Gaming

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.

It stifles innovation in the same way that museums and libraries stifle innovation ie. in no way

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

@alyaza Why is Nintendo so controlling with their IPs?