Nintendo files lawsuit against Tropic Haze (Switch emulator 'Yuzu' developers). UPDATE: 'Ryujinx' Switch emulator development also terminated

[KarlRemarx]

Pretty sure there is pressure from 3rdParty Partners as well for Nintendo to get this shit sorted out. We already know that some of them feel some type of way about the fact that Switch 2 is gonna have BC and this might make it more difficult for them to sell new software. Now you add a platform where Piracy and Emulation becomes more and more mainstream/accepted with every year and there is a fear of thing repeating itself.

Switch still gets a lot of 3rdParty games from smaller devs, once you get so used to not paying for stuff many people just stick to it if its possible - the person not willing to pay for a TotK level game and feeling good about themselves, is unlikely to just stop at this game but is gonna milk that "preservation" and emulation cow until its dry.

Certain gamers entitlement will push many of them towards piracy when they feel like it. "Oh Unicorn Overlord isnt releasing on PC ? Guess ill just pirate the Switch release."

Honestly im surprised that Nintendo let shit slide for so long. So yeah i absolutely believe that with the every increasing 3rdParty support, they cant justify having the perception of being the easy theft eco system - not when the Switch family might be their main platforms for at least another decade.

Exactly, all the arguments are aimed against Nintendo. But does anyone think Capcom is happy that MH Rise has been pirated countless times on Switch? Or Square Enix with their games? Its disastrous for Nintendo building relations with third parties to have a problem with mass piracy like the Switch had, it makes third parties more reluctant to put their games on Nintendo hardware. I'd bet many big publishers, both western and Japanese have put pressure on Nintendo to go hard on piracy on their consoles in anticipation of Switch 2 as well. When these publishers put AAA games on a platform, they certainly don't want to deal with games being available weeks before release for free due to mass piracy.

These are overblown and evidence-free assertions ("pretty sure x", "I bet y"), like most of the narrative around piracy as an issue. All of the scaremongering above re: 3rd parties is easily disproven by 3rd parties' extensive and constantly deepening support of PC, which is by far the most trivial platform to pursue piracy on. Nobody at Capcom or S-E is giving Nintendo a hard time about issues that almost entirely stem from a security flaw in the v1 Switch, just like none of them abandoned Playstation 1 or the DS.

Nintendo operate an integrated hardware/software business. People reverse engineering the hardware is an occupational hazard of that business. The way to overcome that is the same way Nintendo achieved success all the other times this happened (particularly the Wii and DS) - they make the value/service proposition good enough that 99% of customers will engage on Nintendo's terms. Most customers absolutely do not want to fuck around with the actual process of engaging with piracy.

 

[cw_sasuke]

These are overblown and evidence-free assertions ("pretty sure x", "I bet y"), like most of the narrative around piracy as an issue. All of the scaremongering above re: 3rd parties is easily disproven by 3rd parties' extensive and constantly deepening support of PC, which is by far the most trivial platform to pursue piracy on. Nobody at Capcom or S-E is giving Nintendo a hard time about issues that almost entirely stem from a security flaw in the v1 Switch, just like none of them abandoned Playstation 1 or the DS.

Nintendo operate an integrated hardware/software business. People reverse engineering the hardware is an occupational hazard of that business. The way to overcome that is the same way Nintendo achieved success all the other times this happened (particularly the Wii and DS) - they make the value/service proposition good enough that 99% of customers will engage on Nintendo's terms. Most customers absolutely do not want to fuck around with the actual process of engaging with piracy.

You cant compare Nintendo and how their base level 3rdParty support looks like to the HD Twins or and especially PC - the latter is gonna get pretty much every release nowadays and they have been implementing various forms of DRM to secure that content - still there is no one questioning the strength of the platform. Meanwhile on Nintendo systems even longterm partners often drop support fast the moment things dont look like they are gonna work out.

So no Nintendo absolutely doesnt have the same kind of credit than the other eco systems and they have first hand experience of past massive systems turn into piracy/flashcard heavy just because felt it was okay to steal their games. Once these movements enter the mainstream its tough to combat them.

As a platform holder Nintendo has to make sure the eco system is attractive for all parties involved, not just for them because their games continue to do relatively well.

 

[KarlRemarx]

You cant compare Nintendo and how their base level 3rdParty support looks like to the HD Twins or and especially PC - the latter is gonna get pretty much every release nowadays and they have been implementing various forms of DRM to secure that content - still there is no one questioning the strength of the platform. Meanwhile on Nintendo systems even longterm partners often drop support fast the moment things dont look like they are gonna work out.

So no Nintendo absolutely doesnt have the same kind of credit than the other eco systems and they have first hand experience of past massive systems turn into piracy/flashcard heavy just because felt it was okay to steal their games. Once these movements enter the mainstream its tough to combat them.

As a platform holder Nintendo has to make sure the eco system is attractive for all parties involved, not just for them because their games continue to do relatively well.

"We have to allow Nintendo carte blanche to rewrite the laws on reverse engineering and generally intimidate people away from tinkering with what they own, because they otherwise may hypothetically lose 3rd party support in this extremely contrived and specific scenario that has nothing to do with the actual reasons for Nintendo's level of 3rd party support" is not convincing.

Nintendo are fully within their rights to protect their copyrighted material, but as we've seen over and over and over, treating all users as criminals with heavy handed antipiracy measures is not only a fool's errand but usually creates issues for legitimate customers down the line.

Again - Nintendo already have a great value/service proposition, which is why this has been the most financially successful period in their history. If piracy was the issue some claim it is (coincidentally also claimed by companies selling intrusive DRM services) a system with a trivially simple day 1 vulnerability would be in its grave, not at year 8 achieving unheard of sales performance.

 

[Joseki]

Pirate is pirate many people like free and used fancy words for this.

Even rich company did not want to paid.

This for me was the moment Pandora's box was opened.

Valve was officially pitching the Steam Deck with "you don't need a Nintendo Switch to play Nintendo games, give your money to us instead of giving them to Nintendo and play their games anyway".

 

[KarlRemarx]

This for me was the moment Pandora's box was opened.

Valve was officially pitching the Steam Deck with "you don't need a Nintendo Switch to play Nintendo games, give your money to us instead of giving them to Nintendo and play their games anyway".

And as we all know, the Nintendo Switch died that day and Steam Deck has dominated the handheld market since, right?

I'm not sure what an "official pitch" looks like to you but to most people I'd say it doesn't involve a blink-and-you'll-miss-it section of a trailer that was literally removed and reuploaded.

The idea that not just "pc gamers" (a few thousand redditors while 99% of the market just plays native pc games) but Valve themselves are trying to steal from Nintendo is sub-gameFAQs discourse.

 

[Old sorta fan]

I don’t think that the people behind Ryujinx were as ethically challenged as Yuzu. I think it started as a software development project that was taken by pirates to pirate.

I think the lesson is that any emulator of a extant piece of hardware will be used to pirate, regardless of the intentions of its creator.

I don’t blame Nintendo for protecting the value of its products.

