One thing that Nintendo has become very infamous for is their very strict measures on fan content, as well as emulation. There are many examples of this from the company over the years, but Nintendo has been very quiet in regards to why they actually do this in the first place.
Well, that has somewhat changed. Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for a response about the Gamecube/Wii emulator Dolphin being removed from Steam. Nintendo responded by saying that “Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers. This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo’s protection measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same”.
So, it seems that Nintendo thinks that emulation and ROMs hurts development and innovation. It doesn’t explain why the company has also targeted things like fan games, YouTube videos and game mods, but this is the first time Nintendo has provided some insight on why they’re so strict with it.
It does hurt their sales cuz some of these pirates don’t care to support by “sticking it to the man”. Emulators are only illegal if you’ve obtained keys illegally, if you dump your own keys (which is why the pirate community doesn’t wanna do) then it’s legal but it’s still a grey area. It is illegal to download ROMs and the like if you have no intention to support companies, if you own legal copies it’s legal to own ROMs though iirc you have to dump the game for it to be legal, owning an illegal ROM while owning a legal copy is a grey area but should be considered legal. Piracy can be good if a game that no longer is available to purchase and hard to obtain a legal copy. Pirating for the sake of pirating is bad news bears and even Monkey D. Luffy will call you out on that. In short, it’s legal in some cases and it does hurt sales for current games. If you are gonna pirate then be a good pirate not a bad pirate.
There is not good pirate and bad pirate. There is only thievery. It is not legal to download illegal ROMS even for the sake of back up or if a game is not available to purchase.
Question, what am I stealing by playing a game I already bought?
It’s not theft, it’s copying. There is a massive difference. When you steal, you remove the ability for someone else to have it. When you copy, the original is not touched. Nintendo themselves have used roms dumped on the internet in official products. (Zelda master collection, nes classic)
how tf am I supposed to play a game that isn’t on the market anymore ???
There is not good pirate and bad pirate.
It is morally correct to “pirate” games that are not accessible to the public, like half of the GameCube games that Nintendo have locked behind a vault. The embargo on things before they enter the public domain is ridiculously high, and honestly things should enter it automatically if it hits the 30 year mark and has had no use on the market, but the law favors corporations so much it’s not even funny. The NES was 21 years old before the Wii launched with its virtual console, and there were ports even before then for people who wanted to play those games. The GameCube on the other hand has been around for 22 years and plenty of its library never saw a re-release. This is not even mentioning the games that companies refuse to localize and fans can only play it by translating it themselves and “pirating” it.
Common sense clearly is not common. It is theft down right. Nintendo owns those games and the rights to those games. They can do whatever they want with them. Just because you can’t get them anymore is not an excuse to oh hey I can steal this now and not feel bad.
Look at WB and Disney following and removing shows off their streaming service that you can never see again in any form as they were only on the streaming service. Does that mean you have the right to steal their show?
If the law was just, yes. We’re not talking about busting into their offices and taking their things, that’d be theft. If you’re able to reproduce something, sell it, and the supposed owner refuses to make it accessible, then there should be an opportunity for someone to step in and make it accessible in their place. Nintendo has had an ample amount of time to port over Chibi Robo, and each copy costing around $350 is nothing short of absolute greed.
Piracy is theft. It really shouldn’t be this hard to understand. When a company makes a game or a movie or any product in general they have no responsibility at all to always make that available to the consumer. They own the product they can do as they see fit. Just cause they don’t rerelease it or it becomes hard to find doesn’t mean oh yeah it’s okay to steal it now cause I don’t want to pay $350 for it.
Too bad. I ain’t paying $350 to a second hand dealer for an NES game. Nintendo isn’t getting that money either, and the only way they’re getting money is if they sell it. Don’t play the morality card in terms of consumer products when the reality is that they aren’t providing the product for the consumer in the first place.
