Now that we've seen this pattern emerge multiple times in the past (people losing a large chunk of their games due to the shutdown of the online catalog), I think it begs for a killer feature in the future: the ability to burn the games you've purchased from the online catalog onto write-once blank cartridges.
Distributing games via physical copies is already a profit loss compared to distributing them via an online store, and distributing different cartridges per-game means even more supply issues for that specific game. Allowing players to do a one-time burn of the game they purchased to a blank cartridge would mean game companies could sell the game at full price digitally, make an extra sale on the cartridge, and gamers get the security of knowing that if servers were going to be shut down, they'd have the ability to burn the games they care about to physical media and be able to keep playing them. Win win for everyone.
Purchase a game console, why shouldn't the store remain functional indefinitely?
Yes, I get operating costs for your store front, but the standard should be, _if you are operating a market it should not be yours to control_.
Monopolies are bad in all forms, game stores should be operable by anyone, period.
And yes companies can protect themselves by disqualification of warranty for 3rd party stores, but that should be the consumer's choice, not some arbitrary CEOs decision.
We should buy your product because it offers something worth buying, not because you needed a subscription to bump your numbers...
I thought the whole point of download-only games is that they are not borrowable/lendable/resellable, so wouldn't allowing one-time only writes defeat the purpose?
Distributing games via physical copies is already a profit loss compared to distributing them via an online store, and distributing different cartridges per-game means even more supply issues for that specific game. Allowing players to do a one-time burn of the game they purchased to a blank cartridge would mean game companies could sell the game at full price digitally, make an extra sale on the cartridge, and gamers get the security of knowing that if servers were going to be shut down, they'd have the ability to burn the games they care about to physical media and be able to keep playing them. Win win for everyone.