No longer about Nations, Ideologies and Ethnicities. It's an endless series of proxy server deactivations conducted by cost cutting boot lickers and corporate economists!
Perhaps one of the most looming existential crisis that we encounter often in the gaming world is the reality that all we have is finite from the servers that we work them. As infrastructure improves and gaming expands, the past gets left behind in the endless march towards the 'new and next'. Already we live in a world that stubbornly refuses to recognise the importance of video game preservation which had led to the loss of some missing links of the game design world over the years as consoles have become utterly depreciated and the games on them inaccessible. To this day one of the most unsung stories of the gaming world is how little thought we put behind preservation and how we expect to maintain what we had. PC games have slightly more survivability, but as we've slipped further down the digital rabbit hole our vulnerabilities have only become more transparent.
For the oldest consoles out there we of course have physical media, an ageless preservation method which has ensured for generations that games of the old can still be played on functioning hardware assuming we have the funds to fuel it. Because, you know, Earthbound is apparently worth triple digits these days if you want a physical copy... for some reason. Still, we lost something very important the day that games stopped keeping any genuine data on the disc and moved entirely to machine installation. We lost the ability to maintain collections on the consumers end, barring the possibility of giant server farms to maintain all the crappy online games we downloaded one time on a wild fancy and totally forgot about. And when those store fronts go offline, we lose our purchases.
I still remember the days when the Wii Store was finally put out to pasture, dragged out to a non-descript field stuffed waist full of tufts of wheat, allowed to walk it's last tumbling steps out into the golden sea before being cruelly cut short with a round in the back. (What was that image?) It was a sad time, not just for the degenerate forum communities that were still inexplicably active during the end times, but for the dozens of now vapourware Nintendo games that populated the long life cycle of the Wii back then. Heck, the single best Nintendo-brand sports game existed for the Wii, what have we got nowadays? Switch Sports? You have to pay for that one, screw that game! But in all honesty, we do lose some real ones that day, and the scars still linger in the back of gamers minds as we come to rely more and more on platform providers.
What about the Vita shutdown that Sony were complicit in; a much fresher wound there. The PS Vita had a life cycle that felt more like a struggle on life support for most of it's exsistence, after a lacklustre support period left the console entirely to the mercy of third party developers. But those developers really did step up their game! To this day the Vita is fondly remembered as one of the most impressive handheld devices of the several generations it stuck around through- and what did it get? Two in the back and a pathetic excuse for a replacement which is is more of just a PlayStation Switch without a dock. Physical media stopped being produced for the PSV pretty much after year 3, so that has to be hundreds of high quality, not just Wii Store trash, games which literally vanished overnight in that massacre. And Sony didn't even blink.
Now we have a new impending victim. It has come to the attention of the world that next year will see the end of support for the Xbox 360 storefront, which has to be one of the largest deposits of absolutely trash nonsense ever to exist. Any game that wasn't lucky enough to get itself a Nintendo or PlayStation deal ended up with an Xbox 360 marketplace port, then several dozen inexpensive and badly made marketplace rip-offs and maybe a musical thrown in for good measure. The Xbox 360 marketplace stands as a virtual time capsule of the late 2000's encapsulated in an amber prison of avatar clothing items, 360p downloadable videos and the occasional college project turned game. It was like the console equivalent of the Steam Marketplace, but somehow still with better content moderation. And there were a few good games too, but it's the culture of the place that I mourn most.
To be fair, Xbox have placed themselves as champions of preservation in a way that made this announced shutdown feel like it's coming somewhere out of left field. But if you really think about it makes sense with the Xbox trajectory. The One, Series S and Series X all share the exact same marketplace infrastructure which is what allows their games to seamlessly be shared from one console generation to the other. Every 360 game which has entered this ecosystem had needed to be specifically patched to work there, and most developers choose to instead release their own One-version executable. The DMC HD Collection, for example, found it's way on the One Storefront without any changes whatsoever from it's 360 storefront counterpart. For all of their posturing, Microsoft only really started working towards preservation in the last generation, and so it was inevitable that the umbilical cord with the 360 would one day be cut.
That day will mark an absolute massacre of games becoming forever lost to the ether, however, because even if they keep up their efforts to painstaking port 360 titles over the gap, there isn't enough hours in all the universe before the heat death for Microsoft to get every game. And even if they could, you know they'd skip out the crappy rip-off titles, the awful two-bit twin-sticks, the Minecraft parody games with assault rifles and block zombies, the weirdly chaste Japanese hentai games. (because Nudity was the only thing they did crack down on for the 360 storefront.) There's an experimental period of game development where the tools entered the hands of the uninformed public, and their blind and uneducated grappling's will be lost in time like... tears, in rain.
Of course, from a certain point of view you might look at this as a necessary dispelling of uneven and sickly humours. In fact, some might say that it's the curse of the information age to possess and hold onto needlessly endless turrets of irreverence- thus dragging down the process of evolution which is predicated on the process of erasing the irrelevant and clinging onto the useful and purposed. Perhaps that describes the philosophy behind the 'best game standing' approach to game preservation that all the industry seems to display. And do you know where that Philosophical stance comes from? It's the plan that the Patriots created Arsenal Gear to execute in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Total virtual control of the flow of information in the pursuit of unclogging the development of society. So good job, Games Industry, you've made Kojima a prophet once again!
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