So lately I’ve been thinking, maybe Pretendo will have servers for the switch once Nintendo’s support for the switch stops entirely (Obviously not anytime sooner) but I feel like it’ll be harder to implement due to Nintendo’s encryption and other security measures. I’m also hoping for Pretendo to open up new servers for games. I’m amazed at how far the community has grown (and still is growing today). I’m amazed at how far we’ve gotten.
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No, it will not do anything Switch.
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Just to give some actual details, in case this comes up again:
While most of our game server code can be used to create servers for some early Switch games, and we have documentation/research on how the rest of the new servers operate, we have no plans to extend our coverage into NSO. This is for various reasons:
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Most obviously, NSO is still Nintendo’s flagship online service. It is now on multiple generations of consoles, and shows no signs of ever going away. That means that they are going to be very protective of it. We already know that Nintendo is aware of us and watches us directly, so we always try to be on our best behaviour
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NSO is a PAID service. Unlike the services of the past, which were free, if we offered an NSO alternative then that’s Easy Mode for Nintendo’s lawyers. We would be offering a free alternative to their paid “content”, especially since NSO gives access to entire games through the virtual console thing it has. This is the same reason why anything we do for PSN is limited to pre-PS4 consoles, as Sony started charging for PSN after the PS3. The only time we would even MAYBE consider it is if NSO stopped being supported by Nintendo, but we don’t see that happening for MANY years (if ever, to be honest)
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Nintendo’s recent changes to their EULA (old EULA here) added the following new paragraph to section 2:
Without limitation, you agree that you may not (a) publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Nintendo Account Services; (b) bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services, including through the use of any hardware or software that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use; (c) obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services; or (d) exploit the Nintendo Account Services in any manner other than to use them in accordance with the applicable documentation and intended use, in each case, without Nintendo’s written consent or express authorization, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law. You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.. Subsection c of this section specifically says:(c) obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services;, which very clearly implies “no custom NSO servers”. This change comes relatively soon after the Japanese Nintendo customer service Twitter account made a Tweet warning users to “not use unauthorized Wii U services”. The Tweet, plus the EULA change, STRONGLY suggest that Nintendo is aware that we exist, the lawyers do not like that we exist, and they do not want a “Pretendo for NSO” service to crop up at some point so they’re adding it to their EULA as a sort of legal justification -
NSO games are in a weird spot where Nintendo switched their first-party networking library mid generation. Starting with the 3DS, Nintendo used a networking library called NEX. This library was licensed from a company named Quazal (later bought by Ubisoft) under the name Rendez-Vous. Nintendo modified Rendez-Vous to fit their own needs and rebranded it as NEX. Nintendo continued to use NEX throughout the entire life of Nintendo Network on both the 3DS and Wii U, and then continued to use it going into NSO on the Switch. However starting with Monster Hunter Rise, Nintendo released their NEW networking library called NPLN. This is made entirely in-house at Nintendo and is VASTLY different from NEX. There was a period where games were released with either NEX or NPLN, but at some point Nintendo seems to have mandated that NPLN be used for all games moving forward. This means that to support NSO games, we would need to do BOTH NEX and NPLN, which doubles our workload. We also have the advantage that Rendez-Vous was used in thousands of games even outside of NEX, so we have a TON of reference material for researching (lots of examples of version differences, debug symbols/data, etc.). But since NPLN is entirely in-house, we have VERY LITTLE to go off of and Nintendo stripped all debug information from future releases
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While NEX is used somewhat on both platforms, the underlying account system is not the same. We would need to completely reimplement the entire NSO architecture, which is much more complex than Nintendo Network’s, and now manage multiple account systems. This is definitely possible, but like with game servers it doubles our work load
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