 

[Danny]

"We have to allow Nintendo carte blanche to rewrite the laws on reverse engineering and generally intimidate people away from tinkering with what they own, because they otherwise may hypothetically lose 3rd party support in this extremely contrived and specific scenario that has nothing to do with the actual reasons for Nintendo's level of 3rd party support" is not convincing.

Nintendo are fully within their rights to protect their copyrighted material, but as we've seen over and over and over, treating all users as criminals with heavy handed antipiracy measures is not only a fool's errand but usually creates issues for legitimate customers down the line.

Again - Nintendo already have a great value/service proposition, which is why this has been the most financially successful period in their history. If piracy was the issue some claim it is (coincidentally also claimed by companies selling intrusive DRM services) a system with a trivially simple day 1 vulnerability would be in its grave, not at year 8 achieving unheard of sales performance.

But legal emulation of modern consoles only continues because no one has yet challenged emulation since the old 90s case for Sony. Breaking encryption security keys to emulate modern consoles is not at all a 100 % guarantee that such a case would be won by emulators in a court. As of now the status quo from decades ago still holds but i'm far from certain the status quo will prevail forever.

Nintendo for instance cannot take for granted that they will always sell Switch numbers of hardware and software, making piracy a blip for them. There will come times when they are under far more pressure due to software and hardware sales failing, making piracy a much bigger threat.

 

[KarlRemarx]

But legal emulation of modern consoles only continues because no one has yet challenged emulation since the old 90s case for Sony. Breaking encryption security keys to emulate modern consoles is not at all a 100 % guarantee that such a case would be won by emulators in a court. As of now the status quo from decades ago still holds but i'm far from certain the status quo will prevail forever.

Nintendo for instance cannot take for granted that they will always sell Switch numbers of hardware and software, making piracy a blip for them. There will come times when they are under far more pressure due to software and hardware sales failing, making piracy a much bigger threat.

The right to legally modify/reverse-engineer something you purchased is meaningless if all a manufacturer has to do is insert encrypted keys in any part of the process, to suddenly render all of those rights null and void due to a legal carve-out. This is obviously very highly beneficial to corporations and thus would be quite easy to make legal in the USA, but legality has never stopped this activity and it will just take place in a more lenient legal regime instead.

We would all be better served if Nintendo simply pursued the uploading of copyrighted software via the extensive powers they already have via the DMCA etc, rather than picking apart the fabric of legal ownership. Nintendo themselves would be better served by this, because it's harmful to their public perception when they aggressively pursue people who are often the most vocally passionate about their games. Public perception is way more supportive when they go after e.g. someone bulk uploading Nintendo software or flagrant profiteering (setting up a Patreon for your emulator is simply inviting trouble IMO, just like when people were selling preloaded DS cards), rather than when they are hounding nobodies on YouTube with takedown requests, or going after stuff that often has public interest beyond piracy.

 

[Danny]

The right to legally modify/reverse-engineer something you purchased is meaningless if all a manufacturer has to do is insert encrypted keys in any part of the process, to suddenly render all of those rights null and void due to a legal carve-out. This is obviously very highly beneficial to corporations and thus would be quite easy to make legal in the USA, but legality has never stopped this activity and it will just take place in a more lenient legal regime instead.

We would all be better served if Nintendo simply pursued the uploading of copyrighted software via the extensive powers they already have via the DMCA etc, rather than picking apart the fabric of legal ownership. Nintendo themselves would be better served by this, because it's harmful to their public perception when they aggressively pursue people who are often the most vocally passionate about their games. Public perception is way more supportive when they go after e.g. someone bulk uploading Nintendo software or flagrant profiteering (setting up a Patreon for your emulator is simply inviting trouble IMO, just like when people were selling preloaded DS cards), rather than when they are hounding nobodies on YouTube with takedown requests, or going after stuff that often has public interest beyond piracy.

But that is why emulation is in a sort of grey area, because as Sony during the 90s showed, some aspects of emulation is entirely legal. But its difficult to reconcile the DMCA with how modern emulation bypass encryption keys.

But i think Nintendo's reaction is based in part because of how widespread info about ''You can play Echoes of Wisdom on 4K/60 fps on PC already'' is spread these days, its not exactly a good look when games you made to be exclusive to your hardware gives a much better experience for people playing it for free on hardware you didn't want to put the games on in the first place.

Imagine how Sony would feel if articles like ''You can play this latest PS5 game 4K/60 fps on your PC already today'', was reguarly happening when the whole point of their coming PS5 pro is to play PS5 games in better quality. It would obviously be seen as a direct challenge to their business model and hardware.

Say if Nintendo wants to sell the Switch 2 in part by making it play Switch games in better resolution and fps, the fact that emulation already delivers that, and also makes it available for free will obviously not be taken too kindly by Nintendo.

 

[KarlRemarx]

But i think Nintendo's reaction is based in part because of how widespread info about ''You can play Echoes of Wisdom on 4K/60 fps on PC already'' is spread these days, its not exactly a good look when games you made to be exclusive to your hardware gives a much better experience for people playing it for free on hardware you didn't want to put the games on in the first place.

It's not "widespread" at all though. It's a few thousand people on forums and media platforms out of an addressable market that has sold 100 million+ units.

And even then, so what? A fixed spec that will inevitably age over time is the trade-off the console market always makes in exchange for reaching tens millions of customers with attractive hardware pricing. Nintendo, Sony, Xbox all make this trade-off every time they create a fixed spec on a closed platform, because it guarantees them royalties, full price controls, etc. Frankly they should just live with the gigantic piles of money this model generates, they are already fortunate that they get to persist with the notion that they aren't a computing device in the same way phones are, and thus avoid legislation legally requiring e.g. sideloading. They should simply take the win.

Imagine how Sony would feel if articles like ''You can play this latest PS5 game 4K/60 fps on your PC already today'', was reguarly happening when the whole point of their coming PS5 pro is to play PS5 games in better quality. It would obviously be seen as a direct challenge to their business model and hardware.

I don't care about how Sony feels. Why should I? If the PS5Pro isn't an attractive offer to a certain group of customers Sony can either accept that their business model won't attract literally every customer, or make changes to their business model accordingly. Switch's business model is absolutely attractive to people who would usually game on PC (i.e. Nintendo have the strongest selection of 1st party exclusives, they have the best priced hardware on the market, they haven't trained their own customers to wait for PC ports, they have a constantly improving services offering - which is the real anti-piracy measure, because most people can be won over to simply buying a product if there are included incentives attached to services (multiplayer, free software, etc)). Sony's model isn't as attractive, and PS5Pro is actually going in the opposite direction to attracting PC users (they've already trained PC customers to simply wait for ports, the hardware is extortionate when a PC user would more readily put $800 towards parts than impulse-buying a console, the library is 99% identical to PC but is also still missing large amounts of Microsoft's output, etc).

Say if Nintendo wants to sell the Switch 2 in part by making it play Switch games in better resolution and fps, the fact that emulation already delivers that, and also makes it available for free will obviously not be taken too kindly by Nintendo.