If I didn’t pirate Mother 3, I’d have never played it. A game that legitimately changed my life for the better. And you’re saying that I shouldn’t have done that because “it’s Nintendo’s right to not sell me that game”. That’s bullshit and you know it. Screw off with your small brain consumer ethics if you don’t know jack shit about the human condition, asshole.
Lol Nintendo owns the product moron they can do what they want. And you say I’m the one with the small brain yet i can grasp a simple concept you seem to not be able to understand. Stop being such an entitled a$$hole. Good for you, you stole a game and to justify it it changed my life for the better.
It’s not theft to download a product that isn’t for sale, has not been for sale in a long, long time, and has no plans to be sold.
Yes it is. You don’t own it. What is so hard to understand that. Go ask a cop or a lawyer and say I don’t own this product can I download this even thought it’s illegal as it’s not for sale and I don’t own this or have any rights to this. If it was legal Nintendo wouldn’t be pulling this.
And I am willing to pay Nintendo money for the game if they choose to put it up for sale lol. I’d even pay $70 for Mother 3. It’s not about money- it’s about availability. Supply and demand.
I WANT to buy Mother 3- did you ever consider that? People are willing and able to pay for these games. Look at how well Metroid Prime Remastered sold. People WANT to pay for these GameCube era games. Calling you small brain was a bit too aggressive of me, sorry for that, but I’ll still call Nintendo out on their stupidity when it comes to this issue.
Fucking shill
+StevenTurtle
Question: If I pay for a game and then dump it to my PC and play it on an Emulator, am I a pirate?
You’re very dumb. Like, I don’t get why people are arguing with you. In fact, everyone should just ignore your comments until you go away you’re so dumb
Yes I am the dumb one. Not the moron who comments and calls someone else dumb and brings absolutely nothing to the conversation.
tes, you fucking bootlicker
Yes
Yes. If it cannot be consumed in a legal way, then it should be up for grabs. Locking it away for no reason is rediculous.
It’s not theft if there’s no legal way to aquire the game.
Do you own any right to that game? No you don’t so it’s theft. It doesn’t matter if there is no way to get it.
Story came out a few days ago about a aliens vs predator animated show that is done and stuck in the Disney vault with no plans on being released. That doesn’t mean oh hey we can steal it since there is no legal way to get it.
Yes.
“You wouldn’t download a game”
Copying and stealing are different dude. You talk about common sense but you don’t even have any.
Then buy a GameCube and the game off eBay or a vintage store.
You missed the part where games cost in the hundreds now. No sane person is going to pay for that price tag or even think it’s okay for a game to cost that much. People emulate older games for a reason.
I’d like to just point out to you, momentarily, that it doesn’t matter whether it’s “morally correct” to pirate games that are not currently accessible to the public. This is not a matter of how you feel. This is a basic matter of law. You do not have the right to download illegally distributed copies of digital media from the internet.
Whilst I agree that the public domain embargo is incredibly high, and that the law in its current form overly favours corporations, and I also agree that it’s a shame to see so much of video game history being difficult to preserve, I think some people are missing the point of what exactly the law is. Just because you want things to be a certain way, doesn’t mean you have the right to declare that they are due to “morals”. Just because you want a certain product, doesn’t mean you have the right to illegally acquire it.
Breaking the law makes you a criminal, regardless of whether you feel it to be “moral” or otherwise. If I steal your car because I think it’s “morally correct”, that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve stolen your car. Whilst digital copying is not equivocable to physical theft, it nonetheless damages the owner’s intellectual property, and promotes a laissez-faire approach to the promotion and perpetration of criminal activity.
Your actions have consequences, and if you commit a crime, you are a criminal. These should not be difficult concepts for you to understand.
I heavily disagree that breaking ANY law makes you a criminal, there’s a reason why there’s so many laws out there that are not even enforced by the police, and pirating is one of them. Otherwise, there would be a lot of people in Florida getting arrested for singing in their swimsuits, or people in Indiana for never having put manual work on a highway. You can’t pick and choose which laws are reasonable and make you a criminal and which ones can be ignored if that’s your stance, because the law is the law after all.
