Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that's the last day you'll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.

The shutdown will affect some of both systems' most popular games, some of the best-selling games of all time. Suddenly, over 34 million copies of Mario Kart Wii and 23 million copies of Mario Kart DS will be severely diminished. The tens of millions of people who own the DS Pokemon games will no longer be able to trade their beasts or battle online. Animal Crossing: Wild World and Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be less functional for over 11 million players each.

Sure, as a practical matter, relatively few of these tens of millions of players are still making regular use of online servers for games that are sometimes pushing nine years old. If they were, Nintendo would probably have more interest in continuing to maintain those servers on the theory that it would lead to some more very-long-tail sales for its online-enabled games. On the other hand, Nintendo could be more interested in trying to force more players off its "legacy systems" and on to the Wii U and 3DS, which of course still have active online support.

The reasoning doesn't really matter. There's no reason that continued online support for these consoles should be at the whim of a company that obviously has no financial interest in them anymore. Nintendo and other console and game makers should take steps to release versions of their server code that allow players to run their own online infrastructure after the corporate servers are no longer available.

Locking the doors and swallowing the key

Don't get me wrong—I can see why companies like Nintendo might not want to allow anyone to run their own console servers from day one. Having a single, centralized, controlled environment for online gameplay prevents fragmentation and helps make the online experience simpler and more secure when these games are at their most popular. But this centralization becomes a problem down the road when the companies behind the servers basically decide to lock the online gameplay up and swallow the key, crippling their own games for ever after.

This is far from a new problem in the gaming space. When Microsoft decided to shut down Xbox Live servers for the original Xbox, a small group of devoted Halo 2 players kept the game active for months by refusing to turn off their consoles. EA routinely shuts down servers for its older and less popular games across consoles and PCs, as do other publishers. PC gaming history is littered with failed MMOs that no longer exist in any official form, though in those cases at least the community is often able to step in and hack together makeshift fan-run servers on its own.

Nintendo's decision to stop running Wii and DS servers feels like the leading edge of a big expansion of this problem, though, as the first full console generation with tightly integrated online play starts to get phased out. I give the Xbox 360 and PS3 two or three more years at most before Sony and Microsoft decide it's not worth supporting servers for the aging hardware anymore. Looking ahead even further, there will probably come a day when Titanfall is no longer playable on the Xbox One because Microsoft thinks it's no longer worthwhile to support it (in that case, the game won't even have a single-player mode to fall back on).

There are two important justifications for companies to open up their online server infrastructure once they're no longer willing to support it on their own. The first is consumer rights. Players were sold a game they could play online, not a game they could play online for a few months or years and then play only in single-player mode.

Yes, a savvy consumer will realize that centralized server support is going to be inherently limited, but it's not like the timing is heavily advertised or even knowable. In some cases, purchasing an online pass for a game like EA Sports MMA could have resulted in less than a month of online gameplay access for the money. I don't think that selling an online game should obligate the game maker to provide server support in perpetuity, but neither should it mean that consumers are left with no feasible alternatives for online play past an arbitrary expiration date.

Today’s hits, tomorrow’s history

The second big issue here is game preservation. In a few decades, historians and researchers are going to look back on the games of today and be interested in console gaming's first cautious steps in to the world of online gameplay. Those interested parties are going to be unable to experience the original games as they were meant to be played online without the support of (likely uninterested) software and hardware markers. Instead, they'll likely have to resort to an emulator like Dolphin to get some sort of ad-hoc netplay, which brings its own problems.

Issues of historical access for console games are quickly going to extend beyond online games and into downloadable games as well. The Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop are still available for now, but it might not be long before Nintendo decides that these are also no longer worthwhile services to continue supporting on aging systems. The problem is that downloadable games on Nintendo systems are locked to the console that first downloaded them (outside of a cumbersome one-time transfer process).

This means that in the near future, the only way to play the hundreds of titles exclusive to WiiWare or DSiWare will be to find a working console that has them pre-installed. Not only is this going to be a logistical headache for anyone trying to maintain a complete library of titles for posterity, but as hardware starts failing, working copies of many of these digital games (and bits of DLC) are going to become harder and harder to find. As it stands, I know from personal experience that it's incredibly difficult to get a working copy of the many SegaNet-download-only songs for the Dreamcast version of Samba de Amigo after the fact.

If history is any guide, players won't take this sitting down. There's already a robust effort to retrofit the online services for the earliest Internet-enabled consoles with varying levels of success. Wii and DS fans may very well be able to cobble together unofficial versions of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to replace the soon-to-be-dead official servers.

But there's no reason they should have to. In its announcement yesterday, Nintendo said it "sincerely thank[s] our fans for their continued support of our company's legacy systems. Your enthusiasm for games made for these systems speaks to their longevity and the passion of Nintendo fans." If Nintendo really cared about that passion, it would do everything it could to encourage those fans' continued enjoyment of its legacy consoles, even after they are no longer viable commercial concerns.