Nintendo's claim that emulation 'stifles innovation' isn't just absurd—it's hypocritical
Nintendo's claim that emulation 'stifles innovation' isn't just absurd—it's hypocritical
It stifles innovation in the same way that museums and libraries stifle innovation ie. in no way
Like nintendo and emulation though, most book publishers would be more than happy if Libraries went away. They are trying to make sure that they maintain more control over digital libraries than they could with physical libraries.
True, I would argue that overall emulation increases brand awareness and promotes video games as a whole. Would the likes of Mario and Pokemon be as popular if the classic games were not readily available, especially 20-30 years ago?
Good analogy, what a shit take from Nintendo.
Love this take
Really, it should create more innovation They should be asking themselves what are they doing wrong with their new releases that's making people prefer decades old games.
Video games are a very interesting medium to me, when it comes to preservation. With movies, TV, Books, and Music, it is very easy and convenient to experience older content. CDs, DVDs, Bluerays, etc are very easy to play on almost any hardware (if you've invested heavily in Laser Disk, I have some bad news for you, though). Meanwhile any game ever made is largely trapped on the console it was designed for. If I want to show someone Casablanca, I can easily show them; but if I want to show them Ocarina of Time, I would need to have a 30 year old console if you believe Nintendo. This, to me, is absurd since A) Nintendo doesn't make any money even if I do buy the N64 cart, and B) I would need to buy and maintain every console that has a game with any cultural relevance for the foreseeable future.
Emulation is a very useful tool for game preservation. I've heard Nintendo is actually very good internally at game preservation and has original source code from every game they've ever made; but that doesn't do a lot of good when older generation games are left in the Nintendo vault. I wouldn't have a problem with Nintendo being so staunchly anti-emulation if they actually made their older games available, but if you ever want to play games like Chibi-Robo you either need to be OK shelling out ~180 USD for the game and ~80USD for the GameCube, or emulate it
I'm all for emulation already but this is another great point for it. Once games are out they are usually out and you are forced to use the console it came out on. If you can't find one or yours stops working RIP I guess.
I wonder how much money they'd make if they just put all of there old games on the eShop, like, I cannot think of a good resource my self to just not have access to most though official means, it's just loss sales, and it also hurts your customers
The crazy thing is they did that for a while with the Wii virtual console, and I think they also had a Wii U Virtual Console and a 3DS one as well. The problem is the titles never transferred over, so you had to keep buying them over and over (though this is still preferable to the current NES/SNES/GBC Virtual Consoles in the NSO subscription). One of the things I think Microsoft actually does well is their Backwards Compatibility. If you buy an old game on from an old console, it'll still carry over (though my understanding is this is only possible due to having a PC-like architecture across all their consoles, so it's easier to achieve)
I feel strongly that once games reach a certain age, there should be laws preventing companies from going after freely transmissible copies of said game. If you can't buy a console from the manufacturer and you can't buy the game from the publisher, then where's the harm?
I remember back in early 00's, when game magazines with full games on disks were common, someone from Nintendo - I believe Miyamoto himself - said that stifles innovation.
Nintendo only wants you to sell you new games at full prices, period. You're not supposed to think of anything else, except for exceptions when they also want to milk your nostalgia.
Nintendo only wants to sell you new games at full price>
Nintendo only wants to sell you old games still at full price.
Fixed it for you
They aren't super keen on selling old games however. On previous consoles the drip-feeding of virtual console releases was infamous, and on Switch you only have the subscription option.
But yea if they do re-release an old game, they definitely want all the money... Looking at you, Link's awakening
Nintendo only wants to offer you old games as a service. You will own nothing and you will like it.
But this doesn't even track -- if I buy a physics SNES game, Nintendo doesn't make any money off that!
Pfft. Nintendo has been stomping around for decades right alongside with emulation. In my opinion this sudden change of heart by Nintendo is just another idiotic move made by a desperate leader.
