I would love to see an announcement from a company who was hosting FOR FREE a product that was no longer being offered by the original company(because of the above mention frogs or other alien interference)…
“Hey I just got a friendly call from “original company” and they asked me very nicely to stop hosting their product…So I did.” End of story…No bad publicity. No legal parties getting rich because you know who pays for those legal costs. We do!
I think you should pay for a game…but NOT 10 times over! I am personally tired of paying for new formats for games, movies and music. But i know…Live goes on and who cares about the little people.
But dammit, Jim. I am a consumer not a doctor! 5 years ago I had boxes and boxes of albums and 45’s. I got rid of them because Hey…MP3’s were the “cat’s pajamas” Now what is coming back…ALBUMS!!! I just can’t win!
I’ve bought hundreds upon hundreds of CDs over the years, and had amassed quite the large DVD collections, but I move. A lot. It doesn’t make sense for someone like me to be dragging along all those physical copies. 99% of the movies I have on my hard drive I have paid for at least once.
Most of the ROMs on my hard drive I have paid for at least once. I have a few games I’ve never owned (some never heard of), but if they were available for purchase for PC, I’d totally be down.
I was about to purchase Chrono Trigger yet again when it came out on Steam, but quickly noticed the reviews, and after learning what they did to the port (or didn’t do to the port of a port), I went to LoveROMs and got my old classic back.
All this aside, I don’t see what the big deal is. If a person doesn’t have enough money to buy something they can download, I say go ahead and download. If a person does have enough money, and the company doesn’t already have all the money in the world. just pay for it.
Also legit in my book is try-before-you-buy. I’ve downloaded plenty of albums to see if it’s something I want to add to my collection, and, when it was, bought it. I’ve done the same with games. If I want it, a-purchasing we go. If I don’t, into the trash it goes. If it’s not available for purchase, well… then I say thank you to LoveROMs for preserving this game that would otherwise be molding in some rich company’s basement not being played.
These are just my unprofessional opinions. I’m a person who grew up poor and has lost most of his belongings multiple times. I know how heavy a five-dollar decision can be.
I think if you’ve already paid for an older game, you should be justified in downloading a ROM. The original company is still making money (provided it isn’t a used physical copy of a game), so it should be okay for the customer to download a more convenient copy that’s free from the issues a physical copy might face. Then again, I’m no lawyer, so maybe there is some issue I’m not seeing.
Well, Nintendo DID take down AM2R shortly before announcing Samus Returns, so maybe they are up to something!
If you own the game, it shouldn’t be illegal to download a ROM/ISO/etc. It is absolutely absurd that game companies etc think that it should. I believe in the U.S, the area is more grey (correct me if I am wrong) due to the Sony vs BLEEM lawsuit, so technically emulation is not illegal. So downloading is illegal, but backing up personal copies etc as roms etc is not.
I don’t have any studies or research papers to defend my statement about the ds, but piracy did cut it’s lifespan short. I do know that r4 carts were everywhere and it was beyond easy to copy stuff over. When my son was young, there were families that bought their kids a ds and an r4 cart and that was the end of it. It’s all conjecture anyway since we can’t tell what people would have done if piracy was not there.
I will say that it’s illegal to download roms in the US and Nintendo has to protect their IP. Those are facts… That’s not a grey area. You don’t get to play Mother 3 because you want to. To say Nintendo doesn’t care about their fans is a real stretch. Go through the virtual console on the wii u and the breadth of that catalog is amazing. If anybody knows how much Mother 3 would sell IT’S NINTENDO. We can armchair quarterback all we want but they have the data and it’s their business. I’m pretty sure it’s not worth doing from their perspective. You have the right to be unhappy, but you don’t have the right to download the ROM and fan patch it. It’s not anti consumer to stop people from distributing products they don’t own.
I’m always frustrated with Nintendo but to say that they don’t care and are leaving a ton of money on the table by not making all this stuff available doesn’t make a lot of sense
My guess is that they are coming up with something in regards to the online service and old titles and are trying to clean up and eliminate the biggest violators.
No it isn’t and no they don’t.
It is in fact expressively permitted to download roms in many countries, Sweden happens to give you all the rights to backup and download backups of your digital entertainment and to enjoy said copies in whatever means that are necessary. You are fully within your right to download a ROM of a game you have once purchased.
We can however tell by looking at the greater market overall that maybe Nintendo might be the problem, not the customers. Nintendo has another console that generally was considered killed off by piracy, the Gamecube. We can then compare it to the Xbox which was also a platform that was widely pirated on but happens to be among the most successful consoles out there. You can then further look at the PC platform and what happened when steam showed up and what we can clearly see then is that piracy does not kill a platform.
Piracy is a service problem. Nintendo has long had huge issues with the service they are providing and the way they are conducting themselves online is certainly not making anyone particularly empathetic towards any perceived plight they might be facing in regards to someone playing a fan translated rom of mother 3.
So fuck 'em. Whether they have the law on their side or not, fuck 'em.
Firstly, I just want to make it clear that I don’t condone piracy.
The problem you’re falling into is the age old conundrum of assuming that every download equates to a lost sale. A vast proportion of those who download games are not going to buy them anyway and, in the music industry at least, research has shown that people who download music are actually more likely to make purchases than those who don’t. The DS may have sold a little more without flash carts but the “it prints money” meme that was associated with the console, and the total sales figures, go on to show that it was incredibly, hugely profitable for Nintendo.
Nintendo has an image problem. More often than not the actions they take seem punitive and backwards. Whilst I don’t agree that taking down ROM sites is IP protection motivated, unless they take down all the ROM sites it’s not actually achieving that goal. And in the main we’re not talking about ROMs that are readily available on the sparsely populated eshop and virtual console, we’re talking about games that people have no other way to get…and to say there’s a breadth of catalogue when you look at the games that Nintendo own and have done nothing with is a stretch. Nintendo’s digital service is sorely wanting.
