 Well, welcome to a new week and another episode of VG News. We got four big stories. We're gonna be going over a few today on this wonderful day of, well, April 8th, 2024. And the funny thing is, well, we're on our road to 150,000 subscribers and I would appreciate if you would subscribe to the channel. The first story we're gonna start out with is one that's gonna make us remember today specifically in infamy because today is the day that Nintendo is shutting down online services for the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS. Oh, man. This isn't really how we'd like to start our week, but you know what, Nintendo? We got you. Thanks for the biggest story of the day about something that nobody wants to happen in the first place. Let's dive in to this here. So going through some stuff today, there's actually many games that are only gonna be playable through questionable emulation means. We mean questionable, we're talking about those legally gray areas. Some examples include Mario Kart 8's original online multiplayer mode that was only available still on Wii U. You, Mario Kart 7, of course, 3DS only, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, Wii Sports Club, Super Mario Maker, Animal Crossing, New Leaf, and Splatoon 1, among many other games, of course. These are just some of the most notable ones that will no longer be able to be played at all, really, on a Wii U or 3DS. When I say at all, it's a bit of a hyperbolic statement. You can still obviously play the games, but losing the online functionality, fundamentally, changes what you can do with them. Like Splatoon 1, look, there's only so much in single player you can do. The game was really about multiplayer. We won't be able to do that anymore. Now, as sad as it seems that these services are being shut down, or not seems are being shut down, what's worse is actually being reminded of the current state of the video game industry. We have technically never owned our games in terms of just legally gray, mumbo-jumbo terms of service, gobbledygook that none of us ever read. But despite this, we've never really had to worry about losing access to our games as Nintendo fans until this Wii U and 3DS online server shut down. Now, the biggest reasons for that being, well, hey, Nintendo kind of had a really crappy online service and online functionality. In the first place all these years, other platforms have had to worry about this for a while. The funny thing is, Sony was even gonna shut down the PlayStation 3 servers all the way back in 2021, but the fan backlash was so humongous against doing that that you could still access all those online services to this very day. Unfortunately, this didn't really happen with Nintendo. They didn't really go into massive fan backlash, probably because things like Miiverse were shut down back in 2017, so Nintendo already sort of slow rolled down shutdowns. They stopped letting you buy games as well. So Nintendo's been kind of slowly shutting down these services, and the Wii U is Nintendo's least successful mainstream platform, same mainstream, we all know that the virtual boy exists. And we also have to talk about how 3DS, despite its popularity, is actually the least popular Nintendo handheld ever made. So you combine those two together, and you can kind of see where maybe there just isn't a lot of people still rocking it, which for Wii U, that never really was that many people rocking it. So the backlash isn't gonna be as large as it is for 80 plus million PlayStation 3 potential owners out there, so I understand that. Also, online functionality was still not even the core or center point behind both of these platforms. I mean, we talked about a handful of games where it was like PlayStation get to argue like half the damn library might not work without online access. So I kind of understand where the backlash was a bit harder for PlayStation than Nintendo, but this does get us into a grander conversation around the Nintendo Switch, because see, someday they're gonna wanna try to shut down the servers on this system, and not only do we have a paid online service that literally has games like the entire NES N64, Genesis, Accenture Libraries stuck behind it, you also have a lot more online games from Nintendo in general this generation, let alone third party games and indie titles. So this is one of those things where it might not seem like a huge deal at the moment for Wii U and 3DS, although it's very sad. This still talks about game access moving forward in this modern age where things are increasingly more online and online and going digital only. And we're getting to this point where people are just kind of realizing, especially in the Nintendo universe that hey, we are probably gonna survive this one and be okay, but when they try to do this again in like a decade to the Nintendo Switch, I don't know that it's gonna be quite as easy, or maybe by then it won't matter because the world's come to an end. God forbid that happens. All right, we are gonna do this next story because it also deals with the future of the industry in a little bit. But this time coming from Xbox. And we're talking about Xbox president, Sarah Bond. Not to be confused with CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, yes, they're both super high positions, but like Phil used to be head of Xbox, he's now in a position higher than that and now manages all of Microsoft Gaming, which includes their PC side and everything. Of course, then again, Microsoft is a PC company. So whatever, anyways, we also know that he's also a member of the actual overall board at Microsoft. So he's a pretty high up and he still has a lot to say, more say than Sarah Bond. But Sarah Bond probably manages more of the day-to-day stuff with Xbox. And what's really funny about this is she had to talk about some stuff over the weekend that she probably didn't mean to. I don't know, we don't know if this was intentionally leaked but an internal email from Sarah Bond got