You claim to be unconcerned with the morality of the acts in question, but the only reason to state such a tautology as “if you commit a crime, you are a criminal” is to try to rhetorically leverage the deeply negative moral connotation of that word “criminal” to trick people into feeling ashamed or guilty for breaking a law whether or not they actually should.
We all know that history is rife with unjust, arbitrary, authoritarian, nonsensical, or otherwise unreasonable laws — and of course, innumerable examples remain around the world today. Depending on the place and time, being a “criminal” may mean very little, or may be a badge of honor, while remaining a law-abiding citizen may require you to engage in unthinkable atrocities.
Pirating a game you don’t own is illegal and I would also argue it’s morally wrong, but the overall harm it causes is abstract, hypothetical, and minimal when compared against almost any other illegal act under modern US law. Indeed, there’s a strong argument to be made that far greater harm is caused by the anti-piracy, anti-preservation, anti-fanart, and anti-modification measures by companies like Nintendo, particularly if you value your rights as a consumer (which in the US does include the right to make and use backups of legally purchased software, and to modify such software or the environment or manner in which it’s used) and/or value the preservation of the body of human artistic achievement.
Its not that we dont understand the legalities of it. We just dont give af. Or correction I dont. Now would i go and just steal someones physical shit, no. But am i gonna go out of my way to rip games off of physical copies that now cost more than their respective consoles did at launch… no.
Don’t be surprised when games like sonic heroes, watch dogs and splinter cell blacklist are pirated. Those games haven’t been on Nintendo platforms in years.
Pirating new stuff is bad.
But Gamecube and Wii games? There is no digital marketplace to buy them. The only way to buy them is to buy them second-hand in which case the money doesn’t even go to Nintendo.
Unless they rerelease a game, it literally can’t hurt people to download a Gamecube or Wii game.
Uh-oh, playing Nintendo’s games stifles innovation. I better bury my Switch in the attic so I don’t stifle innovation.
Thanks for the warning Nintendo!
That is not what they said at all. Quit being a baby about it.
Lol Nintendo just doesn’t want you to play any games without them making their profit off of it. Just a basic corporate response which is to be expected. Emulation is fine for older games, newer games not so much unless you know how to pull the actual games off of the legally purchased game cart which 90 percent don’t. Emulation will never die and I’m glad for that
Nintendo’s just straight-up lying here. The consumer’s right to make and use backups of software they’ve legally purchased (and to modify the experience however they please, which almost certainly includes running said software on any arbitrary device of their choosing) is well-established in US courts. This actual right automatically supercedes Nintendo’s imagined “right” to prevent you from doing so.
Of course it’s all the more insulting considering that Nintendo’s own games run so much better when emulated on relatively low-end gaming PCs, than they run on Nintendo’s own platforms. Tears of the Kingdom is great, but its performance and visuals are tragically anchored to last-last gen hardware. What a joke.
Try reading the small print. Especially when it comes to digital. You bought the license for that product you don’t own that product. I haven’t read the small print on Nintendo’s stuff but it’s that way for all of the stuff you buy on ITunes so it only makes sense it’s that way on other digital store fronts.
The more I think about it I remember reading stuff that says it’s the same for physical. You don’t own it even though you technically do it’s all licensed when you buy it.
Sorta yeah. In the case of buying a cartridge, you own the physical copy of the software and I suppose a de facto transferable license to use it. Since you have that legal license to the software, the courts have determined that you also have the right to make backups of that software for your own personal use, and to modify the software or the manner or environment in which it is to be used (tools like GameShark being the classic precedent).
I was mainly referring to physical media purchases, where the law is much more plainly settled. However, the underlying principle applies equally to digital licensing. The fact that these companies have had the ability to restrict consumers from making and using legally-sanctioned backups of their digital purchases is a deeply unfortunate legal aberration, and makes it all the more morally reasonable (if not legal) for consumers to re-download their legally-purchased software from ROM-sharing sites.
stupid kid
nintendo hardware and software are copyrighted
emulation and downloading are therefore illegal
Nope.