I think this is part of the actual reason they're pursuing e.g. Youtube content all of a sudden, yeah. To clear away search results relating to 4K Switch content ahead of new hardware announcements. I think if they actually wanted to effectively illegalise emulation they wouldn't accept settlements and push things through the courts.

 

[AruanaRiva]

Hard to claim you are "preserving" games that are still on store shelves IMO

Even harder to pretend preserving games when the game u are preserving haven't even released like 2 weeks lol.

So in the end.

ToTK slayed Yuzu
Echoes killed Ryujinx

The people who brag on social media for pirating Switch game weeks before game launched sure love to poke the bear nest and then get angry when the bear mauled them lol.

 

[Fularu]

I love how in the past people were honest about just wanting the free games (as someone who went through linkers, wildcards, super magicoms, multigame hunters on consoles or just good old piracy in the 8-16 computers days)

Now it’s all about « PreSErvAtIOn » when there’s 0 actual preservation effort and all the emulators are HLE levels ones with tons of hacks to make games work and next to no actual cycle accurate behavior.

It’s highly hypocritical

 

[SquidEnthusiast]

Both emulators would still be around if people could just keep things on the down low like the old days but apparently emulation (especially of Nintendo games) has become a way of life for some people that they simply must share on social media constantly.

 

[RDragon]

I love how in the past people were honest about just wanting the free games (as someone who went through linkers, wildcards, super magicoms, multigame hunters on consoles or just good old piracy in the 8-16 computers days)

Now it’s all about « PreSErvAtIOn » when there’s 0 actual preservation effort and all the emulators are HLE levels ones with tons of hacks to make games work and next to no actual cycle accurate behavior.

It’s highly hypocritical

That's the thing I hate the most. What's worse, what they mean is availability not preservation. They talked about they can't play games like Path to Radiation because it's stuck on the GCN and the physical copies sales for hundreds of dollars, but you would be foolish to think the game is in danger of disappearing from the face of the Earth since Nintendo have shown they know to keep their game's code.

 

[AruanaRiva]

I love how in the past people were honest about just wanting the free games (as someone who went through linkers, wildcards, super magicoms, multigame hunters on consoles or just good old piracy in the 8-16 computers days)

Now it’s all about « PreSErvAtIOn » when there’s 0 actual preservation effort and all the emulators are HLE levels ones with tons of hacks to make games work and next to no actual cycle accurate behavior.

It’s highly hypocritical

Yup. The hypocricy is big big lol. As they actually hurt people who is doing the real preservation.

Now? Preservation term has been poisoned so badly because of all pirates using that term to protect their image from being cheap arse pirate who cant accept being called as pirate lol.

 

[Aostia82]

You are not getting it guys

It's not about preservation
It's about preservation of the FUTURE!111!1!!


That's why they preserve games before street date release

 

[KarlRemarx]

Both emulators would still be around if people could just keep things on the down low like the old days but apparently emulation (especially of Nintendo games) has become a way of life for some people that they simply must share on social media constantly.

This is the correct answer. The modern internet is completely dominated by mass social media that fully incentivises broadcasting what you're doing at all times, which has raised a generation of people who simply do not understand practicing basic opsec about illegal activity, lol.

I love how in the past people were honest about just wanting the free games (as someone who went through linkers, wildcards, super magicoms, multigame hunters on consoles or just good old piracy in the 8-16 computers days)

Now it’s all about « PreSErvAtIOn » when there’s 0 actual preservation effort and all the emulators are HLE levels ones with tons of hacks to make games work and next to no actual cycle accurate behavior.

It’s highly hypocritical

Yup. The hypocricy is big big lol. As they actually hurt people who is doing the real preservation.

Now? Preservation term has been poisoned so badly because of all pirates using that term to protect their image from being cheap arse pirate who cant accept being called as pirate lol.

There are broadly two different demographics at play here with two different goals. You have thousands of kids in developing countries who have literally zero purchasing power demanding free stuff, usually through android emulators, to the point where e.g. emulation developers note that they routinely receive harassment up to and including death threats in google translated English to make the games work on ancient cheap android devices. Then there's the opposite end - wealthy enthusiasts running Switch titles at 4K60 or even 4K120 through a high end GPU etc. You'll find lots of idiots self-rationalising their behaviour (just like any other group of people on earth), but at the end of the day one of these groups is carrying out 90% of the infringement because they literally are unable to buy the product anyway, and of the other group some percentage are enthusiasts who routinely buy Nintendo hardware and software and are as "legitimate" customers as you're likely to get. It's the highly public-facing nature of the behaviour of these morons (i.e. kids going feral in google play store review comments, clout chasers freely uploading clips of unreleased Nintendo games to Twitter) that's destroying emulation. It also doesn't help when emulation developers pretend they are running a business and operate a fucking patreon, no shit Nintendo will go after you when you are basically saying "pay us instead".

That's the thing I hate the most. What's worse, what they mean is availability not preservation. They talked about they can't play games like Path to Radiation because it's stuck on the GCN and the physical copies sales for hundreds of dollars, but you would be foolish to think the game is in danger of disappearing from the face of the Earth since Nintendo have shown they know to keep their game's code.

Yes - but that's an outcome of Nintendo's chosen business model, which creates the scarcity and thus the demand. 99% of the demand would disappear overnight if you could simply buy Nintendo's past output directly and run it on their current hardware. The case for emulation and outright piracy is easily justifiable to most people when they reckon with the idea of paying scalpers and hoarders hundreds of dollars for individual discs, and then setting up a 20+ year old device that was not designed for either the resolution or inputs of a modern TV.

We're seeing a great example of this happening in real-time with PS4 emulation - 99% of the interest/demand for which is coming from a single game Sony appear to be completely unwilling to patch. The ~20 year old quote that "piracy is a service problem" remains the best commentary on the problem and how to resolve it.

 

[AruanaRiva]

And as we all know, the Nintendo Switch died that day and Steam Deck has dominated the handheld market since, right?

I'm not sure what an "official pitch" looks like to you but to most people I'd say it doesn't involve a blink-and-you'll-miss-it section of a trailer that was literally removed and reuploaded.

The idea that not just "pc gamers" (a few thousand redditors while 99% of the market just plays native pc games) but Valve themselves are trying to steal from Nintendo is sub-gameFAQs discourse.

There is no company idiotic and dumb enough to allow things to spiral even further when they can nip the bud asap.

The moment u see other player in the industry has proudly advertised tools to pirate and steal ur money making product on their own platform. Is the warning signal for the company to immediately go ham and crush any potential for that pirates to spiral even further.

Nintendo failed on DS with R4 as they are too late to hit the pirates asap at that time. That piracy problem has been well known problem in many developing nations where R4 sold far more than any legal proper game copies. This practice has even become so ingrained that till now. 2 generations ahead many of those nations industry is still struggling to clean their act up from the highly ingrained tradition to pirates mindsets.

Also that piracy is service problem has always been absolutely laughable statement that comes from the mouth a guy who not only don't produce much games anymore nowadays but just running a game store for other to put their product in.