For the longest time Nintendo has been actively "Ignoring" emulation so long as the pirates were reasonably not making any kind of money. Yes they've been going after anyone who has a whiff of opportunity of making serious cash on their works; but they've been playing nice when the fans do.
Hell; Nintendo has even been profiting off of Free and Open Source emulator code for their Virtual Console.
To Nintendo I simply say this: "Put up or shut up." Make all of your older games on older consoles that you no longer choose to manufacture available on your latest generation of console(s) or maybe even try to hire off some devs from the FLOSS emulation scene and make all of them available on the PC. I swear to god Nintendo; you can make bank on your IP if you just listen to consumers; what they want and need; and go from there. Stop being such a stolid and traditional Japanese company and get with the times. You don't need to abandon the core of what you are.
It's especially funny when you consider the Virtual Console. There's some debate as to if they actually sold pirated roms or not but what cannot be argued is that they used iNES headers on their roms which means they benefited monetarily from the work of the emulation community
It's amazing how they can be so over zealous about protecting their IP and at the same time do nothing about conservation of their older, less blockbustery games.
Must be so tough giving your all to a Nintendo game and seeing it disappear from the face of the earth, having only the retro gaming community and emulators working to keep your work alive and in the hands of gamers.
Nintendo is a incredibly poor steward of their own legacy. They hold amazing pieces of software hostage to... lets face it... average to unnecessary hardware. And if a game is not moving console sales... they just let it rot.
@Mars Tbh this is the risk with making games exclusive to any console (as well as any platform, speaking more broadly), or for any publisher.
The games industry across the board is largely terrible at preserving their past works, with it only recently becoming even of slight interest to any of them (e.g. Microsoft backwards compatibility). They'd rather old IP rot & be forgotten than risk releasing it & losing the slightest profit opportunity from a nostalgia cash-in.
That's why I like GOG. No DRM bullshit and they actually put in some effort to make old games run on modern hardware.
When it comes to console games, emulation is the only way to go most of the time. If only they would just let you buy ROMs legally for a fair price. Instead Nintendo likes to give you a sub par experience and only if you subscribe to their service. No way to purchase old games. Not that you ever really owned the eShop games you bought, but at least it was not tied to a bloody subscription service.
I'm hoping exclusives, by which I mean true exclusives and not timed exclusives, go the way of the dodo. They're already a lot more rare; Nintendo is the last big holdout when it comes to tying their games to their own hardware only.
That said, I don't know what Xbox and Playstation are doing in regards to the Japanese releases of (what in the U.S. are) timed exclusives. Are they timed exclusives in Japan as well, just the same, or are they be treating that market differently? Are there PC ports available in some countries that aren't made available in other countries or in languages besides English?
I dunno about the the preservation value of something like gamepass, either. Games come and go continually, online connection is required, and the files are... Stored in incredibly messy and inconvenient ways for everybody who even just wants to mod a game or copy save files. But still, it means they make official PC versions that could be separated from gamepass if that goes down one day.
Nintendo being the best and worst company at the same time.
Remember that time they sent an elderly person to jail for several years and ruined them financially for the rest of their life, all because that person had been a glorified Facebook group admin for a cracking group?
And Nintendo pushed for, and somehow the judge explicitly agreed with this argument, an absurdly harsh sentence to "set an example". Despite no evidence whatsoever that such "examples" even deter anybody - I suspect the effect is rather the opposite, if anything, especially in the long run.
And so they stuck that guy with having 40% of his wages garnished for Nintendo for the rest of his life.
How the fucking hell did anyone look at that sentence and decide it was morally acceptable or legal.
I hope he's able to find a great pro-bono lawyer and the gumption to appeal, but I haven't gotten the impression so far that he will.
When are they the best?
Quality control.
Even if a particular game isn’t your cup of tea, you’ve gotta admit that it at least works as advertised. When was the last time Nintendo released something so buggy/incomplete that it was virtually unplayable?