The copyrights on the software (and presumably patents on the hardware and copyright to the OS and other system-level middle- or software) make it illegal to directly copy and sell said software. However, it is well-established in US courts that consumers do have the right to make copies of software for their own use. Likewise, it is legal for consumers to modify or alter software they’ve purchased, or to use it in a different environment or context than originally intended.
Most emulators — even those developed and sold as a business — are perfectly legal because they don’t directly copy the code from the original system, but rather are independently developed from the ground up to create an (often superior) facsimile of the target system’s runtime environment. I suppose technically such an emulator could still run afoul of high-level or conceptual software design patents, but that’s unlikely given the generic nature of most of the features that are emulated.
Downloading a game you don’t own from a rom site is illegal. Downloading a game you already own from a rom site is somewhat legally dubious, but morally unimpeachable IMO.
48 hours later it occurs to me you were probably being sarcastic.
D’oh
Ummm your whole comment is moot. Also sounds to me like you’re jealous or made because you haven’t gotten or cannot beat ToTK.
Yeah ya caught me bruh: I retroactively fabricated decades of unambiguous legal precedent because I was just real butthurt that I wudnt gud at this one new vidya game.
Seriously though TotK’s a great game (and not an especially difficult one despite the performance issues), but it’d be a dramatically better experience on a platform worthy of its ambition.
What they fail to realise is that most of the pirates wouldn’t even buy the game in the first place. So they’re not really stealing anything
Are you secretly Trump? The amount of stupidity in this comment is off the charts. If they pirate a game they are stealing said game. It’s not rocket science although it might be for you. It’s just insane how people justify or that it is so okay to steal someones hard work.
The good thing is that neither Nintendo nor any of their shills can stop anyone from using Dolphin. The idea that it’s okay for a company to withhold products from their consumers and for people to be forced to not play expensive out-of-print games is patently absurd and bootlicking at its finest, so it’s great that I don’t have to submit to that belief.
It’s fine for you to play their stuff, you have to pay for it though. Thinking you can just get things for free is pretty stupid honestly.
Clearly this is a lie for the weak minded corpo worshipping bots. Piracy doesn’t hurt anything, which has been proven with studies, and it actually is believed to help sell games. Nintendo is doing very well despite all their consoles being easy to hack and their big games leaking weeks early.
Also, emulators aren’t illegal.
MDR stupid boy
If only Nintendo would put as much effort into letting their customers buy their older games as they do for putting the effort into cracking down on people pirating.
If you’re gonna do one or the other, at least do the one that’ll get you money Big N.
I wish they did for once but they expected us to pay older games from other consoles to make sure people all of us following there policy standards for pirate contents.
Why not allow us to purchase old games legally, instead of forcing us to pay again and again for games we’ve already bought in the past.
It does hurt there sales and there reception. Truth be told that Nintendo has been taking down fan games for years best on there IPs and want to make sure fans didn’t used them to make a bigger budget out of them. SEGA is ok with fan games but not for people who makes money out of it.
Piracy is theft!
Dolphin is such a unique case because the Wii side of the Dolphin emulator is using ripped code while the Gamecube side is actually legal. Sad they ended up being exposed for sorta half-assing development of Dolphin
Stupid idea!!! Companies only fight against (hours of) playing old games (less buying new high price games). Emulators is only way how to play old games like psx, gbc, gba, snes. Because companies dont release old games officialy. Paying monthly on switch for playin gba games? Never!!! No way :). I buy enought new games from sony, nintendo. But still i use emulators and in future i play emulators only because real good games release only one of year.
This joke will never not be relevant.
Tell me something I don’t know. Quit being greedy and buy a Nintendo system. You’re not doing Nintendo any favors by emulating their games.
You win, I’m going to stop being greedy.
Where do I buy Wii and Gamecube games on Switch?
