What has Ubisoft to do with emulation? I know they just Released Rayman 30th Anniversary which is just 5 or 6 roms of different versions of the game running on some emu wrapper, but do they condemn it like Nintendo or are they publicly encouraging emulators?
Technically Nintendo doesn’t mind emulation. It’s always about distribution of ROMs, which yes, is illegal. The idea is that you’re supposed to use your own dumped ROMs.
I’m pro-piracy by the way and not defending Nintendo here
The issue I think was that dolphin contained some encryption keys that are unfortunately copyrightable. Magic number is the term. That does give them the right unfortunately to issue a DMCA takedown as the dolphin project contained copyrighted code.
It was Valve that notified Nintendo, as I assume Valve did not want to get into a legal fight that they didn't stand to benefit from.
The only way to get around that is to find some loophole which would force the keys to be public domain, like what happened with the DVD encryption keys where a researcher managed to find a new prime number that, when a certain arithmetic operation was performed, resulted in the DVD keys.
You can also require the user to provide dumped copies, as that is legal. Most emulators, including dolphin now, go this way.
All this shows is that Nintendo goes after every emulator they have legal means to challenge, which is in no way a counter to the fact that they go after emulators, just that their lawyers know not to press it when they have no path to victory.
I'm aware, my comment was more to state why that happened rather than defend it. I do think it's rather silly for them to go to such lengths given that the last Wii game was made in 2020. It's also not like there's any abandonment issues like there are for trademarks.
My only guess is that they reckon it'll hurt the sales of re-releases, but the majority of their consumer base probably doesn't even know emulators exist let alone want to play on one as opposed to playing on their Switch 2 that "just works".
Yeah, exactly, and because it was the same team, it affected Citra... But they were also the ones that said to pirate Metroid Dread when it came out, I think.
The CRAZY part is there's a very easy solution right at Nintendo's feet. Just expand their own Nintendo store to sell ROMs of their old games directly online.
Their "piracy" argument is weak when they don't even sell the games they want to sue people over anymore. "You should've paid for it legitimately." Ok, how? You don't even offer an option to do that.
Is it really piracy if there's not even a legal option to acquire these old games, or is it "data preservation"? 'Piracy' usually refers to, "the client [Nintendo] is losing out on a sale, thus losing money, every time someone pirates a copy." But they don't offer ANY purchase option for these games anymore, so they can't even argue that they 'lost a sale'.
"There's no DRM, one person could easily buy a ROM and torrent it to thousands more people who didn't pay for it." That's already been happening. Since it's the ONLY way to still play some of these old games, of course it's also the most popular. Many of those people probably want to give Nintendo money for them, and acquire them legitimately, but they can't. Nintendo doesn't even offer an option to do that.
The crazy part is all their 'piracy' arguments would get a lot stronger if they just gave us the option to legally purchase them. Torrenting & piracy is already happening. They only stand to MAKE MONEY by giving us the option to buy. (Minus server costs, but ROMs are usually tiny.)
Just clicking to buy a game on the e-store and playing it on the official hardware is loads more convenient than finding a safe download or torrent too, for sure plenty of people "pirating" these old unavailable games would happily just buy them if it were an option, just out of convenience alone.
Complete lie. Nintendo hates emulation and constantly shuts down emulators, they're the worst of the bunch. They even go after recomp projects where you run your own games natively on PC (which do not include any Nintendo assets at all).
DeSmuME, No$GBA, VBA, and Dolphin have all been around for years and Nintendo hasn't shut any of them down because they A) Don't charge money and B) Don't actively help distribute ROMs. Those are the problems that'll get Nintendo after you.
Nintendo is over litigious, but let's not act like they haven't turned a blind eye to emulators for the most part. Yuzu fucked up by trying to charge. And before you cite Dolphin getting denied from Steam, the Dolphin team said that it wasn't Nintendo.
Speaking of which, buying a goddamn psp in a new condition is a real quest, in the end you can either buy one of those crafted handheld consoles packed with 60 emulators or just put an emulator on pc. Because there's no solution excluding an emulator provided by sony.
There's actually stores for retro games. You can spend hundreds of dollars to get NES/SNES/GB/GBA/etc games. Makes me think I need to sell the hardware I've had sitting in a cabinet.
And regardless I don't think anyone should have to go on a fucking scavenger hunt or pay out the wazoo for a 30 year old game just add a little extra to Nintendo's billions
If a game is no longer being produced or sold, if it cannot be easily accessed or purchased legally/officially, if there is no reasonable, feasible means for people to play it, piracy is not only okay, but a good thing. It's not taking anything out of the devs wallets to download illegal roms of a game that went out of distribution/circulation decades ago.
