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.
I like the idea of non-transferable copyrights a lot. That would make the “this is motivation for innovation / just protects inventors and artists” claim a lot more believable to me. I don’t think it should even be passable to descendents/“estates”.
And maybe also disallow “our employees’ inventions/creative work copyright automatically goes to the company” clauses. This would be… Waaaay more complicated to sort out, but still worth thinking about imo.
That sounds a good solution to me, and it would fix many of the issues with modern copyright law. Although I feel “lost profits” for companies would mean that this would never be implemented.
oh thats easy to solve though. If the corporation wants to profit off of it and made it, it has to obtain the copyright.
I mean those people could then just sell it to the highest bidder…
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 grew up during the virtual console era. It was amazing. Just a dollar to buy a game. I bought plenty of old games through it. Now you have to pay monthly 20 dollars on switch online to access the same games they offered for one dollar just a few years earlier. Things like this are why I emulate.
I’m sorry, but this is misinformation. The cheapest games on the virtual console were NES games for $5 a piece, and Switch Online is $20/year, not $20/month. There’s plenty of good reasons for emulation, but we don’t need to resort to drastic exaggerations to make the point.
I haven’t payed for either in a long long time, so genuinely forgot the price for both. I guess this is a lesson to search before I type lol.
It’s all good! I wasn’t trying to call you out, I also had to double check before I left my comment just to make sure I wasn’t correcting you with more misinformation lol
Easier to achieve? I routinely play nes, GB, SNES, DS, as well as master system, Genesis, wonderswan, and even TurboGrafx games on my 3DS. It’s plenty easy. It’s just not what they want to do.
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.
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
I was more on the “no discount even after 5 years that a game is out”
That too. I don’t buy nintendo games anymore, because tbh their aggressiveness against piracy and simultaneously very expensive games leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Oh yes definitely. When I got a 3DS, that was quite a shock.
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!
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?
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.
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.
remember, kids - pirating Nintendo games and emulating them (you get better performance too :)) is the morally correct thing to do.
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?
To be fair, Nintendo releases games for a single console, and 1st party console games don’t tend to be too buggy. Switch is also two generations behind, so it’s more comparable to X360.
In any case, “not releasing completely broken games” should be the standard, and it would be if only people stopped preordering and falling for hype.
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’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
Let’s be honest, they’re able to do this because people bought their shit, are buying it, and will keep buying it.
Stop willingly and knowingly giving those people money who will turn around and bend you over afterwards. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Shell, Nestle, and the list goes on
It so sad for me to watch corporations let old masterpieces just be abandoned/locked away and not cherished.
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 feel some kind of way lately about the superior experience available with emulators vs the original console, too. Like, do you want to buy a switch and a ~$70 game to play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 720p at 30fps and with no ability to adjust the control mappings, or do you want to emulate it at 1440p 60fps and use your favorite controller set up just the way you like it? And that’s not even accounting for mods, which could include accessibility improvements (by god, why is there not a color blind mode in a 2023 game? I hate to think what that game must be like for people who can’t distinguish blue/green or yellow/orange, when using the powers that rely on highlighting objects in those colors.)
The system as is now asks people to pay more for an inferior experience than the people who download it and emulate it, and inferior than the one people get if they do have legal copies but use those legal copies to set up an “illegal” - per Nintendo - emulator for the game they legitimately bought. When Nintendo attacks emulators, it screws over both pirates and people who literally bought the game on switch, and would probably buy it on PC too if they could, who just want that better experience.
Tldr: longwinded agreement with you
@Lowbird @Link To add to this, when Nintendo attacks emulators they even screw over folks that buy their games to show support and then play them via emulator for the benefits they provide over the original hardware.
Sure, that may be an exceedingly small number of folks, but I’ve personally done this with older titles simply ‘cause emulation provides so much more flexibility. I’d do similar with other platforms’ recent games if it was as viable (looking at you specific PS3/PS4 exclusives).
My brother bought an original box case of SWAT 4 for over 100 dollars, saying it was the only way he could get it, I then bought it on GOG for 9 bucks lol. He then swapped to saying he wanted it for the box and art and all that (which is a valid reason), but that definitely wasn’t why he spend 100+
He then swapped to saying he wanted it for the box and art
I would guess that was after he found out the disc doesn’t run on a modern PC.
It actually did work! idk how lol
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.
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?
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.
I think in particular they were targeting Steam Deck users b/c the current install process uses the command line which is too big of a barrier for people who want a more console-like experience
It doesn’t currently require the command line though. You can get it as a flatpak using the Discover app in desktop mode. Most people would be using EmuDeck anyway which automates that.
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.
Oh, interesting. I didn’t realize that was a thing.
Yeah, I currently run the Steam version of retro arch on my pc and my deck and been really enjoying the automatic save syncing. Even my save states show up.
Thanks for the info. This is the first time I’ve seen any kind of reason for it to be on Steam. I use Dolphin a lot but I don’t have a Steamdeck and just use it from my desktop.
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
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!
