I don't think there's any validity to the article and/or what it says... HOWEVER, doing something like that is something I wouldn't put past the industry. I still remember how they tried to sell those self-decaying DVDs that basically started the process of erasing themselves as soon as the package was opened. The only reason that wasn't a thing was because there was enough pressure from environmental groups about the enormous amount of e-waste those would generate (and even then some were still released).
Was that the DVDs that required a special DVD player and subscription? Some store tried to pull this scam as innovative technology. Circuit City maybe. I saw a Youtube video about it awhile back.
No matter what happens to my physical games I will likely always be able to find them digitally somewhere. Emulation is going to be the best way to preserve games
I had one where the screen kept shrinking vertically. And another that would turn itself on like it was haunted. The screen also developed a red tint. Like it was haunted.
Was that the DVDs that required a special DVD player and subscription? Some store tried to pull this scam as innovative technology. Circuit City maybe. I saw a Youtube video about it awhile back.
It's clickbait. They're going to last 30-40+ years. Try searching about the actual chips used, the lab data from the simulations is freely available on the manufacturers website.
Haha it's a stretch even for Nintendo to purposely make cartridges so they break and you either buy another or a digital version of the game lmao now I sound like a conspiracy theorists!
It’s freaky, definitely. It’ll become part of the culture, whatever culture still plays Switch in the future, whatever culture plays 3DS in the future: use your games.
It’s similar to how it’s customary in the OG Xbox scene to perform surgery on your system to remove leaky capacitors. Or how it’s typical in the GameBoy scene to do screen replacements and mods. People love their games, they love these pieces of hardware, and they’re more than willing to do what they need to do to keep them alive.
I should also say, I’m not surprised the Switch has a problem like this. The Switch was always built more fragile than past Nintendo systems, handheld or otherwise. We knew this back at launch. I was a kid back in 2017, old enough to see the buzz online, and I knew what was customary to do in order to protect your console. What really shocked me was the 3DS carts having the same issue, but it makes enough sense that similar technology would be used between the two, since 3DS software was still very much coming out for the first three years of the Switch’s life.
Got around to testing all of my 3DS games and Code Name S.T.E.A.M. gets an error every single time. I Googled it and this seems incredibly common with this game. While it's still cheap, and I did enjoy the game, I don't think I'll bother rebuying it since it's a common issue.
Haha it's a stretch even for Nintendo to purposely make cartridges so they break and you either buy another or a digital version of the game lmao now I sound like a conspiracy theorists!
It’s something to be aware of, yes, but not something to utterly destroy your desire to collect if you truly love to.
If you’re buying from any kind of seller, PLEASE ask them to show you it working in their system. This goes for brick and mortar stores too: ask for testing. They already should anyway, but I’ve had a few situations over the years where I got scammed at a brick and mortar (I’ll never forget when I bought a Sonic Advance 3 cartridge that had LITERAL DIRT INSIDE from a store that was all about keeping up appearances).
If you were already going to emulate or only play digital games through modding your system, this doesn’t affect you and you can move along. There are other things to worry about with that (like circle pad decay on real hardware. Just about all my friends have busted circle pads lmao)
This. But, also, this decay is remarkably faster than is typical. Most game carts still work as long as they’ve been cared for and kept in a cool, moisture free climate. It’s definitely okay for people to be concerned about this particular issue, since it’s so soon in the system’s existence.
The memory used in Nintendo game cards, new Atari carts, the Evercade games, etc. are all flash. They are all more fragile and can have bits flipped, causing corruption and catastrophic failure if there is no electricity to charge it.
These games will go "shelf dead" if left sitting in the box for a few decades even if properly stored. Sooner than the old rom cartridges, probably sooner than discs which rust and rot depending on how they are stored, and how they were pressed.
Bits get flipped and data gets corrupted by stray cosmic rays all the time. It's why enterprise environments use error correction memory, and always back things up to redundant drives or tape archives.
