Alas, the live service, bane of the patient gamer.
I picked up the original Super Mario Maker on WiiU for cheap a few years ago but haven’t really played it much (who knew that professional level designers are better at designing fun levels than internet randos?), but apparently its servers are being shut down on 8th April. (This has apparently been announced for a while but I only discovered it from recent articles about players trying to beat every level!)
Does anyone know if there’s any way to mass-download levels before the servers go offline? Is it just a case of manually downloading all the top levels one by one? Should I just play it intensely for two weeks assuming it’ll then be reduced to the default levels regardless? Are there third-party tools to download levels on Cemu instead?
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This is why server code should be made open source when the developers shut it down
Or at least source-available, with a grant for modifications for personal use. It’s pretty easy to distribute and use patch-sets if they want to retain some control.
I’d prefer them to be FOSS, but I understand them not wanting to give competitors full distribution rights.
I didn’t confirm it but saw a comment when there was only one level left. They mentioned how to download them and make them playable as your own offline stage. They also mentioned you can download an archive of all the levels about 1 TB of data. The level has 2 or 3 files for each one if I recall correctly.
Edit: found archive link. The process to do it for one levels not automated but from what I read so someone will likely make a tool around the time it actually shuts down. https://archive.org/details/smm_levels
All hail pretendo 🙏
Edit: I was incorrect stating it’s still sold for $40.
They’re still selling this game for $40! Why can they not continue to support it?
Are they? All the articles I can see say it’s not been available for purchase since 2021. Are you thinking of Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch?
Super Mario Maker for Wii U will be removed from sale on Nintendo eShop on January 13th 2021
Welp, looks like I looked too quickly and you’re correct. Google sucks ass now and never directly shows what you search.
Because not enough people are buying it to justify the server running costs?
Ah ya that makes sense, I know Nintendo is struggling. lol
I think it’s more just that the server running cost is an ongoing cost, while each purchase of the game is a one-time cost. So even though the server cost is likely very low (all it does is host level designs and some metadata around them), eventually sales for the game were bound to drop to the point that they would be losing money on the servers. Honestly, given how poorly the WiiU sold and how long ago it came out, I’m surprised they kept it going this long, but I supposed that just speaks to the cheapness of the server running cost.
Maybe they should have just done a dollar a month subscription that goes along with the game or give that as an option now to keep the server alive.
Even if it’s a couple bucks sure the most faithful adherence of the game would not really mind paying it. The biggest problem for me here is that they’re totally removing the consumer’s agency, their choice.
I agree with what someone else said in this thread that if the support goes away then the server’s code should go open source. By law.
I guess you could say that the consumers chose to buy the game, knowing that it had a dependency on an online service that they weren’t being charged an ongoing cost for. Obviously that’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but I I agree with you that if game companies shut down their servers, they should release the server code. Or at very least the API of the server so that it can be reverse engineered more easily.
Perhaps a class action lawsuit could set that precedent.
Class action lawsuits only work if a law has been broken.
Does this affect the Switch versions too?
That’s Super Mario Maker 2, separate game that’s presumably fine for the foreseeable
Aaah thank you! Wasn’t sure, I didn’t play SMM1 :-)