Literal babies in these comments throwing out whether this shit is legal or not. Legality is usually not a good hill to die on. You weirdos should be looking at the morality. And if you think Nintendo is morally right to stop people from playing games how they want and that Nintendo is morally right in preventing people from playing decades old games that they can’t purchase anyway then you’re really stupid. I would also argue that pirates only hurt smaller developers but even then that’s debatable
Anyway, y’all who cheer when Nintendo takes down fan projects are bonkers plain and simple lmao
No sweetie, you got it backwards. Nintendo is in the right for taking down bootlegs of their intellectual properties, and pirates are in the wrong for stealing them. If the game is a decade old, then it’s debatable if it’s morally right to emulate it. But I can’t mod Super Mario Odessey by replacing Mario with a naked Shrek and accept it as an official Mario game. Buy Nintendo’s games and systems you greedy dirtbag. How would you like it if everyone stopped giving you money to draw sketches of penises and used ai art instead? Oh wait!
There are still people in 2023 who think that pirating a game does not make a publisher lose money?! LOL
+Soflona
And what of the people that play on emulators with games they actually paid for? Are they also pirates?
if the emulator is not authorized by nintendo, yes since you do not fit into their condition of use…
Why buy a game if it’s to emulate it?
Totally stupid
+Soflona
Well for 1; Emulators are not illegal. It’s when they are used for Piracy that it becomes illegal.
Secondly; The fact you don’t know why people dump their games and keys to play on an emulator is proof of how little you actually understand of the situation. Go look into this properly before you start blasting insults at everyone.
The publisher does not “lose” money. They never had that money to begin with.
ok so nintendo has no money…
what not to read…
How they don’t have no money after the sales of Tears of Kingdom and that Mario Movie?
Gonna say this hear instead of posting multiple replies: Piracy is NOT theft. Think of it like this: suppose i break into your house and steal your TV. That is theft, because you no longer have a TV. If you decide you want to sit down and watch TV, you cannot, because i stole it. Now on the other hand, suppose i pirate a copy of Mother 3. That is NOT THEFT, because nintendo STILL OWNS THE COPYRIGHT to Mother 3. I did not steal the copyright to Mother 3, and more importantly i cannot sell my own copies of Mother 3 for a profit. However, nintendo still reserves the right to choose to sell copies of Mother 3, if and when they decide to stop being a little dipsh!t about all this. I can tell a lot of these commenters are morally bankrupt, so hopefully this practical example gets through to some of you.
Is that basically your good explanation about this?
if you use a product (here software) other than under the conditions defined by the rights holder, you are illegal.
There is no arguing about it and your example is just stupid. Stealing a tv is theft, pirating is theft.
So they’re blaming gamers for their shortcomings.
Sure sounds like a them issue.
If Nintendo just made their games available to purchase, this issue would be reduced greatly. I’m still waiting for Gamecube and Wii games to come to their slow as molasses service. I have to use an adapter just to plug in my old Wii to play these old games. It takes up unnecessary room on my shelf and its a hassle to switch over to it to play games that my Switch should be able to instead.
Then its worse to play these games legally if you don’t own them already like I do. Who in their right mind would spend hundreds of dollars to play these games buying them second hand online? I for one completely understand pirates and their incentive to preserve gaming history. It would be a different story if Nintendo actually cared, but they don’t. In my personal opinion they aren’t stealing at all. If Nintendo doesn’t even sell the item then what are these people stealing? You literally can’t purchase it from Nintendo if you wanted to.
They aren’t stifling your creativity, that’s ridiculous. Your games have a ton of creativity. Currently playing Tears of the Kingdom and I’ve been praising it for its creativity and freedom for the last couple of weeks. And yes, to clarify I purchased the game digitally on my Switch (I feel like I have to defend myself when taking this stance against Nintendo’s stubbornness, I may not pirate despite defending those that do in this scenario).
Sorry, but if I bought all those virtual console games on the Wii and Wii U and can no longer get them back because the eshop closure and system no longer functional, then I’m getting them on an emulator. I’m not buying them again full price or paying indefinitely through cloud services for something that could be easily carried over. Nintendo will be and has been just fine.