Steam is not going to be the one who suffer from the piracy there. Because it is not anymore their problem.

 

[RDragon]

This is the correct answer. The modern internet is completely dominated by mass social media that fully incentivises broadcasting what you're doing at all times, which has raised a generation of people who simply do not understand practicing basic opsec about illegal activity, lol.




There are broadly two different demographics at play here with two different goals. You have thousands of kids in developing countries who have literally zero purchasing power demanding free stuff, usually through android emulators, to the point where e.g. emulation developers note that they routinely receive harassment up to and including death threats in google translated English to make the games work on ancient cheap android devices. Then there's the opposite end - wealthy enthusiasts running Switch titles at 4K60 or even 4K120 through a high end GPU etc. You'll find lots of idiots self-rationalising their behaviour (just like any other group of people on earth), but at the end of the day one of these groups is carrying out 90% of the infringement because they literally are unable to buy the product anyway, and of the other group some percentage are enthusiasts who routinely buy Nintendo hardware and software and are as "legitimate" customers as you're likely to get. It's the highly public-facing nature of the behaviour of these morons (i.e. kids going feral in google play store review comments, clout chasers freely uploading clips of unreleased Nintendo games to Twitter) that's destroying emulation. It also doesn't help when emulation developers pretend they are running a business and operate a fucking patreon, no shit Nintendo will go after you when you are basically saying "pay us instead".


Yes - but that's an outcome of Nintendo's chosen business model, which creates the scarcity and thus the demand. 99% of the demand would disappear overnight if you could simply buy Nintendo's past output directly and run it on their current hardware. The case for emulation and outright piracy is easily justifiable to most people when they reckon with the idea of paying scalpers and hoarders hundreds of dollars for individual discs, and then setting up a 20+ year old device that was not designed for either the resolution or inputs of a modern TV.

We're seeing a great example of this happening in real-time with PS4 emulation - 99% of the interest/demand for which is coming from a single game Sony appear to be completely unwilling to patch. The ~20 year old quote that "piracy is a service problem" remains the best commentary on the problem and how to resolve it.

I highly disagree with this quote since the most emulated and pirated game of all time is SMB. A game that has been rereleased several dozen times. And most pirate/emulated games are high profile releases. Only a few are actual interested in Path to Radiance or even Dreamcast games. Heck, Saturn games are both hard to come by and are in danger of disappearing, but no one really cares to emulate them because the system wasn't popular.

 

[Joseki]

Now it’s all about « PreSErvAtIOn » when there’s 0 actual preservation effort and all the emulators are HLE levels ones with tons of hacks to make games work and next to no actual cycle accurate behavior.

It’s highly hypocritical

Incorrect emulation can alter the reception of many games.
The GBA for example is infamous for this, the most popular emulator is VBA and it hasn't been updated in 20 years. Both graphical and audio emulation is plainly wrong.

 

[Danny]

I highly disagree with this quote since the most emulated and pirated game of all time is SMB. A game that has been rereleased several dozen times. And most pirate/emulated games are high profile releases. Only a few are actual interested in Path to Radiance or even Dreamcast games. Heck, Saturn games are both hard to come by and are in danger of disappearing, but no one really cares to emulate them because the system wasn't popular.

The preservation argument does not make logical sense, as you say the most pirated games are new, big budget releases, not small time games that have been forgotten by time. I think such arguments are either misguided, or people using preservation as a moral argument to keep emulation legal, even though they realize that the real goal of emulation is mostly an entirely different, financially based goal.

I think the fact is clear, no one is getting worked up that they can't emulate the newest PS or Xbox games, but any step to make it harder to do the same for Nintendo games causes enormous uproar, like people think Nintendo should be the odd one out of every other big video game company that their games should be 100 % free and available everywhere on release and anything else is an attack on gamers. Because how much of overall gaming do they really ''preserve'' if all emulation efforts are directed against just one company in Nintendo? There are a majority of games being made that never release on Nintendo hardware, so they don't ''preserve'' most games by just emulating Nintendo hardware anyway.

And if the goal is to force Nintendo to put their games on PC the piracy problem will stop that anyway, given that Nintendo wouldn't be able to get any money porting their games to PC as long as PC gamers can enjoy their games for free on PC anyway.

 

[Fularu]

Incorrect emulation can alter the reception of many games.
The GBA for example is infamous for this, the most popular emulator is VBA and it hasn't been updated in 20 years. Both graphical and audio emulation is plainly wrong.

This is basically what I said?

Your response confuses me

 

[Joseki]

This is basically what I said?

Your response confuses me

I was agreeing.

 

[KarlRemarx]

There is no company idiotic and dumb enough to allow things to spiral even further when they can nip the bud asap.

The moment u see other player in the industry has proudly advertised tools to pirate and steal ur money making product on their own platform. Is the warning signal for the company to immediately go ham and crush any potential for that pirates to spiral even further.

Nintendo failed on DS with R4 as they are too late to hit the pirates asap at that time. That piracy problem has been well known problem in many developing nations where R4 sold far more than any legal proper game copies. This practice has even become so ingrained that till now. 2 generations ahead many of those nations industry is still struggling to clean their act up from the highly ingrained tradition to pirates mindsets.

Also that piracy is service problem has always been absolutely laughable statement that comes from the mouth a guy who not only don't produce much games anymore nowadays but just running a game store for other to put their product in.

Steam is not going to be the one who suffer from the piracy there. Because it is not anymore their problem.

Please don't call a statement laughable when your own contributions are gameFAQs-level drivel about "VaLvE mAkE nO GaMes!!!" and continued bullshit about "proudly advertising" piracy, which I already addressed. Steam doesn't suffer in any significant way from piracy because they literally solved the service problem in the PC space (i.e. they made it easy and convenient to be a legitimate customer instead of a pirate, and invested early in stuff like regional pricing for digital goods, which addressed where high volume piracy is historically rampant: developing countries which have often been left to grey/black market activity without official distributors).

The preservation argument does not make logical sense, as you say the most pirated games are new, big budget releases, not small time games that have been forgotten by time. I think such arguments are either misguided, or people using preservation as a moral argument to keep emulation legal, even though they realize that the real goal of emulation is mostly an entirely different, financially based goal.

I think the fact is clear, no one is getting worked up that they can't emulate the newest PS or Xbox games, but any step to make it harder to do the same for Nintendo games causes enormous uproar, like people think Nintendo should be the odd one out of every other big video game company that their games should be 100 % free and available everywhere on release and anything else is an attack on gamers. Because how much of overall gaming do they really ''preserve'' if all emulation efforts are directed against just one company in Nintendo? There are a majority of games being made that never release on Nintendo hardware, so they don't ''preserve'' most games by just emulating Nintendo hardware anyway.

And if the goal is to force Nintendo to put their games on PC the piracy problem will stop that anyway, given that Nintendo wouldn't be able to get any money porting their games to PC as long as PC gamers can enjoy their games for free on PC anyway.

