I got a C&D from them 20+ years ago for hosting a ROM site. That's fair enough. I complied. But this seems ridiculous. What if they're plugging an 8-BIT NES to an adapter and into a capture card?
The whole thing seems silly as I don't see it's costing them money. But it's their product they can do what they want.
For a whole lot of software companies, the main competitor is the old version of the software.
Same for Nintendo: Newer games might be nicer to look at, but old games are just as much fun. So working older copies of their games do cost them money, and they'd rather see them disappear.
Indeed. This is a bit aprocryphal but I believe to recall reading about them attempting to shut down second-hand video game shops using legal threats somewhere in the 90s?
I guess this is it: Nintendo took Blockbuster to court arguing that rentals constituted copyright infringement. They also sued Galoob for the Game Genie under the premise that using the Game Genie to alter the game in any way constitutes producing an infringing derivative work. They lost in both cases.
>This is just overstretching of IP-laws if you ask me. This madness has to stop.
IP laws aren't a natural concept that exists by itself in nature, they're a construct manufactured and enforced by the governments. So if governments made them, then governments can easily rewrite them if they wish so.
But for that there needs public support and presure form voters to the politicians, but IP laws aren't something the average person cares or even ever thinks about, not when their core worries are inflation, CoL, housing, healthcare, education, etc, so the issue of IP laws is played exclusively on the battlefield of corporations and who has the most money for lobbying.
And corporations don't want laxer IP laws since that gives smaller players more leverage, versus the current status quo the favors the large plyers with the biggest litigation warchests to create large moats for them.
Do they really get to do whatever they like forever with e.g. games and consoles they neither sell nor maintain anymore?
The NES was discontinued in 95, that was nearly 3 decades ago. I don't think they should have the right to prevent hackers to emulate it and share their findings.
Current consoles, yeah maybe, but even then the question would be why they should get a monopoly on the games developed for their platform..
> I don't think they should have the right to prevent hackers to emulate it and share their findings
They do not. Emulation is legal. However it is worth considering that:
0) NES Classic was sold as recently as 2018
1) Nintendo currently rent out NES games as part of Switch online
2) Copyright law ("lifetime" + 70 years) is on Nintendo's side for games themselves
3) Fair use can be a defense against infringement in some cases
4) Although it might or might not be fair use, I feel no guilt downloading Super Mario Bros 3 for an emulator since I've purchased it at least ten times by now, own multiple copies of the game on physical media, and am currently renting it through Switch online.
On the Sony/PlayStation side, I own a PS Classic, which actually runs a version of an open source PS1 emulator PCSX, amusingly enough. (I'm a bit disappointed that it's not a descendant of Connectix's emulator though.[1])
> Nintendo currently rent out NES games as part of Switch online
If Nintendo really cared about this they should create their own version of Spotify for legacy video games and charge a monthly subscription fee for the entire library that’s cross platform and mobile friendly. The strength of Nintendo really is their games, not the hardware. I don’t understand why Nintendo is so attached to their hardware in 2024, especially in the age of the Steam Deck.
> I don’t understand why Nintendo is so attached to their hardware in 2024,
Yes, you do not.
Nintendo makes a lot of money selling hardware. Switch is the third most successful game console of all time, behind the PS2 and Nintendo's own DS. Switch was always profitable vs. component and manufacturing cost, and this has largely gotten better over time with the exception of covid-related supply chain disruptions. Nintendo has no need or desire to follow in Sega's footsteps.
Switch consoles mean Nintendo can sell physical game cards. Physical media are important in Japan, and important elsewhere since they allow fully offline operation.
Moreover, Nintendo doesn't want to sacrifice its platform fees to the likes of Valve, Apple, or Google.
They do, but the majority of their library is not available on current hardware. I think not understanding this as a business decision is a valid opinion.
By restricting access to their classic portfolio, it inflates the value of it so they can periodically release it on new platforms in a time limited fashion.
Disney did the same thing with their classic movies during the VHS/DVD era. If they were all available all the time then nobody would even think to watch them. But by creating scarcity and then periodically releasing them in a time limited special edition they can eke out more money.
So Nintendo do not want everyone to be blasse about their back catalogue. They want the nostalgia to build and then release some of these titles every so often so you buy them over and over again.
> By restricting access to their classic portfolio, it inflates the value of it so they can periodically release it on new platforms in a time limited fashion.
One would think so, but there are incredible games in their portfolio that have never seen a single re-release - on any platform. The old Pokemon games are among it, as is A link to the past.
> One would think so, but there are incredible games in their portfolio that have never seen a single re-release - on any platform. The old Pokemon games are among it, as is A link to the past.
Maybe you're using a different definition of re-release than I am, but I recently played A Link to the Past on the Switch virtual console. I also played the Game Boy Advance re-release of it in the early 2000s. Apparently it's also been released for the Wii, Wii U, New 3DS, and Super NES Classic Edition.
A quick check of Wikipedia shows that in addition to their remakes, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow were also released on the 3DS virtual console.
Physical media in Japan is important for a lot of reasons. Just looking around, the Music CD rental market is still big here... I have spoken to many people who have no streamers, they buy or rent all their DVDs and BluRays. There's the collectors thing, too, with "special edition" and "limited time" offers, etc. Physical media has a lot of love in Japan.
“I’m not a prophet or anything, but I believe that physical media will have more longevity here for the same reason that I think magazines do, which is that anyone can step out of their house and walk five feet [to buy one],” says Ricciardi. “It’s just easier to get to these things in Japan.”
I think part of the reason Nintendo (and it's not just Nintendo) is very reserved with their historical library is that they do not want to satisfy the demand for games that way while they're still making new ones.