I wouldn’t even mind buying the games I bought on cartridge again if it wasn’t because not only are they not available, but you usually have to pay the same price as a new game for a port that has nothing new.
If I go to the library I can read books and the author and publisher get no money for it. If I want to use the copy machine in the library I can copy all of the pages of the book. Nobody is outraged either its really funny. I can also rent CDs and burn the songs. Its not even a legal issue to do this.
I don’t know how to determine this. If you bought the game physically, then it’s yours you can do whatever you want to do with it. If you bought a Toyota paid in full and you decided to go and change the tires and it no longer makes the car as fuel efficient?, is Toyota going to sue the owner? So why can’t someone take their own $59.99 game and download it to their PC to play their Nintendo game?
Continued;
I feel like Nintendo freaking out is a lot like if Steven King waged a war against the libraries that enable people to check out and read his book for free.
Continued continued:
At my library I can check out video games as well. OOOO uh oh, it must be a crime.
If you go to Rom hacking you can alter the games to be translated, updated, and improved. It’s really fun, it keeps the old titles fresh and if anything it shows off more creativity than the original creators thought possible.
if you tell me i cant buy your car so i take it without your permission, that is theft.
if you tell me i cant buy your car so i just instantly produce a perfect copy of it, that is piracy. you still have your car.
if you’re mad, remember i was willing to buy the car – you could have produced the copy and sold that to me. that guy over there will still buy a copy instead of learning to make their own copy. still not going to sell? guess what, i’ll give that guy a copy of my copy because you’re obviously not going to do it.
valve is actually intelligent so they understood this concept a gorillian years ago. maybe in another 50 nintendo and its drone fans will catch up to reality.
You are so right. Sort of stupid of Nintendo to get rid of Wii U and 3DS eshope and not combine it to the Switch with over 100 million install base. That’s extra revenue right there.
To decrease this, then simply combine Wii, Wii U and 3DS eshope to the Switch. Problem solved. Nintendo doesn’t want emulation yet got rid of Wii, Wii U and 3DS eshopes and expect no one to emulate. Also figure away to have 1st generation Pokémon to work Pokémon Stadium. People want that too.
Thanks everyone for explaining this in layman’s terms, I don’t understand all these fancy words but I now have a better understanding.
Wanted to post one last comment on this article before I stay away from it as so many of these comments are straight up stupid and ignorant. Reading these make my IQ drop.
To the people complaining oh I’m not gonna pay $350 for a game or all this money blah blah. You do realize that companies not just Nintendo don’t just flip a switch right? It’s not magic. It takes time and money to get these old games running on new hardware and architecture. Games have contracts and copyrights that expire. So some games might have the rights to songs or something when a game comes out and after so long that contract ends, so for let’s say Nintendo to rerelease a game not only could it cost them time and money for their team they might need to pay someone else for stuff for that old game and all that is not worth it.
Something that could cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to make might only make a couple grand as not everyone has the same nostalgia for these old games.
Bottom line this sucks as a lot of great games I played growing up I will never get to experience again but in this case Nintendo made the game and has the rights so they can do as they see fit. It’s theft and there are no if ands or butts about it. I would love to see everyone here saying it’s not theft make a game and then decide to stop selling that game or updating as systems change and then have people steal from you.
Why does Nintendo need copyrights on their own IPs?
I still have my orginal N64 and GameCube games. Since my mom got me those games in the late 90s. So if I were to someway take those games of mine like Banjo-Kazooie, Bomberman 64, and emulate that’s stealing?
I say it is stealing if I were to emulate them and make money off them. But if I’m giving them free emulating and it it not even available to purchase anymore, then why is this a crime when I’m the orginal owner of a physical copy?
This is why I buy all my games physical and keep my consoles.
And the thing that sucks is today’s modern TVs don’t even work with the N64.