Do the ROM sites hurt Nintendo’s sales? Somewhat unlikely, and there could be many cases where they actually generate sales (as I intimated with the Mother 3 player going on to get a taste of the series and making related purchases). I agree that no-one has a right to Nintendo’s library of games other than Nintendo themselves, but given their history it’s very unlikely that they’ll do anything but drip feed out games that we’ve seen many a time before. There’s no reason to believe that these recent actions were motivated by any intention to release any older games. They have an incredible potential to populate their digital services with content, and have had for many years, but still seem to unable to compete with the services offered by others.
Additionally given that sometimes these ROM sites acts as a means of preservation (I know this is a stretch but it has proven true in some cases), and that they may actually create Nintendo fans of tomorrow,
Generally piracy doesn’t tend to kill systems, other factors surrounding them do. The Dreamcast wasn’t killed by piracy. Nor was the DS. In fact the closest argument for piracy induced mortality is the PSP…although again the argument could be made that Sony never really tried with their system outside of Japan and as a result sales floundered and couldn’t recover.
Well spoken. I agree. Definitely not a black and white issue. Don’t know that any fans can do much else but shell out the money for something we love. I think they’re strategy to their market is just that really. Buy it or not. Love it or not. I’ll love Nintendo no matter how many times they keep fucking with us. Lol>>>
Well, Nintendo DOESN’T pull this garbage. Dolphin and CEMU are still going strong, and Dolphin has been around for more than a decade of continued development at this point.
The keyword is “and several games.” You can’t do that. If I’m not mistaken, it’s bleem! v. Sony Entertainment that set the standard for emulation laws: if it’s original code, and doesn’t contain proprietary information that belongs to (console manufacturer), then it’s clean.
Not that Sony stopped there, of course, destroying bleem! financially through endless continued suits and appeals, and forcing their closure after Sony was on the wrong side of the law again.
Ninty is just throwing a tantrum because people who bought their classic NES and/or SNES minis are hacking their consoles to add more games in the significantly minuscule library of games Ninty packaged with their minis.
ROMs sites, ROM Hackers and emulator creators are just unwitting bystanders in Ninty’s temper tantrums.
They don’t? There are numerous fan projects that were not making money, such as the many Pokemon projects, that were ended due to Nintendo (which were just innocent projects) plus this emulator and the dozens of Youtubers who were treated unfairly and hit with copyrights because they had Let’s Plays and whatnot up of their games. So Nintendo does pull that garbage, now it just seems they’re picking up the pace because they have new services coming out that could get them a lot of $$$. The question then though is “how far are they going to take it?” and will they become absolute tyrants about it? I believe they will. They have demonized emulation since the 90s and haven’t stopped since.
I know about the lawsuit around BLEEM and Sony, and the coding etc, I wrote about it above. I was basing my entire viewpoint on Nintendo’s actions around it. Dolphin is old, yes, and it has survived because it isn’t using proprietary code. However, there are emulators that aren’t exactly clean or are but were shared with proprietary code or dumped BIOSs and so Nintendo can go after them—like this GBA emulator. That still makes Nintendo scummy. They haven’t stopped what they incorrectly perceive as “piracy” since the 90s.
I just had to check up on one of the split branches of the GBA emulator in question and it seems that branch’s site and forums had been nuked by the developers. However, they still have copies of the latest build for their emulator up for download. Sadly the version in question is their “wxg widgets” upload. This is unfortunate (for me anyway) as I prefer their “MFC” builds. But hey these folks need to go underground for a while until after Ninty’s tantrums stop
"Pokémon Essentials was used to build Pokémon Uranium, a fan game that received a reported 1.5 million downloads before being shut down by Nintendo. The title was later locked out of consideration at The Game Awards after initially being listed among the nominees in the Best Fan Creation category. Marin asks that PokéCommunity members “please don’t freak out about the claim, and there’s no reason to get angry with Nintendo or anyone else involved. It doesn’t need to be a bigger deal than it should be.” But not everyone is taking that advice.
“This is disgusting. It’s unfortunate that copyright trolls can take down years of volunteer work so easily,” PokéCommunity poster 00.Archer wrote on the forum. “Nintendo may have taken down the wiki, but I believe PE will rise again,” user Soccersam added. "It’s not like we’re making money out of it! It is a non-profit program, purely for entertainment purpose [sic]!
I highly suspect that the major point of contention here was the use of the Pokemon name in the project. If the people producing the content had called it something else, like “Tiny Creatures” or something else that could be considered ‘legally distinct’, they mght have been able to avoid the takedown. Given that they used the name, I’m not surprised they got a C&D on it.
Yes, this is what actually protecting a trademark looks like. This is what you have to do to avoid a trademark becoming a generic term, if too many people start calling any training and collection RPG “pokemon” then eventually that becomes a genre term and Nintendo stands to risk losing the trademark on the name.
This is completely different from the previous discussion where they take down rom sites and places that distribute their intellectual properly, which is in many cases just pure dickery even if they have the law (mostly) on their side.
“Since 2007, Pokémon Essentials has been a crucial part of the Pokémon fan game community. As a free mod for the paid RPG Maker software, Pokémon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poké-adventure.”
But why did it take Nintendo over 10 years to do anything? What has changed?
Yeah I don’t know about that. Of course it would be nice if they just put a stop to things, if necessary, before hundreds of people put years of their life into a project. Most fan projects goes nowhere and being on top of every little upstart thing to hammer it down is both costly, unnecessary and not very good optics. It seems like they could have maybe found a better middle ground though.