All the conspiracy and doubt around this issue being commented on here is a bit funny. It's absolutely true. It is another reason I can't take the new Switch 2 users that cry and go to war about game key cards too seriously. They already lost the "physical preservation" argument a few generations ago and apparently they didn't even notice yet.
It feels like worrying about disk rot in the sense that it is likely something that can/should cause concern but so long as things are maintained won't be an issue, at least not for a very long time.
It's hard to take the doom and gloom seriously if the example is "the game goes unused for literal decades". Granted in 10-20+ years we very well might see some sort of collapse in the secondhand market for these systems as meaningful percentages of the cartridges start to go bad. It's something that's kinda hard to feel super worried for though given everyone who seems to understand the issue better than me describes a reality where something needs to go without even minimal testing for 20-30+ years.
If the argument is "not if, but when" then that applies to quite literally every piece of technology you own and is a functionally useless statement imo. Everything will need maintenance eventually, my fat PS3 is damn near a ship of theseus with how much of it has been replaced/upgraded at this point. My CRT will eventually need parts replaced or will stop working outright. If it is mechanical, then on some level it is finite. Maybe you can hypothetically keep repairing/replacing bits of the thing until you die, but eventually it won't even exist to be usable by the next generation.
Which yes, we should all be aware of that and work to preserve what we can as best as we can. Software is more easily preserved but even then, in 50 years what will the world look like if people continue trying to endlessly throw more and more data onto servers in the hopes that it will be available eternally to anyone who goes looking. That's getting into other issues and hypotheticals tho. Point is that just because something is finite doesn't mean it loses all semblance of value.
As an admittedly vapid and purely anecdotal example, my Vita does in fact have some burn-in when the screen goes pitch black, but after ungodly amounts of hours across tons of software on an early generation OLED it is still truckin along well. Of course, I have a backup unit and wanna get a 2000 just in case, but with how much I love OLED's I wouldn't let the fact that they'll go bad in some nebulous future-time deter me from enjoying it in the present anymore than I will let the fact that my CRT will go bad someday deter me from enjoying playing my classic consoles on it.
Fwiw, fact that people have run tests that are far harsher on modern OLED panels than anything they will actually see in the real world and the hardware has come out just fine shows me that on some level, people who swear off OLEDs due to fear of obsolesce are being at least a bit alarmist at this point.
If the argument is "not if, but when" then that applies to quite literally every piece of technology you own and is a functionally useless statement imo. Everything will need maintenance eventually, my fat PS3 is damn near a ship of theseus with how much of it has been replaced/upgraded at this point. My CRT will eventually need parts replaced or will stop working outright. If it is mechanical, then on some level it is finite. Maybe you can hypothetically keep repairing/replacing bits of the thing until you die, but eventually it won't even exist to be usable by the next generation.
Which yes, we should all be aware of that and work to preserve what we can as best as we can. Software is more easily preserved but even then, in 50 years what will the world look like if people continue trying to endlessly throw more and more data onto servers in the hopes that it will be available eternally to anyone who goes looking. That's getting into other issues and hypotheticals tho. Point is that just because something is finite doesn't mean it loses all semblance of value.
As an admittedly vapid and purely anecdotal example, my Vita does in fact have some burn-in when the screen goes pitch black, but after ungodly amounts of hours across tons of software on an early generation OLED it is still truckin along well. Of course, I have a backup unit and wanna get a 2000 just in case, but with how much I love OLED's I wouldn't let the fact that they'll go bad in some nebulous future-time deter me from enjoying it in the present anymore than I will let the fact that my CRT will go bad someday deter me from enjoying playing my classic consoles on it.
Fwiw, fact that people have run tests that are far harsher on modern OLED panels than anything they will actually see in the real world and the hardware has come out just fine shows me that on some level, people who swear off OLEDs due to fear of obsolesce are being at least a bit alarmist at this point.