Yeah rereleases cost money- that’s why they charge consumers money for them in the first place lol. Of course it’s about cost verses profit, as that’s what all products have to weigh against before being made. You do realize that no one here dismisses any of that, right? People understand how markets work, and they are saying that they would buy them for FAIR prices. Nobody is saying “just emulate to screw over Nintendo”, and the majority of these commenters have stated that they’re willing to buy the games.
Honestly at this point it doesn’t matter if piracy is theft or not because of two reasons: 1) people are willing to buy games they want to play if they are available on the market, and 2) Nintendo took a majority of their library off the market in a single night with the eShops closures. Literally nobody is going to be arrested, sent to trial, or put in jail for downloading or ripping ROMs and playing them on different hardware. I could give you my own IP address and state every single ROM I’ve ever downloaded from the internet, and Nintendo could never do anything to put me in jail.
That’s why calling this illegal is meaningless. Nobody is going to do jail time over this unless they are making a business out of selling these ROMs. The precedence in protecting individual consumers has already been established over the company in regards to allowing them to do what they want with their physical media, and emulator developers have a similar precedent set in allowing them to be made as long as they don’t have any copyrighted components (code) in them. That is the only issue Dolphin had, and it is an easy fix for them to make.
You can act as high and mighty as you please with this, and you can keep playing victim in that your IQ has been affected by differing opinions on the internet lol, but the fact of the matter is that nothing Nintendo can do will ever stop people who actually care about preserving these games and art from existing for all people. They’ll make sure people can always have access to these products even when Nintendo refuses to make them easily available. Money be damned, though again I reiterate that I have money to spend.
Nintendo is correct here actually. It is their ip and they own it period. You buy the product and if you want to port it and play it on pc yea that is actually legal but you cannot put it on the internet and actually any emulator that can play their ips can actually be illegal also because it is their ips and without their permission to use them makes it illegal period.
It is never ok to just steal things. If you want to play these games get the system and games you want off of eBay. My god most these people spent over 1k on a pc and act like they should get everything free.
Emulators themselves are fully legal unless they use original code found within the original hardware. If emulators weren’t legal, then no emulators of the big companies would exist considering how extra protective every single AAA company is with their brand and IPs. Oh, and as long as the emulator doesn’t have any game attached to it- that’s a big one too
Do you really think a +20 years old cartridge still works?
Back when these games were new, a video rental company could just buy a copy and make money off people renting it and Nintendo never saw a dime other than the original purchase.
I very rarely come across a comment section on anything on the internet as inflammatory, immature, and objectively incorrect as some of the points being made here, but I feel the need to set some points straight.
Point One: Committing crimes is illegal, because that’s the law. The action of committing crimes makes you a criminal. I don’t know when this became such a controversial statement to make, because frankly – it’s not difficult to understand. As a citizen, you are expected to follow the law. You don’t get a free pass exempting you from following the law just because “it’s a fan project”, or because you’re “sticking it to the man”. There are not “good pirates” and “bad pirates”. Breaking the law makes you a criminal, so don’t be shocked when the people who break the law are accordingly punished for it.
Don’t get me wrong – the law isn’t perfect, and I think that aspects such as the length of time for which IP is protected should be shortened. It might not be fair, and that’s a reasonable assessment to make. Just because I think that, though, doesn’t mean I have an excuse to break the law – and neither do you. The law, regardless of how fair it is, is still the law.
Point Two: Just because a video game has been released in the past and is difficult for you to attain now, does not mean you have the right to download illegal copies of the game. I’ve heard people saying things like “the publisher isn’t making money” or “the only person profiting is the reseller”, and I’m going to remind you – the law is the law. It doesn’t matter what your excuses are – a lot of people are saying they should be able to get these games because they’re no longer being published and they’re feeling nostalgic for them – but the truth is, you do not have the right to take what you want purely because you can’t afford it. I feel like this is something that parents have to tell their young children – just because you want something, doesn’t mean you have the right to take it. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as complicated as some of you are trying to make it.
