Edge May 2022

One thousand. That, give or take, is the number of digital-exclusive games estimated to become unavailable for purchase once Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U digital stores are shuttered. For everyone except those who already own affected games – a situation soon to present challenges of its own, given that credit card and eShop Card functionalities will be disabled in May and August respectively – they will effectively vanish in March 2023, unable to be downloaded ever again. Nintendo has argued that the move is part of the “natural lifecycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time”. In a now-deleted statement, the company pointed to the availability of over 130 “classic games” on its subscription service Switch Online as “an effective way to make classic content…

This isn’t the first time Broken Rules has experienced one of its titles disappearing from a digital storefront. The studio’s debut title, And Yet It Moves, was released on iOS in 2015 as Yet It Moves, distributed by Japanese publisher DeNA, but is no longer available. A WiiWare version was also lost to the closure of that console’s digital store in 2019. “We have one old iPad 2 in the studio that’s only there because it still has the game on it, because it’s the only way to still play on an iPad,” Bohatsch (above) says. “We just try to preserve it for ourselves, at least.”…

One thousand. That, give or take, is the number of digital-exclusive games estimated to become unavailable for purchase once Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U digital stores are shuttered. For everyone except those who already own affected games – a situation soon to present challenges of its own, given that credit card and eShop Card functionalities will be disabled in May and August respectively – they will effectively vanish in March 2023, unable to be downloaded ever again. Nintendo has argued that the move is part of the “natural lifecycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time”. In a now-deleted statement, the company pointed to the availability of over 130 “classic games” on its subscription service Switch Online as “an effective way to make classic…

This isn’t the first time Broken Rules has experienced one of its titles disappearing from a digital storefront. The studio’s debut title, And Yet It Moves, was released on iOS in 2015 as Yet It Moves, distributed by Japanese publisher DeNA, but is no longer available. A WiiWare version was also lost to the closure of that console’s digital store in 2019. “We have one old iPad 2 in the studio that’s only there because it still has the game on it, because it’s the only way to still play on an iPad,” Bohatsch (above) says. “We just try to preserve it for ourselves, at least.”…

Pennington (above) says it’s generally easier to approach smaller developers about preservation, noting that the Museum’s relationship with Gang Beasts developer Boneloaf facilitated an exhibition of the game’s design documentation. The VHS hopes to inform developers about what materials are most susceptible to being lost during development. “Making sure that those works are preserved is, in a way, preserving the game,” Pennington says. “It’s just not preserving its playability.” When we put this idea to Bohatsch, he admits to being “data messy” but says Broken Rules does hold onto its development materials: “I try to not throw these things away.”…

The clone wars, it seems, are far from over. The practice of copying the essence of a popular game and repackaging it for financial gain has been around almost as long as videogames, but it’s become a particular problem in recent years on mobile platforms. Not only can this be dispiriting for creators, in the worst cases, clones can overshadow an original game’s performance on storefronts – as in 2018, when Hole.io, a knock-off of Ben Esposito’s Donut County, shot to the top of the iOS App Store before Esposito’s game was even released. Sometimes, developers even find themselves competing with copies of copies, as in the case of Threes, the puzzle game which was copied as 1024, then not one but two games called 2048. At the beginning of 2022,…