Well, I believe it's about the actual games they make. Many of the games they made (Mario, Zelda, Pikmin, etc.) are among the best games many people played.
It so sad for me to watch corporations let old masterpieces just be abandoned/locked away and not cherished.
They said capitalism bred innovation too but all it actually bred was profit. Innovation is work. Why improve a bad product when you can cripple or buy out the competing ones?
I'm reminded of how the English tried to lower the cobra population during their occupation of India, offering a bounty for each snake head that was turned in. The locals started breeding cobras into a profitable enterprise. When the colonials realised what was happening, they cancelled the bounty; all the breeding stock was then simply released. Yet more cobras.
The metric by which a system is measured will determine how that system is optimised, not the system's original intention.
Schools measure grades, not learning. The English measured snake heads, not population. Capitalism measures capital, not innovation.
I'm definitely not Team Nintendo on this, but why was Dolphin on Steam anyway? People with Steamdecks would just use Emudeck and people with PCs can just download Dolphin from its site or even just use RetroArch, which is still on Steam. What was the point of putting it on Steam?
It would have made syncing saves between multiple devices really easy, which was what excited me. Being able to play on the Deck then continue on a laptop or desktop from the same save without any further third party syncing methods would have made for a really polished experience for device switching.
I’m definitely not Team Nintendo on this, but why was Dolphin on Steam anyway?
i think they wanted to make it more accessible and Steam has a very wide audience relative to their website? i'm not sure, the whole affair was very confusing.
100% agree with this. When I think of emulation and mods, the first thing I think about is Nintendo. That's how a LOT of people discover these older titles. As much as I love playing things on original hardware, the market for those devices and games have gotten absurd.
I would much rather someone emulate a nintendo game to have the chance to experience it over nothing at all. It's not like Nintendo is losing money from players emulating games that aren't even available anymore. It's all about dat preservation!
Isn't there a Retroarch core for Doliphin? And Retroarch is on Steam. Maybe the Dolphin core is not available on the Steam version though.
Anyway, thankfully if you are tech savvy enough to get Dolphin to work, you are more than likely also capable of side loading it on the Steamdeck.
The Steam Deck has its own installer for RetroArch called EmuDeck. Streamlines the whole installation, and has emulators all the way up to the Switch. Also has a quick setup for Prime Hack, and everything is very well documented.
Cool! Seems to be a bit like RetroPi exept for the Steamdeck
If anything, emulating Nintendo games has furthered innovation. The PC port for Mario 64, any Pokemon romhack, etc, all can only exist because of emulation
@alyaza Why is Nintendo so controlling with their IPs?
I think there are two main reasons why Nintendo is so aggressive about their IPs.
@Exaggeration207 Yeah, I can see that. Speaking of pokémon, is there a reason why they keep retaining GameFreak for making their games? The quality control of the products they ship is, uh, not quite there.
With any corporations the answer is always greed.
@TheTrueLinuxDev Yeah, but even by corporate standards Nintendo seems quite over-the-top about it.
op-ep (blog post) spotted
The copyright term for works owned by a corporation should be cut wayyyy down. I'm fine with a long copyright if it's owned by a person, but corporations shouldn't be able to lock down things that are older than like 20 years old. People shouldn't be forced to buy a long discontinued console in order to legally play a old game.
With that strategy, we'd wind up with shell people holding copyrights on behalf of corporations.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I am definitely for the reduction of copyright duration, just that this particular solution has a somewhat amusing flaw.
Well then make it impossible to transfer the copyright. In most jurisdiction it's not possible anyway. You can only licence it, not transfer.
I guess it might be difficult to figure out shared copyright in teamwork, but indie teams work just fine, and it's still a better option than corpus sitting on a golden pile of IPs.
oh thats easy to solve though. If the corporation wants to profit off of it and made it, it has to obtain the copyright.