leaked over the weekend that talked about game preservation and their plans for the future. And yes, they were reached out to to comment on this and well, they didn't leave a comment. They really just said they confirmed that this is a real email. So Microsoft has confirmed this is a legit leak. And that's fine, probably because everything in this, it looks positive for Microsoft and Microsoft could use all the positive news they could at the moment. So let's get into all this because Windows Central is the one who obtained the letter and it was sent by Sarah to Xbox team members. Now, Xbox fans probably want to hear a lot of the stuff that this has to say but also maybe not exactly the thing that they want to hear. Now, what is that thing exactly? Well, Microsoft is clearly been toying around with providing a large swath of their games to PlayStation 5, Switch and even Nintendo's next platform. And this has led to several Xbox loyalists being extremely mad and this letter doesn't address any of that. It's kind of weird in hindsight, of course, when you think about it because the reason such moves are being made is due to how small the Xbox community is and I'm sorry, we're not trying to insult you. These are just like facts, okay? Well, Nintendo has certainly had failures like the 3DS, Wii U, GameCube and others. They have always bounced back from those low sales with something more significant. Xbox, unfortunately, has never been able to really recapture that magic of the 80 million plus sales they had with the Xbox 360. I mean, these are just facts, guys. I'm not trying to insult Xbox community. I'm a part of the Xbox community. I know it says Nintendo Prime but I literally have an Xbox Series S just off camera and Xbox Series X over there hooked up to my TV. I'm just as much a part of this community as the rest of you. So I've been supporting with my wallet. I just don't really know what you could say when there aren't that many others. I mean, look, Nintendo Switch is in its eighth year and still outselling the Xbox Series. It's kind of crazy if you think about that. So just put in some context. Anyways, let's get into what Sarah Bond had to say in a leaked letter about the future of Xbox consoles because again, this is something that you might be really interested in. It's been nearly six months since we came together as an organization. She's just talking about her role in the organization. Our collective achievements in that timeframe are tremendous. Everyone should feel incredibly proud of what we've achieved and excited about the opportunities ahead. We are moving full speed ahead with our next generation hardware focused on delivering the biggest technological leap ever in a generation, which is an extremely bold claim. There's been some pretty big technological leaps in certain generations. So very curious what they're gonna do there and what are they gonna charge for it? They've also been like rumors rolling around handheld. So is that gonna be part of this? Is it gonna be a handheld console thing? Are they gonna cross barrier or something to go into what Nintendo did? I don't know, there's a lot that we could dive into with this, but she did then go into maybe something you do care about, game preservation. I think all gamers care about that. Here's what she had to say on that front. We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself. We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generation of players to enjoy. Now, the Xbox Series X is actually one of the best backwards compatibility capable machines, takes physical disks, in fact takes physical disks from the original Xbox era. Now not every single game, but a lot of them are there. Also a huge chunk of their back catalogs available on Xbox Game Pass. Now, the biggest thing here is, while we wanna talk about game preservation, all that means is making sure games are available doesn't necessarily mean that she has to make sure that your games are available. That's right, let's say you own a physical copy of some Xbox 360 game, Microsoft doesn't need to for game preservation reasons, make sure you can still play that particular copy that you own on the next Xbox, they would just have to make sure that game is playable in some form on the next Xbox, even if they resell it to you, or they put it in a service. None of that's really addressed here. This is just one of those things where you have to consider that what she is saying may not mean that you can maintain access to what you already own, just that the games that were there will be available in some form in the future. So that is probably a promise Microsoft will keep in some form, although promises are made to be broken. But still, I just wanted to note here that this doesn't guarantee access to what you currently own on all your Xbox systems, the way it works on Xbox Series X. We don't even know if there's gonna be a physical drive on the next system, right? So just pointing that out, but in terms of game preservation purposes, technically that just means the game's available in some form, not necessarily your copy. Now, that being said, you really should check out the Windows Central article in general because there's a lot of great stuff in there. We're not covering here because I don't feel like it's super relevant to the two big points that we brought up, but will be really relevant to some people, and plus it just gives you further context, so I really do encourage you to go check that out. Now, we need to dive into something here that I think is really fascinating, and that is headlines that popped up on Friday, heading into the weekend, kind of big news, but maybe not what you think, big news in a different way. There's a story out there that Apple is about to allow video game emulators officially in their app store, and this is huge news that actually this came up in a guidelines policy change that is real. It's very much real. In fact, let's read what that policy change says because this