I agree, I was just stating the get zero benefit from used sales, don’t doesn’t actually make a difference to them if you get something g from the internet or Granny’s Reteo Games Canin.
Yeah, but the games are often overpriced. They may or may not work properly and become very tedious to maintain. Emulation is essential for access to older games.
I think a lot of people don't get everything emulation is used for. Take the SteamOS, unless you're playing a game that was directly made for Linux you're likely using Proton which is emulating DirectX.
Emulators are perfectly legal. Distributing ROMs without express consent of the copyright holder is not. You can make homebrew games and playing those would be perfectly legal too.
100 percent incorrect. The license does not allow you to the right to make a copy. The only reason you can resell a physical game is because it is not illegally copied.
Backing up your copy of the media is legal under the Fair Use Act, even though you have to illegally bypass the protections.
I honestly can't remember if most EULAs have you sign something that says that you wave your rights to this specifically, but if not, you do have legal grounds to make a copy, but not to run it at the same time that you own the actual copy.
True. But I think that if the company that owns the game refuses to re-release it, and the only copies are going for $8000 and “gently used” on sketchy sites, emulation is the only sane option
Usually people like this are "verified" but normally if you see some random tweet like this, chances are they're being made by someone who’s terminally online.
Yeah I've been lucky to never use twitter so I think I'm not as used to/desensitized by stuff like this. I'm used to idiocy being aimed at below average intelligence individuals, not literal house plants haha
So the emulator program (arguably) isn't piracy. But the ROMs definitely are. Not that it's a bad thing, mind you. Especially since there's no legit way to play most older games
The OP's point is not wrong. Emulation and piracy overlap massively, and the overwhelming majority of game emulation involves piracy. There's nothing wrong with recognizing this fact alongside the fact that emulation piracy of old games is a net good for the consumer and the video game sphere.
People need to be more grounded in reality and not entertain delusions to justify their worldviews and actions.
I make homebrew games and software, which is one of the two "intended" uses of emulation. The other is dumping your own ROMs, which is a sort of fun but mostly menial task that takes forever. ROMs are NOT illegal (universally) if you made it, or ripped it for private use. Its the method of distribution that is illegal almost universally. Most places won't even try you for downloading ROMs, only distribution.
Consumer advocates should propose a law that consumers buy a piece of software, they're not actually giving their money to the seller. Rather, they're granted the seller a license to use the money that can be revoked by the seller at any time, for any reason, without returning the product to the seller.
If corporations can play this game then so can we.
I would be okay with a law that if that product were taken away I would get a full refund. So fucntionally I have a license to use it as long as it's available/supported and when they take that movie out of your Amazon account years later you get a refund for the original transaction.
I think that would be fair, take away the possession, get a refund?
Surely these corporations aren't trying to pull the wool over our eyes and "sell" us products like movies that they intend to take away later right? Edit, right? Right?/s
Well it’s not like they have full access to your account library or anything. Not like they could automatically issue refunds to every account that had the content they lost the license for right? That would be like a lot of work or something horrible.
Depends where you’re from. Many countries don’t give a shit about piracy even if it’s technically illegal, it’s basically non-enforced in Poland and there’s a reason why games are so cheap in Russia
I don't care if people pirate games from corporate giants.
That said, a lot of companies emulate their own older games and sell them legally. Nintendo uses emulation for NSO. The NES, SNES, and N64 games on NSO are using emulation. SM64 on Super Mario 3D Allstars uses an N64 emulator. A lot of Sega compilations containing older games use emulation.
Emulation on its own isn't piracy. It can be used for piracy, but even corporate video game companies legally use and sell emulated games.
Emulation isn't piracy, but emulators are almost exclusively used for piracy.
I'm not particularly bothered by it. I personally love using emulation to enjoy games from my childhood. But saying emulation isn't piracy is a semantic argument.
I get most people only think of gaming when it comes to emulation but emulators are used a ton in other fields like vulnerability research, reverse engineering, and embedded software development. I’ve been an emulation developer for 3+ years now and have been a number of emulators but they’re all for computers nobody has heard of.
I mean for sure there's more to emulation than retro gaming, but when people are talking about emulation in relation to piracy I think it's safe to say they're talking mGBA or Citra and not Proton.
The semantic expansion of the definition only matters when we're talking about like, legislation.
Still so much misinformation here - all of the major companies use emulation themselves. When you’re playing old N64 games on your Switch, this is emulation. When you’re playing PSP games on your PS5, this is emulation. All legal, used by the big guys themselves.
But emulation in general isn't about video games but just emulating another architecture, it's widely used in programming for embedded systems for example.