There's no demand for emulation of 99.9% of PS and XB games because those games literally run natively on PC and can be bought there. It's very obvious why Nintendo sees unique levels of demand for emulation: there is literally no legitimate way to access their 1st party software without also buying the hardware. This is the exact same reason PS4 emulation is suddenly progressing rapidly - there is high demand and interest driven almost entirely by 1 game that Sony have neither made more widely available nor even patched to make use of newer PS hardware. It's not some insane conspiracy of thought where someone buys their first GPU and immediately demands free Nintendo games and a copy of Bloodborne.

You are completely mistaken in the assumption that "nobody would buy Nintendo games on PC". By this logic nobody would ever have bought a thing on Steam, given how trivial piracy was on PC at the time. 99% of users do not want to jump through the hoops or deal with the significant downsides of piracy and will simply buy for the combination of convenience and value-adds (multiplayer and online modes/services, for example). This extends to all media - 99% of people will just pay the Netflix/Disney+ sub rather than fuck around with torrents and streaming sites. Nintendo want to keep a tightly integrated hardware/software ecosystem and are free to do so, but that has the completely expected trade-off that you aren't going to meet 100% of customer demand when you are adding additional cost to the customer to enter that ecosystem. Nintendo's job is to balance that trade-off to reach the maximum number of customers (that's where mass-market pricing and highly attractive software helps achieve that, and has achieved that).

I highly disagree with this quote since the most emulated and pirated game of all time is SMB. A game that has been rereleased several dozen times. And most pirate/emulated games are high profile releases. Only a few are actual interested in Path to Radiance or even Dreamcast games. Heck, Saturn games are both hard to come by and are in danger of disappearing, but no one really cares to emulate them because the system wasn't popular.

Is SMB on phones or PC, where the piracy is occurring? No. Does anyone's previous purchases of SMB transfer to modern hardware? No. So it's absolutely a service problem, because there is clearly some level of demand but no legal supply until you go out and buy a Switch (this obviously works, because Nintendo have sold tens of millions of them). Likewise Gamecube/Dreamcast/Saturn games - literally the only legal way to play the vast majority of these titles is by fucking around with 2nd hand markets for ancient hardware and software, which 99% of people will not engage in. Again, near-zero legal supply until legitimate retro collections appear (which is thankfully now happening for these generations of hardware): a service problem. As long as Nintendo operates their business model (which I think is the right way for them to operate) they will always generate some amount of demand on other hardware that can demonstrably play the games - in the case of phones, it's computing hardware that's completely ubiquitous even in developing countries. It's up to Nintendo to make the case to the public to spend money on another device for the sake of videogames.

 

[Danny]

Please don't call a statement laughable when your own contributions are gameFAQs-level drivel about "VaLvE mAkE nO GaMes!!!" and continued bullshit about "proudly advertising" piracy, which I already addressed. Steam doesn't suffer in any significant way from piracy because they literally solved the service problem in the PC space (i.e. they made it easy and convenient to be a legitimate customer instead of a pirate, and invested early in stuff like regional pricing for digital goods, which addressed where high volume piracy is historically rampant: developing countries which have often been left to grey/black market activity without official distributors).



There's no demand for emulation of 99.9% of PS and XB games because those games literally run natively on PC and can be bought there. It's very obvious why Nintendo sees unique levels of demand for emulation: there is literally no legitimate way to access their 1st party software without also buying the hardware. This is the exact same reason PS4 emulation is suddenly progressing rapidly - there is high demand and interest driven almost entirely by 1 game that Sony have neither made more widely available nor even patched to make use of newer PS hardware. It's not some insane conspiracy of thought where someone buys their first GPU and immediately demands free Nintendo games and a copy of Bloodborne.

You are completely mistaken in the assumption that "nobody would buy Nintendo games on PC". By this logic nobody would ever have bought a thing on Steam, given how trivial piracy was on PC at the time. 99% of users do not want to jump through the hoops or deal with the significant downsides of piracy and will simply buy for the combination of convenience and value-adds (multiplayer and online modes/services, for example). This extends to all media - 99% of people will just pay the Netflix/Disney+ sub rather than fuck around with torrents and streaming sites. Nintendo want to keep a tightly integrated hardware/software ecosystem and are free to do so, but that has the completely expected trade-off that you aren't going to meet 100% of customer demand when you are adding additional cost to the customer to enter that ecosystem. Nintendo's job is to balance that trade-off to reach the maximum number of customers (that's where mass-market pricing and highly attractive software helps achieve that, and has achieved that).


Is SMB on phones or PC, where the piracy is occurring? No. Does anyone's previous purchases of SMB transfer to modern hardware? No. So it's absolutely a service problem, because there is clearly some level of demand but no legal supply until you go out and buy a Switch (this obviously works, because Nintendo have sold tens of millions of them). Likewise Gamecube/Dreamcast/Saturn games - literally the only legal way to play the vast majority of these titles is by fucking around with 2nd hand markets for ancient hardware and software, which 99% of people will not engage in. Again, near-zero legal supply until legitimate retro collections appear (which is thankfully now happening for these generations of hardware): a service problem. As long as Nintendo operates their business model (which I think is the right way for them to operate) they will always generate some amount of demand on other hardware that can demonstrably play the games - in the case of phones, it's computing hardware that's completely ubiquitous even in developing countries. It's up to Nintendo to make the case to the public to spend money on another device for the sake of videogames.

But piracy of Switch games have only become ever more mainstream, we have at least 1 million people confirmed to have been downloading ROMs of TOTK and playing it on PC, that would be a pretty big chunk of the potential PC audience of those games if Nintendo ever ported them over. God of War sold like 3 million on PC? So for Nintendo games, a large percentage of potential customers would already be lost from the current piracy figures alone. Which makes potential PC ports return much lower revenue then they otherwise would have done.

So yes, piracy of Nintendo games only makes PC less possible than if Nintendo could release their games on PC and there would be no alternative, cheaper ways to get those games on PC.

Sony and Microsoft also started their PC push after emulation of their hardware and software were no longer on a large scale, while Nintendo is still suffering from 90s style mass piracy even today, which puts them in a fully unique position in the current gaming market. We also know that the PC market is growing, the more people that own a gaming PC and/ or a Steam deck the more potential pirates of Nintendo products will exist. So if over a 1 million people today are pirating the biggest Nintendo games, that would easily swell in a few years.

Valve has been a thorn in Nintendo's side, given that they have fully worked to benefit from widespread Switch piracy for their own hardware products as well. No one that is active online can have avoided seeing that Switch emulation has been pushed as a big selling point for the steam deck, in that you can play both PC and Switch games, on better handheld hardware than the Switch itself, and those Nintendo products are free for Steam deck users as well.

But everything will depend on Nvidia and Nintendo themselves, they must reach the same standard of security as their competitors have reached, if it takes many years to breach their hardware then the piracy problem will automatically be less of a problem, because if the Switch 2 is safe from piracy for most of its active existance then nothing like what happened during the Switch era would be possible to repeat itself during the Switch 2 era. But if they fail once again, going the legal direction makes full sense, even if online rage against them will be massive. Because with new hardware, comes even higher budgets for Nintendo games, and with bigger budgets comes even less a case to be lenient in the case their products are made available to millions of people for free.