isn't as simple as it seems. According to Apple's updated guidelines, many apps, many games, streaming games, chatbots, plugins, and game emulators are allowed, but there's caveats to this. Those include ensuring the software adheres to additional rules that follow 4.7.1 and 4.7.5. This means using in-app purchases to offer digital goods is required. This is key because it notes for game emulator specifically, you can offer downloads of games, but you are responsible for the software offered. If you offer something you don't own, they will remove your application. Now, this could kill some of these emulator apps before they even get started in the app store, as Apple doesn't allow for a way for users to sideload content. Now, you can in Europe, I want to be clear. This is just speaking strictly in the United States. Europe does allow sideloading of apps. The government forced it. They can go to websites in Europe and download apps on your Apple device. That is absolutely a thing. So in theory, you could sideload ROMs in, but we're talking about Apple App Store availability, and this is where we need to get serious because what Apple is saying here is that your emulator could be on their store so long as it offers the ability to purchase things within the app. So they want to make money off you. They don't want it just to be a free app and that it includes things that you can download and use. So I find this fascinating because it seems like what Apple's trying to do is actually saying we don't want just random fan-made emulators going up on our app store officially because we don't want to deal with the legal gray area of that allowing sideloading of ROMs that people don't own. I think this is likely something to encourage Nintendo, Sega even, right? Sony, Xbox to create applications specific for iPhone that allow access to their games in some significant way. As an example, Nintendo could drop say a NES Classic application on there. Within that application, maybe you buy individual Nintendo Entertainment System games from Nintendo. Apple takes their 30% cut Bing bang boom, everyone wins. Billions of people get access to Nintendo's stuff through that app. Nintendo makes some money, Apple makes some money, it's a win-win-win. This essentially is just a change in policy that would now enable that where in the past you could not have game emulators or software emulators or platform emulators of any kind in the Apple app store. Now you can and I think they're trying to encourage these official ones where all the license holders are actually involved with the software. That seems to be what they're trying to do. We'll have to wait and see if that's what actually ends up happening. But hey, for now, this is just my current interpretation. We'll link to the policy down below and you can go ahead and check it out for yourself. Now this last story, forgive me, it's gonna be a bit long-winded. I apologize, but there's a lot to go through here because Good Morning America broke a story last week, late last week Thursday about a mother and father whose eight-year-old son spent $4,000 on video games. Remember, eight years old, doesn't have a job, can't make money. Money had to come from somewhere, right? Now look, these stories seem to be a dime a dozen, but it is notable the couple here was fully refunded, they're all their money. So in the end, no real financial harm, just maybe a scare for a little bit. But we have to dive into this because what we're not gonna show the kid on screen is I don't think it's right to do that. They were pictured at one point during the video portion of the story on Good Morning America, the actual kid, playing games on a tablet, which sort of infers that tablet mobile games is where a lot of this stuff was happening. And the parents had this to say about the situation. I think sometimes it's confusing as to what's real money and what's fake money. And they're talking about in terms of children understanding this. Now the kid was just eight years old, but they got access to one or multiple of their credit cards, which, okay, the story kind of glosses over the exact details here on how the kid got access and spent all that money without their parents even knowing. What they do do, however, is bring in a financial expert from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to make a few statements of which are the following. We want to make sure it's not a haven for fraud, scams, and abuse, talking about video games. What's pretty obvious is that video game companies financial incentives are for players to spend as much as possible. When we have a fraudulent charge on our credit card, we can fight it. Many times you see on these gaming platforms, but they're really just finger pointing or not really taking accountability. I think we shouldn't think of this as traditional video games. It's an immersive world with its own economy. But what we want to make sure of is that it's not just a sidestep to the existing rules. Now one comment quote that I forgot to actually put in my script from this same person was that these video game companies aren't as secure as banks, which I don't really understand why you're bringing banks into the equation here. Banks manage not just your direct access to all of your funds, instead of a single plastic card, they also manage your social security number, oftentimes your driver's license number. They weren't done because they reached out to the ESRB for comment. And here's what the ESRB had to say, we are committed to providing players and parents with transparent information and tools to make appropriate choices for themselves and their families, including the ability to manage in-game purchases, limit or block communication with other players and manage when and for how long their children can play. Now, while that's the story as it stands, I mentioned earlier my issue is with how everything is framed, okay? I have a real big problem with this. Yes, video games has some pretty scummy