If you can legally play Pokemon GBA or DS games under emulation for a subscription, would that have an effect on demand for buying new Pokemon games, especially for the adult market that has nostalgia for the earlier titles? I honestly think it would, especially given that there seems to be a fairly reasonable consensus online that the franchise peaked in the past for a lot of players - some people say the GBA titles, some say the DS ones, etc. I know personally that I play the old DS, GBA and GameCube titles for a lot of Nintendo franchises more than their current Switch releases.
And with regard to making it cross-platform & available on mobile, Nintendo has always controlled their platforms aggressively. They've never released games on other console platforms other than their own, and their mobile push has been deliberately very conservative (even moreso than other companies with retro libraries like Square Enix, Sega, etc). Plus especially with their handheld lineup, the DS and the 3DS are tricky to do emulated releases for - with the combination of built in touch screens, dual displays, etc.
But I also think that mobile gaming is a poor fit for most of Nintendo's library - unless you're expecting players to buy physical controls for their phones, I can't imagine playing eg Super Mario World is going to be very fun with touch screen button overlays.
Selling their own hardware still works for Nintendo, it's still profitable and it gives them control they'd cede if they released elsewhere. They'd have to pay platform fees, go through someone else's certification processes, etc. They have some of the most recognisable IP in gaming (and with Pokemon etc, one of the most recognisable bits of IP in the world), so they have the market power to pull people to buy their hardware too.
> They have some of the most recognisable IP in gaming (and with Pokemon etc, one of the most recognisable bits of IP in the world), so they have the market power to pull people to buy their hardware too.
I haven’t picked up my Switch since I bought my Steam Deck. That’s not “market power” that’s losing a gamer instead.
This is just baby steps to Nintendo weaseling themselves into Supreme Court to get Sony v. Connectix overturned. MGM v. Grokster attempted to overturn Sony v. Universal (VCR lawsuit), but while the movie studios did win, it was not an overturn of the VCR lawsuit.
Wonder what the EU laws are on this, as for example also things as game mechanics/features are not something you can register in the EU. So I assume they can't really block Emulation there.
And in that case, would it make a difference where the development is done, and if the website is "geofenced"?
> But it's their product they can do what they want.
To the extent that we let them. There's no natural rights going on here, so theoretically (if you believe in democracy) we still get to decide how much power foreign companies have.
The US belongs to various international copyright conventions. The assumption is that countries will respect each others' copyrights.
And the US currently has an extremely long copyright period, life of the author + 70 years. Some (Larry Lessig and others) have argued that this violates the constitution's establishment clause for copyright, but so far the supreme court disagrees, and copyright reform also seems dead in the legislative branch. (And on the executive side, the copyright office is not sympathetic, and international treaties also impede copyright reform.)
But your thought experiment is interesting - suppose the US decides that Nintendo's copyrights no longer hold, and suppose that Japan decides that Microsoft's copyrights no longer hold? If it were only for old games and obsolete software, perhaps little would change. If it were for recent games/software, then I think it might change the incentives to localize games/software for other markets.
A large part of the US economy depends on IP law, including copyright; they're not going to suddenly abandon it.
They could, however, shorten the terms to much more reasonable lengths. It wouldn't hurt the US economy to shorten copyright terms to 50 years, for instance. If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.
> If they shortened them to 30 years, it would have no real effect on the software industry, though Nintendo would be pissed. I don't think Microsoft would care much about people passing around copies of MS-DOS 3.3.
Well Windows 95 is coming up soon on its 30th... (and come to think of it MS already open sourced MS-DOS "4.0" for any retro-masochists who might want it.[1])
I'm sure MS Word and Excel must have improved slightly in 30 years, but by how much? They don't seem much more responsive than they were 10 years ago, and most of the shiny new Windows/Office features seem to be things I hate like annoying autocorrect, pointless UI redesigns, new advertisements and telemetry, and worthless and intrusive AI nonsense. Maybe with some incompatible save formats and clunky "cloud" features added in for good measure.
Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser. This is possibly useful for people stuck with crappy Chromebooks, ARM-based tablets/phones, or Linux.
Different company but if I ever got serious about doing graphics/photo editing again I might actually prefer a dedicated ~2010-era CS installation on a virtualized legacy box over anything that either Adobe or the rest of the market has to offer today. CS4~6 felt pretty "done". Creative Cloud still sucks.
Surely that's a gaping hole in the market waiting to be filled?
I thought Office used OO-XML, which they released as an open standard (mostly) back in the 2000s. I use it at work (unfortunately) and that seems to be what it still uses, and LibreOffice seems to work fine with it too. I don't think anything's changed here in a long time, but I could be missing something.
>new advertisements
I see nothing wrong here at all. Advertisements in Windows and Office are good things, for MS shareholders: they increase profits. Sure, they make the user experience worse, but who cares about them? If you don't like it, use LibreOffice.
>Office's largest enhancement seems to be Office 365, which offers an inferior and sluggish imitation of the desktop apps running in a web browser.
I'd say this is the biggest enhancement by far. Yeah, it's slower than running in a native app, but it was obviously a direct challenge to Google Docs, which I think came out earlier and popularized the idea of a browser-based office suite. The main advantage of it is not being tied to a single PC (or worse, a Windows PC), and probably more importantly, being able to easily share documents with others, even editing them simultaneously. That really is a killer feature for many.
> Which basically proves Nintendo has little to no moat apart from laws preventing their executables from being run elsewhere.
That would cause foreign countries to also ignore copyright held by US companies. Copyright laws only work as well as they do because all countries that matter sort of play by the same rules.
The whole thing seems silly as I don't see it's costing them money. But it's their product they can do what they want.