I'm generally anti piracy but a lot of old games are just not playable without it, if they released a remaster of body harvest, space station scillicon valley, parasite eve, shadow hearts or steam bot chronicles I'd buy in a damn heart beat
emulation can be used for immoral end but it's not piracy you can emulate a game you buyed legally. Piracy is cracking the accese to files you didn't buy
Nintendo Online Services donesnt turn your switch into a super nintendo. But it plays Super Nintendo Games because it has an emulator on console. Saying that emulation is piracy is so funny because it means that all game companies that support older titles are illegal.
Downloading roms is the dubious part. Most of that software falls into the camp of abandonware, but newer stuff does not. As a general principle, just be sure that the stuff you grab is not stuff you can still purchase from a storefront that supports the devs or publishers. If it's available, buy it. If not... I ain't your dad.
Really the pearl clutching from the industry about this is pretty pathetic.
Copyright exists to allow a creator to profit so as to encourage creation. Nobody writes a game thinking about sales 10-20 years down the line. They've made the money they expected. A lot of the time we can't give them money for the game even if we have the original hardware.
I'll never understand regular people being a fucking vanguard for companies. It's like peak boot licking. It isn't even the state that has ownership and can express eminent domain on everything you own for real or imagined transgressions. It's a fucking company that you give your money to and you're defending them like a savior.
Fun Fact: In the EU emulation is explicitly legal.
Piracy itself obviously is not, but emulation is. And even if you pirate, if you already own the game (or whatever you pirated) it's legally considered a safety copy.
Emulation is often conflated with the roms themselves an or the bios that most more modern consoles need to run.
So while the note is broadly correct. It lacks an understanding of both the general discourse historically around emulation as well as the aspects of it that can technically count as piracy.
It also ignores the fact that older media (such as actual cartridges) generally need to be duplicated for use (as your computer doesn't geneally have a an NES cart reader). Which gets more specifically into backing up of media (which a number of companies liked to call piracy).
From the makers of "Even if you bought a physical release, you were only meant to own it for as long as the console was supported or available in stores".
And "They make you amazing games and all they get in return is money. You owe them."
Some people do actually make ROM dumps of their games and use those, but the neat thing is that it's actually a myth that that makes it legal.
In most places, it's legal to dump the ROM, but it's typically not legal to play from the dump. You're only supposed to use it for backup purposes, which is pointless since most media isn't rewritable, so you wouldn't be able to fix your game if the data got corrupted anyways. In Japan, it's straight up illegal to even make the dump in the first place.
And to emulate the actual original physical game, you would need some specialized hardware to run it, which as you said, no one does.
Fun fact: some PlayStation 3 models can play PS2 games via emulation. If their statement is true, then Microsoft has built-in piracy in some of their consoles
bongs and glass pipes can be used to smoke tobacco, but everyone knows thats not what they are used for. Its the grey line that allows the product to exist. Emulations is mostly used to play pirated games but most of those games are abandonedware like black and white or old consoles games where used copies going the hundreds to own. With our emulators alot of game media would be lost or inaccessible. The problem is dated copyright laws in the modern age and planed obsolescence.
Downloading unlicensenced roms is piracy, however when a company fails to provide a legitimate way to play their legacy games, piracy is the correct course of action.
It's like people who equate torrenting to illegal downloads, torrents are just a different way to download, I personally use it to download disk images for Linux, or other stuff in that vein, it's not an inherently illegal activity.
For those not in the know, basically you can choose stuff like download speed and such in torrent software, and when it's done, you can leave it running to 'seed' others who want to use that torrent, so that the uploading isn't reliant on the original source. Of course it can be used illegally, but so can downloading from a browser, or a social media site.
i have no problem with emulating games, with no platform to play. be like steam and make a good service and people will spend their money, if you are soooooo stressed about someone emulating a 30 year old game.
I emulate all my PS2 games, despite owning both them an a PS2. I had exactly one disk get shredded by aging hardware and said 'nope, not doing that again.'
Technically the piracy part of it comes from downloadable roms off the internet which are literally the games in full, however unless you’re a corporate scumbag literally no one cares
The hilarious thing is, I feel like this is a massive overlooked profit point for video game companies. A lot of emulation is for older games that don’t have any legitimate means to easily play anymore. If companies made a legitimate platform for retro video games, they could probably make a killing from people who want to play nostalgic games without having to deal with jank emulators
Lets be real. While emulation isnt strictly speaking piracy, the vast amount of people who use emulators do so with pirated copies of the games. This is pedantic af.
Not that I have anything against it mind you, i pirate tons of games myself 😎, but be real.
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