The thing is, we know how long old games last because they still work today, but we're still seeing how long those that use flash technology will last. We know that flash memory can self-erase because we've all had USB or SD memory sticks that die for no apparent reason.
While consoles, PVMs, and many other devices can be maintained to extend their useful life, this is not possible with OLEDs. The tools that manufacturers provide are only meant to delay the pixel degradation that will inevitably occur. It is not a problem that they have eliminated because the organic LED technology itself does not allow it.
If, in order to avoid burn-in, you have to babysit your TV and limit your use of the screen... it's normal that many people don't think the image quality is worth it, especially with the latent risk of burn-in.
All the conspiracy and doubt around this issue being commented on here is a bit funny. It's absolutely true. It is another reason I can't take the new Switch 2 users that cry and go to war about game key cards too seriously. They already lost the "physical preservation" argument a few generations ago and apparently they didn't even notice yet.
Technically physical preservation got harder since the 7th gen thanks to DLC and digital/online only games. Unless you dump the data in several storages.
Still, I still think game key cards are band-aids on a wooden leg.
It feels like worrying about disk rot in the sense that it is likely something that can/should cause concern but so long as things are maintained won't be an issue, at least not for a very long time.
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It's hard to take the doom and gloom seriously if the example is "the game goes unused for literal decades". Granted in 10-20+ years we very well might see some sort of collapse in the secondhand market for these systems as meaningful percentages of the cartridges start to go bad. It's something that's kinda hard to feel super worried for though given everyone who seems to understand the issue better than me describes a reality where something needs to go without even minimal testing for 20-30+ years.
Minimal testing isn't a guarantee. People hoard their junk and stick them in a garage or attic for years or decades at a time. Half of the market is being sold as valuable nostalgia bait.
People are out there pushing 40 or 50, hoarding flash based carts as some last chance to buy physical stuff. Many whine about digital libraries that won't be transferable, crying about missing the physical artifact experience they had as kids. They put money into having shelves of what amounts to plastic junk. Evercade and the new Atari is built off of this angle of things.
Millennials want to preserve a library, justify the money they put into it, and cling on to the idea of their kids or grand kids going into an attic or garage and pulling out a toy box time capsule 30+ years later.
If the argument is "not if, but when" then that applies to quite literally every piece of technology you own and is a functionally useless statement imo. Everything will need maintenance eventually, my fat PS3 is damn near a ship of theseus with how much of it has been replaced/upgraded at this point. My CRT will eventually need parts replaced or will stop working outright. If it is mechanical, then on some level it is finite. Maybe you can hypothetically keep repairing/replacing bits of the thing until you die, but eventually it won't even exist to be usable by the next generation.
Yeah, you're right, but the entire point is that many game collectors are in denial of it happening to media and not just hardware. Many of them demonize digital libraries because they can be taken away from them, dumping money into repairing old hardware, buying fpga and emulation clones to play old media.
They shit all over the internet about physical collecting being a better answer, yet the only physical option in front of them is cheap volatile memory that is much more easy to corrupt or go shelf dead, compared to old roms and discs.
As I said before, the whole thing is funny. The physical preservation of software is being championed by people who don't understand how disposable their toys have become.
Cosmic rays, static discharge, power failure on read & write cycles can flip bits and destroy data integrity in magnetic storage devices or active memory. Corruption happens. Data centers that support big enterprise, protecting bank infrastructure, etc. They have 0 tolerance for data loss or corruption. Everything put in and out of active memory when accessed typically has error correction happening, always making sure checksums add up, fetching data again if things fail.
Typical home computers and devices don't go the extra mile to protect data integrity, not without extra cost and setup.
Technically physical preservation got harder since the 7th gen thanks to DLC and digital/online only games. Unless you dump the data in several storages.
Still, I still think game key cards are band-aids on a wooden leg.
The problem or argument to be made around it is guaranteed access in the future, without the big companies being able to stop you and force you to upgrade. The lack of public domain or consumer rights over software purchases.
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