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?

  • bionicjoey
    25·
    3 months ago

    Because not enough people are buying it to justify the server running costs?

      • bionicjoey
        32·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • Quexotic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • bionicjoey
            3·
            3 months ago

            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.