But i think that is what a lot of the debate is about, there are some gamers who think Nintendo is some sort of massive, untouchable company that cannot be hurt by piracy, but we can only go back to how dismal their sales was during the Wii U to see how only a new failed generation for Nintendo can hurt them massively as a company, and with piracy problems to bout could lead to mass layoffs happening and fewer Nintendo games, which is why some who enjoy Nintendo products fear piracy problems for that reason.

 

[kazewing]

You are completely mistaken in the assumption that "nobody would buy Nintendo games on PC". By this logic nobody would ever have bought a thing on Steam, given how trivial piracy was on PC at the time. 99% of users do not want to jump through the hoops or deal with the significant downsides of piracy and will simply buy for the combination of convenience and value-adds (multiplayer and online modes/services, for example). This extends to all media - 99% of people will just pay the Netflix/Disney+ sub rather than fuck around with torrents and streaming sites. Nintendo want to keep a tightly integrated hardware/software ecosystem and are free to do so, but that has the completely expected trade-off that you aren't going to meet 100% of customer demand when you are adding additional cost to the customer to enter that ecosystem. Nintendo's job is to balance that trade-off to reach the maximum number of customers (that's where mass-market pricing and highly attractive software helps achieve that, and has achieved that).


Is SMB on phones or PC, where the piracy is occurring? No. Does anyone's previous purchases of SMB transfer to modern hardware? No. So it's absolutely a service problem, because there is clearly some level of demand but no legal supply until you go out and buy a Switch (this obviously works, because Nintendo have sold tens of millions of them). Likewise Gamecube/Dreamcast/Saturn games - literally the only legal way to play the vast majority of these titles is by fucking around with 2nd hand markets for ancient hardware and software, which 99% of people will not engage in. Again, near-zero legal supply until legitimate retro collections appear (which is thankfully now happening for these generations of hardware): a service problem. As long as Nintendo operates their business model (which I think is the right way for them to operate) they will always generate some amount of demand on other hardware that can demonstrably play the games - in the case of phones, it's computing hardware that's completely ubiquitous even in developing countries. It's up to Nintendo to make the case to the public to spend money on another device for the sake of videogames.

STEAM hasn’t solved the issue of game piracy; otherwise, why would developers risk using Denuvo, which could potentially upset users?

Why are most companies unwilling to release new games on DRM-free platforms like GOG?

The only industry that truly solved the piracy issue through 'services' is the music industry, but they did so by largely ignoring most music copyright infringements. As a result, most musicians now rely on live events like concerts to make money, rather than selling their songs.

I hope the gaming industry doesn't head in that direction.

 

[tentacle-tropes]

Valve has been a thorn in Nintendo's side, given that they have fully worked to benefit from widespread Switch piracy for their own hardware products as well. No one that is active online can have avoided seeing that Switch emulation has been pushed as a big selling point for the steam deck, in that you can play both PC and Switch games, on better handheld hardware than the Switch itself, and those Nintendo products are free for Steam deck users as well.

While Valve may benefit they do not wanna engage in open piracy promotion; lest we forget they contacted Nintendo about Dolphin. Valve wants to not burn bridges here & will most likely throw emulation devs under the bus if they have to choose between them or their business.

It’s pushed as a big selling point because the community who this device is still primarily selling to are enthusiasts. And enthusiasts often overvalue emulation compared to other groups.

But everything will depend on Nvidia and Nintendo themselves, they must reach the same standard of security as their competitors have reached, if it takes many years to breach their hardware then the piracy problem will automatically be less of a problem, because if the Switch 2 is safe from piracy for most of its active existance then nothing like what happened during the Switch era would be possible to repeat itself during the Switch 2 era. But if they fail once again, going the legal direction makes full sense, even if online rage against them will be massive. Because with new hardware, comes even higher budgets for Nintendo games, and with bigger budgets comes even less a case to be lenient in the case their products are made available to millions of people for free.

It has little to do with reaching the same standards & everything to do with want. The Switch has probably been Nintendo’s most secure device. The difference here is no one is as interested in MS/Sony to emulate their machines to a quick degree. With their games appearing on PC it becomes even less so. Nintendo & Nvidia just have to not repeat what the off the Switch 1.0 did & they’ll be golden.

But i think that is what a lot of the debate is about, there are some gamers who think Nintendo is some sort of massive, untouchable company that cannot be hurt by piracy, but we can only go back to how dismal their sales was during the Wii U to see how only a new failed generation for Nintendo can hurt them massively as a company, and with piracy problems to bout could lead to mass layoffs happening and fewer Nintendo games, which is why some who enjoy Nintendo products fear piracy problems for that reason.

Piracy will be the least of the reasons for massive layoffs or fewer games. What unchecked piracy problems can lead to is erosion of trust by 3rd parties. However with Nintendo taking action & now with Denuvo working on the system, I’m less inclined this will happen.

 

[KarlRemarx]

But piracy of Switch games have only become ever more mainstream, we have at least 1 million people confirmed to have been downloading ROMs of TOTK and playing it on PC, that would be a pretty big chunk of the potential PC audience of those games if Nintendo ever ported them over. God of War sold like 3 million on PC? So for Nintendo games, a large percentage of potential customers would already be lost from the current piracy figures alone. Which makes potential PC ports return much lower revenue then they otherwise would have done.

So yes, piracy of Nintendo games only makes PC less possible than if Nintendo could release their games on PC and there would be no alternative, cheaper ways to get those games on PC.

Sony and Microsoft also started their PC push after emulation of their hardware and software were no longer on a large scale, while Nintendo is still suffering from 90s style mass piracy even today, which puts them in a fully unique position in the current gaming market. We also know that the PC market is growing, the more people that own a gaming PC and/ or a Steam deck the more potential pirates of Nintendo products will exist. So if over a 1 million people today are pirating the biggest Nintendo games, that would easily swell in a few years.

Valve has been a thorn in Nintendo's side, given that they have fully worked to benefit from widespread Switch piracy for their own hardware products as well. No one that is active online can have avoided seeing that Switch emulation has been pushed as a big selling point for the steam deck, in that you can play both PC and Switch games, on better handheld hardware than the Switch itself, and those Nintendo products are free for Steam deck users as well.

But everything will depend on Nvidia and Nintendo themselves, they must reach the same standard of security as their competitors have reached, if it takes many years to breach their hardware then the piracy problem will automatically be less of a problem, because if the Switch 2 is safe from piracy for most of its active existance then nothing like what happened during the Switch era would be possible to repeat itself during the Switch 2 era. But if they fail once again, going the legal direction makes full sense, even if online rage against them will be massive.

We have confirmation of nothing, because the claim was made on the basis of Nintendo's own internal tracking without backing evidence, and they obviously have an incentive to maximise any perceived loss. And, again - this is exactly the same argument deployed in the 2000's, that PC users would never buy large amounts of software because piracy (which was on a scale far beyond Switch piracy).

