be re-downloaded but new purchases can not be made.

 

Media

 

Quotes

Quote

Nintendo is in the midst of a purge of their Nintendo DSi titles, with more than half of the games for the Nintendo DSi delisted. The games... are still downloadable if they are previously bought, but newcomers can no longer buy hundreds of... titles. Shantae: Risky's Revenge, Dr. Mario Express, Mr. Driller, and The Oregon Trail. Nintendo of America has apparently purged almost all DSi titles that are over ten years old, with those from 2010 and older now gone. Most tiles are still available in the EU at the moment, but the situation is still a little murky as enterprising users are trying to discover what exactly has been removed and what is still available. Nintendo did not give gamers an advanced warning like they did for the Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop in 2017. We've reached out for comment and we'll update this article the moment we receive word back from Nintendo. 

 

My thoughts

Hopefully this is just a glitch. Removing digital only copies of games makes it extremely hard to preserve works for future generations. 

 

Sources
Tech Raptor (quote source)

Delisted Games

[WhitetailAni]

This actually affects me because I have a Nintendo 2DS and a New Nintendo 3DS XL.

[TetraSky]

37 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Hopefully this is just a glitch. Removing digital only copies of games makes it extremely hard to preserve works for future generations. 

Considering Nintendo pulls this kind of crap all the time, probably not.

From time limited games(Mario 35), to outright pulling the plug on the servers (Wii and DS for example).

Imagine being a developer for Mario 35, working on it for months and being told the game is only going to be up and running for a while and then it's over. Can't even archive it to play offline with friends or anything.

 

Wouldn't be surprised if they are doing this in preparation to shut down the servers entirely.

[Letgomyleghoe.]

Bob we talked about this

You are not allowed to smoke weed at work and click random buttons 

But who am I kidding Nintendo probably has some arbitrary reason for this

[TempestCatto]

And people often wonder why you'd ever want physical media...

[TempestCatto]

5 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

To get a borked version of the game, as updates won't be saved on the cartridge/disk

Can still get updates. But if it's removed from an online store forever, you still at least have the base game. Besides, we're talking about Nintendo. Are there actually updates to their cartridge games? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Last I ever played a Nintendo game was when the DSi was new.

[Delicieuxz]

12 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Hopefully this is just a glitch. Removing digital only copies of games makes it extremely hard to preserve works for future generations. 

 

This is a good reminder that digital services are not solutions to physical or persistent media sources. In 50, or even 15 years, you may not be able to find the games, TV shows, and Movies you want to watch anywhere unless you have a local backup, or if the GoG and EGS plan of Universal Ownership [2] (the idea that a universal ledger keeps-track of all media a person owns, and all of it can be downloaded from a variety of source) is successful.

 

A streaming service needs to have a license agreement in order to supply an item. The more they offer, the more agreements and license fees and bureaucracy they have to deal with. So, as more and more content becomes available, they'll retire various content.

 

Torrents for old media will eventually become unsupported by seeders, and torrent sites themselves might become threatened by new legislation. And commercial businesses will eventually retire items from purchase-availability.

 

I think it is inevitable that universal ownership will become in-place. But it's important that people keep pushing for their ownership rights to be acknowledged and enforced above publisher interference of those people's ownership rights over their goods, because publishers are continuing to try to stamp-out the idea.

[kaiju_wars]

47 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

Can still get updates. But if it's removed from an online store forever, you still at least have the base game. Besides, we're talking about Nintendo. Are there actually updates to their cartridge games? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Last I ever played a Nintendo game was when the DSi was new.

Yeah, Switch games get updates all the time, and those are on cartridges.  Splatoon 2 still gets regularly updated.  I had to download an update for Age of Calamity. (for something more recent)

[suicidalfranco]

3 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

Can still get updates

and then they shutdown the servers, like they already did in the past with the Wii.

Physical media has lost it's purpose and no longer holds any meaningful advantage

 

And yes, Nintendo too releases patches for their cartridges (had to download a day one patch  back when i bought Pokemon X). An awful practice that has spread industry wide

[AndreiArgeanu]

5 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

and then they shutdown the servers, like they already did in the past with the Wii

The Wii Shop Channel is still fully functional, you cannot buy any titles, but you can download titles you have already bought before the closure of the channel.

[Thaldor]

17 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Wouldn't be surprised if they are doing this in preparation to shut down the servers entirely.

Hard to say, after all it's Nintendo we are talking about. Company that stems from Japan and seems to have one or two too old devs within who still have enough power to pull out "great and new ideas" like the Badge Arcade and the Mario mobile game (whatever that was) and someone greenlights them the whole way. Most likely Mario 35 was also one of these "great and new ideas" that someone greenlighted all the way because they couldn't find any other games that were time limited in sales. Not to even poke the steaming pile of WTF with Amiibos and the mini consoles with very limited quantities manufactured and the resellers (even the wholesalers) given complete freedom of pricing (which is why SNES Mini was 50€ or something more expensive in the Nordic countries and IIRC some more sought after Amiibos have been a bit more expensive).

 

On one hand Nintendo does great things and manages to innovate gaming a lot more than other console manufacturers together. But on the other hand Nintendo is one F'ed up company.

[Luxzio22]

If this was intentional, this would be the prime example of a company using the controllability of digital distribution to enforce planned obsolescence. All the removed games can now be released on another console, possibly as exclusives; adding to the fact that users weren't on the lookout to buy / archive these games since they didn't know this was going to happen. Even Konami had the decency(wow what a thing to say) to announce they'd be removing PT.