practices in ways that they make money. No doubt, especially in the mobile space, but it's happening kind of all over. However, this is also a story that's seemingly just making a bunch of excuses for what I firmly believe is just improper parenting. Now, I don't know this couple, nor their child. And what I do see is how this situation is being framed where it says child spent a lot of parents' money, they should be protected from this, even be impossible, ergo, it's video games fault. That's kind of the way all this read to me. If I'm misinterpreting this, let me know. But this to me is where personal accountability comes into place with the parents themselves and I'm a parent myself, so I'm speaking from a place of experience with this. Your child doesn't know the difference between real money and virtual currency. That's a claim of the parents. Doesn't know what a plastic card is. Now, they didn't say that themselves, there's no quotes on that, but that's one way that you teach your kid real money, that those plastic cards we have contain real money. You should be teaching them about that, but let's set aside the whole teaching your kid of all real money and virtual currency. A lot of parents probably don't do that. I know I have, but I'm a bit more tech savvy than some other parents, I understand that. So here's what I don't get. The statements are made by the associated people. First, the CFPB, saying that games have financial incentives to make money and they lack the security protections of traditional banks, which they say leaves them vulnerable to hacking. One, the child wasn't hacked in the first place, at least according to the story, and they were freely using their parents' cards. So that's not what's in play here. Two, video games aren't actually banks, nor is the store you used your credit card at yesterday, or most websites that accept credit cards, or most other non-gaming apps as well that also take your payment information. None of them are banks and none of them have the same protection as banks. Banks who get hacked quite frequently, by the way, because banks have your social security number, often your driver's license information as well, and obviously all of your financial accounts and information. A video game application website, any app that just gets access to a plastic card of information that you willfully gave them, a card you can cancel and often get refunded to if it does end up leaking. So you're pretty protected with those plastic cards and that's probably how this family got their $4,000 back in the first place. But it doesn't and shouldn't need the same security measures as a bank because it's not a bank. But the ESRB stated actually really makes me more upset. And it's not because they're wrong. It's actually because it points out something that already exists. You see, as a parent of three kids myself, I have the ability to lock everything down, all right? Every device in my house is kicked off the internet at a set time, even some of my devices, just in case they got access to them. Every device my children can even access is set up as a child device with zero access to make in purchases, even if they did take my credit card. My own devices where purchases can be made have two factor authentication to even access them and then a new password to access buying that is texted to my phone every time I want to make a purchase. Is it annoying for me? Absolutely, but necessary? Probably. I am protecting them and myself. My kids also have limited time with their devices to boot. The point I am making is all of these parental access tools exist, whether it's an Android tablet or phone, Windows, Chrome, Apple. Parents have all the ability to lock all this stuff down and control the access. I even control the internet from the router level. That's how convenient this stuff is right on my phone. I can block, I can set limits, I can kick devices off. It's crazy. So all the purchasing ability, and yes, even applications that are allowed to access are controlled by me. All of this is at everyone's fingertips. This isn't some exclusive tool I'm using. If you only care enough to enable it. Even the Nintendo Switch, whose parental controls are a little lacking, still allow me to live in access and play time. The point is, this eight-year-old kid spent four grand and they blame the video game for having digital currency. A child can't understand the difference between. Meanwhile, said child has access to make purchases in the first place. And that's where I have a problem with the parents' skirting responsibility. Eight is pretty young, but what I see here is a couple of parents trying to pass off blame of their own mistakes. What a surprise, a lot of us try to do this. And everyone kind of trying to back them up and point fingers at the big, bad video game industry for wanting to make money, which is what every industry in a capitalist society, aka America, is trying to do. The game companies can be better. I'm not pretending that they, of all this stuff that they do to make money, is a good thing. It's not. I hate loot boxes and stuff like it. Some of you guys love it. I'm not here to judge. Just a personal preference. Here's the thing, us parents are the ones that really need to shape up. It's a scary world out there, digitally and physically. It's on us to protect our kids and prepare them for that world. I'm pretty passionate about this as a parent. So this story really bothers me and it bothers me probably so much that we probably should end the video here because I just, I see this as a systemic failure of parenting more than a systemic failure of bad video games. Video games are evil. We need to regulate them the way we do banks. I just, guys, this makes no sense to me. Be wise out there. These parental applications aren't even new. Most of them have been around for over a decade. All right, guys, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time. That's VG News. We'll catch you in the next episode.