The rest of this is conspiratorial rubbish which has already been debunked. You're really just revealing your own biases if you think "Valve has been a thorn in Nintendo's side" or "fully worked to benefit from piracy", which is laughable. They literally proactively contacted Nintendo re: the Dolphin emulator.

STEAM hasn’t solved the issue of game piracy; otherwise, why would developers risk using Denuvo, which could potentially upset users?

I'm sorry, is Steam incompatible with Denuvo or something? As for "potentially upsetting users", this industry is rife with behaviour carried out at the expense of customers with little rationale behind it. Add it to the pile.

Why are most companies unwilling to release new games on DRM-free platforms like GOG?

Because it's a tiny platform and major publishers are unwilling to go DRM-free regardless of reality, just like when they spent a period in the 00's avoiding the platform (even with DRM) because of demonstrably incorrect perceptions about piracy?

The only industry that truly solved the piracy issue through 'services' is the music industry, but they did so by largely ignoring most music copyright infringements. As a result, most musicians now rely on live events like concerts to make money, rather than selling their songs.

Musicians rely on literally everything except selling songs because their cut of revenue is near-zero. It's got nothing to do with some innate property of "services".

 

[Necu]

We have confirmation of nothing, because the claim was made on the basis of Nintendo's own internal tracking without backing evidence, and they obviously have an incentive to maximise any perceived loss. And, again - this is exactly the same argument deployed in the 2000's, that PC users would never buy large amounts of software because piracy (which was on a scale far beyond Switch piracy).

The rest of this is conspiratorial rubbish which has already been debunked. You're really just revealing your own biases if you think "Valve has been a thorn in Nintendo's side" or "fully worked to benefit from piracy", which is laughable. They literally proactively contacted Nintendo re: the Dolphin emulator.


I'm sorry, is Steam incompatible with Denuvo or something? As for "potentially upsetting users", this industry is rife with behaviour carried out at the expense of customers with little rationale behind it. Add it to the pile.


Because it's a tiny platform and major publishers are unwilling to go DRM-free regardless of reality, just like when they spent a period in the 00's avoiding the platform (even with DRM) because of demonstrably incorrect perceptions about piracy?


Musicians rely on literally everything except selling songs because their cut of revenue is near-zero. It's got nothing to do with some innate property of "services".

When BMW chooses to use Denuvo and achieves the highest single player success on Steam. The statement that Piracy is a service issue is powerless.

For GAAS on Steam, piracy is certainly a service issue, as long as you force players to connect to the internet, there will be no piracy problem. Many people do not understand the true meaning of this sentence. The word service here refers to GAAS.

 

[Astrogamer]

The "piracy is a service problem" only works to an extent. To take it to the extreme of every pirate could be placated with good enough service is only true when you "given away for free" as the absolute end. Valve doesn't worry about piracy because they make most of their money from microtransactions and market fees. Since Valve isn't charged for pirated copies, they don't need to worry about it as long other companies suppress the piracy channels that keeps piracy to a manageable level. The actual answer to that quote is that you don't have to supply a better service than piracy as long as you can break the service that enables piracy. If you want to pirate a Disney movie for instance, now you have to dig for a site that will probably not last a few months to get a notably compressed camrip or you have to dig through discords to find the few people providing the torrent file, and hope your ISP doesn't send you a letter in the mail from Disney. Or you can subscribe to Disney+ and not risk that. Even if the movie isn't in the highest quality, it's just less tedious and risky then all that. Like Necu mentions, GAAS also break the practicalities of piracy.

 

[RDragon]

Please don't call a statement laughable when your own contributions are gameFAQs-level drivel about "VaLvE mAkE nO GaMes!!!" and continued bullshit about "proudly advertising" piracy, which I already addressed. Steam doesn't suffer in any significant way from piracy because they literally solved the service problem in the PC space (i.e. they made it easy and convenient to be a legitimate customer instead of a pirate, and invested early in stuff like regional pricing for digital goods, which addressed where high volume piracy is historically rampant: developing countries which have often been left to grey/black market activity without official distributors).



There's no demand for emulation of 99.9% of PS and XB games because those games literally run natively on PC and can be bought there. It's very obvious why Nintendo sees unique levels of demand for emulation: there is literally no legitimate way to access their 1st party software without also buying the hardware. This is the exact same reason PS4 emulation is suddenly progressing rapidly - there is high demand and interest driven almost entirely by 1 game that Sony have neither made more widely available nor even patched to make use of newer PS hardware. It's not some insane conspiracy of thought where someone buys their first GPU and immediately demands free Nintendo games and a copy of Bloodborne.

You are completely mistaken in the assumption that "nobody would buy Nintendo games on PC". By this logic nobody would ever have bought a thing on Steam, given how trivial piracy was on PC at the time. 99% of users do not want to jump through the hoops or deal with the significant downsides of piracy and will simply buy for the combination of convenience and value-adds (multiplayer and online modes/services, for example). This extends to all media - 99% of people will just pay the Netflix/Disney+ sub rather than fuck around with torrents and streaming sites. Nintendo want to keep a tightly integrated hardware/software ecosystem and are free to do so, but that has the completely expected trade-off that you aren't going to meet 100% of customer demand when you are adding additional cost to the customer to enter that ecosystem. Nintendo's job is to balance that trade-off to reach the maximum number of customers (that's where mass-market pricing and highly attractive software helps achieve that, and has achieved that).


Is SMB on phones or PC, where the piracy is occurring? No. Does anyone's previous purchases of SMB transfer to modern hardware? No. So it's absolutely a service problem, because there is clearly some level of demand but no legal supply until you go out and buy a Switch (this obviously works, because Nintendo have sold tens of millions of them). Likewise Gamecube/Dreamcast/Saturn games - literally the only legal way to play the vast majority of these titles is by fucking around with 2nd hand markets for ancient hardware and software, which 99% of people will not engage in. Again, near-zero legal supply until legitimate retro collections appear (which is thankfully now happening for these generations of hardware): a service problem. As long as Nintendo operates their business model (which I think is the right way for them to operate) they will always generate some amount of demand on other hardware that can demonstrably play the games - in the case of phones, it's computing hardware that's completely ubiquitous even in developing countries. It's up to Nintendo to make the case to the public to spend money on another device for the sake of videogames.

And so what? The point is SMB has been readily availability since its release over forty years ago. Calling this a service issue because people can't legally play SMB on their Phones or PCs is just dishonest. Ape Escape games aren't readily availability on these platforms either with some never even getting an overseas release, yet they're not pirated/emulated nowhere near the extent of SMB.

The second bolded is a lie since most GCN games can be play elsewhere outside of the secondhand market, yet GCN games are pirated/emulated more than Dreamcast and Saturn games. And most of the pirated/emulated GCN games are not cult classics like Path to Radiance, but mainstream games like Sunshine, Windwaker, SC2, and TOS. One of the only real major games that can't be played outside of GCN is Melee.

So no, I don't buy the service issue when the most pirated/emulated games are literally mainstream games with many being availability on newer hardware and the excuse being 'well, I can't legally play them on this platform', when I can look at a game like Ape Escape and only a few people care to pirate/emulated it despite it being more rare and having games that never made it overseas.

