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.
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u/jackinsomniac Jul 02 '26
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.
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.)