Again, do I think this is how things should be? Personally, no. In an ideal world, it would be nice to have open access to the entire history of video games as a medium – it would be amazing to see releases like Mother 3 in the US, for instance. Again, though – just because you want something, doesn’t give you the right to have it.
I want to make it clear – emulation isn’t “objectively wrong”, but Nintendo’s statement here is logical, fair, and honestly far less heavy-handed than a lot of you are making out. If you actually read the statement – no, not just the headline that some of you clicked on so you could scroll down here and wail about how you’re so oppressed because you can’t play Doshin the Giant for N64 or something – you’ll notice that Nintendo’s problem is not with you, personally. It’s not with specific fanbases. It’s not even with the existence of emulators. It is with criminals.
Nintendo profits from the existence of emulators – their business model for NSO partially relies on them, after all – so it would be farcical to claim that they want to remove them all. What damages Nintendo, and any other company you are pirating games from, is the use of illegally copied code, illegal circumventive measures, and so forth. Emulation is good – on the condition that your copied games and emulation software are legal. Many emulators have been developed in a cleanroom environment – a good example of this being Dolphin’s Gamecube emulation, which doesn’t use any of the Gamecube’s proprietary software. (The Wii emulation is why they’ve been removed from Steam, by the way, because that uses illegal software.) The weakening of their intellectual property protections is enough to down a company like Nintendo – because remember, Nintendo isn’t Walmart. Nintendo’s “product” is their intellectual property.
It doesn’t matter if Nintendo isn’t making money from physical NES hardware or some other pointless strawman argument of the sort – they are legally obligated to protect their intellectual property, and that is what they are doing. You are legally required to respect their intellectual property, and that is what you should be doing. The proliferation of “piracy culture” throughout the internet is damaging not just the video game industry, but the greater media industry, and the justifications of actual criminal activities boiling down to the wailing, sloppily written complaints of what I can only describe as manbabies crying that “it’s not fair!” honestly say a lot more than some online rant ever could.
Put simply, I’m ashamed to see that this community has become a place full of self-righteous manchildren who don’t understand basic concepts, such as “how to read more than one sentence”, “why committing crimes is not a good thing to do or promote”, and “my emotions or feelings do not, and should not, dictate the way the world works”. It’s not complicated, it’s not “grey”, and it’s not a place for your bullshitted justifications to try and determine why you don’t have to follow the law. It’s very, very simple; don’t be a criminal, and don’t promote criminal activities.
Why is a preacher of morality using profanity on a nintendo website?
Again, not even the police takes every single law seriously. If you still think the law is the law no matter what, then your average person (who is a criminal in your eyes) will look at you like Barney Fife, and chances are high that you yourself are not righteous on your own given stance. Look up dumb laws written in your jurisdiction, and chances are high that you’ve broken at least one of them, if not on a daily or weekly basis.
I remember one state tried to make yoga pants illegal. I don’t know if they succeeded, but if they did, I highly doubt any cops are enforcing it.
In my state we have these machines that give you money back if you put recyclables into the machine, but the law states that you had to be the one to purchase those recyclables, otherwise you’re marked as a thief. So if a legalist sees you doing a community service by picking up discarded aluminum cans or any recyclable eligible for those machines, you could be charged for a crime. It doesn’t matter if the people who purchased it obviously never intended to get their money back or you helped to improve the environment, as far as the law is concerned you are just a thief.
So when Nintendo does it by putting emulators on the Wii and WiiU Virtual Console, the 3DS Virtual Console, or the NES Classic Series on Gameboy Advance, or when they put stolen code from open source emulators in their NES Classic and SNES Classic Mini (which by the way are BOTH emulation machines), or when they put up their NSO library (which, again isn’t anything but a FRACTION of their entire library cherry-picked) which also is based upon emulation it is somehow okay and it DOESN’T stifle creativity ?
Talk about hypocrisy.
I got the Dolphin on my phone (through Google Play) solely for Eternal Darkness. Til Ninty does a remaster or remake I can buy, this is how I’m gonna enjoy that damn game. Just gotta find a copy that works on me Android.