 

[AruanaRiva]

Please don't call a statement laughable when your own contributions are gameFAQs-level drivel about "VaLvE mAkE nO GaMes!!!" and continued bullshit about "proudly advertising" piracy, which I already addressed. Steam doesn't suffer in any significant way from piracy because they literally solved the service problem in the PC space (i.e. they made it easy and convenient to be a legitimate customer instead of a pirate, and invested early in stuff like regional pricing for digital goods, which addressed where high volume piracy is historically rampant: developing countries which have often been left to grey/black market activity without official distributors).



There's no demand for emulation of 99.9% of PS and XB games because those games literally run natively on PC and can be bought there. It's very obvious why Nintendo sees unique levels of demand for emulation: there is literally no legitimate way to access their 1st party software without also buying the hardware. This is the exact same reason PS4 emulation is suddenly progressing rapidly - there is high demand and interest driven almost entirely by 1 game that Sony have neither made more widely available nor even patched to make use of newer PS hardware. It's not some insane conspiracy of thought where someone buys their first GPU and immediately demands free Nintendo games and a copy of Bloodborne.

You are completely mistaken in the assumption that "nobody would buy Nintendo games on PC". By this logic nobody would ever have bought a thing on Steam, given how trivial piracy was on PC at the time. 99% of users do not want to jump through the hoops or deal with the significant downsides of piracy and will simply buy for the combination of convenience and value-adds (multiplayer and online modes/services, for example). This extends to all media - 99% of people will just pay the Netflix/Disney+ sub rather than fuck around with torrents and streaming sites. Nintendo want to keep a tightly integrated hardware/software ecosystem and are free to do so, but that has the completely expected trade-off that you aren't going to meet 100% of customer demand when you are adding additional cost to the customer to enter that ecosystem. Nintendo's job is to balance that trade-off to reach the maximum number of customers (that's where mass-market pricing and highly attractive software helps achieve that, and has achieved that).


Is SMB on phones or PC, where the piracy is occurring? No. Does anyone's previous purchases of SMB transfer to modern hardware? No. So it's absolutely a service problem, because there is clearly some level of demand but no legal supply until you go out and buy a Switch (this obviously works, because Nintendo have sold tens of millions of them). Likewise Gamecube/Dreamcast/Saturn games - literally the only legal way to play the vast majority of these titles is by fucking around with 2nd hand markets for ancient hardware and software, which 99% of people will not engage in. Again, near-zero legal supply until legitimate retro collections appear (which is thankfully now happening for these generations of hardware): a service problem. As long as Nintendo operates their business model (which I think is the right way for them to operate) they will always generate some amount of demand on other hardware that can demonstrably play the games - in the case of phones, it's computing hardware that's completely ubiquitous even in developing countries. It's up to Nintendo to make the case to the public to spend money on another device for the sake of videogames.

IN what world has Steam solved Piracy? The thing that solved piracy is actually Denuvo Which nowadays has been so secure that the cracker is so dependent on a single person who now has been running a cult and leaving Denuvo game uncracked for years.

If service is truly the problem then any game with Denuvo that actually hurt the game performance and is service problem would not be successful at all.

What has actually combat piracy is gaming being more and more accessible in terms of pricing. The race to the bottom in terms of price that finally allowed many developing countries to finally buy those games, different region pricing to allow many people will lower salary to buy those games and finally then Steam come out. With them providing platform that allow people outside usual Western Europe, USA and Japan to finally been treated as normal gamer that want to buy stuff.

To put all the change simply on Steam success is literally throwing away what has changed in gaming industry and what lead to big growth in gaming sales nowadays.

 

[KarlRemarx]

The "piracy is a service problem" only works to an extent. To take it to the extreme of every pirate could be placated with good enough service is only true when you "given away for free" as the absolute end. Valve doesn't worry about piracy because they make most of their money from microtransactions and market fees. Since Valve isn't charged for pirated copies, they don't need to worry about it as long other companies suppress the piracy channels that keeps piracy to a manageable level. The actual answer to that quote is that you don't have to supply a better service than piracy as long as you can break the service that enables piracy. If you want to pirate a Disney movie for instance, now you have to dig for a site that will probably not last a few months to get a notably compressed camrip or you have to dig through discords to find the few people providing the torrent file, and hope your ISP doesn't send you a letter in the mail from Disney. Or you can subscribe to Disney+ and not risk that. Even if the movie isn't in the highest quality, it's just less tedious and risky then all that. Like Necu mentions, GAAS also break the practicalities of piracy.

1) I never claimed literally all piracy could be prevented. Just a large amount of it.
2) Valve were addressing piracy issues long before the word "microtransaction" even existed. Claiming they "don't worry" about piracy is ridiculous, they've spoken at length about how they were able to achieve massive growth in countries where piracy was seen as endemic and not worth pursuing business in.
3) I'm not sure how anything you've said about the difficulty of piracy disagrees with me? I literally said that most customers will pursue legitimate channels if you make it convenient, well priced, include value-adds etc. "Breaking the service that enables piracy" requires absolutely no additional legislation, there are ample existing legal avenues to drive it underground.

And so what? The point is SMB has been readily availability since its release over forty years ago. Calling this a service issue because people can't legally play SMB on their Phones or PCs is just dishonest. Ape Escape games aren't readily availability on these platforms either with some never even getting an overseas release, yet they're not pirated/emulated nowhere near the extent of SMB.

The second bolded is a lie since most GCN games can be play elsewhere outside of the secondhand market, yet GCN games are pirated/emulated more than Dreamcast and Saturn games. And most of the pirated/emulated GCN games are not cult classics like Path to Radiance, but mainstream games like Sunshine, Windwaker, SC2, and TOS. One of the only real major games that can't be played outside of GCN is Melee.

So no, I don't buy the service issue when the most pirated/emulated games are literally mainstream games with many being availability on newer hardware and the excuse being 'well, I can't legally play them on this platform', when I can look at a game like Ape Escape and only a few people care to pirate/emulated it despite it being more rare and having games that never made it overseas.

Have you considered that perhaps hundreds of millions of people know what Super Mario Brothers is and have a device that will trivially emulate a NES and play a simple platformer on a touchscreen, vs the tiny fraction of that number who know what Ape Escape is?

"Most GCN games can be played outside of the secondhand market" is the lie here. Completely ridiculous. And again - no shit, people are going to pirate mainstream games more than games only tiny fractions of the audience knows about. I never claimed that all emulation was in pursuit of lesser known games. My claim is that you can reduce the incidence of piracy by making more games available natively on modern hardware, because the only legitimate avenue to play a large amount of older games has too many convenience/cost barriers via the 2nd hand market.

If service is truly the problem then any game with Denuvo that actually hurt the game performance and is service problem would not be successful at all.

Having Denuvo absolutely hurts sales performance to a small degree, hence why people attach negative reviews and refund games with Denuvo. Publishers routinely patch Denuvo out post-launch to attract long-tail sales from these customers. Most customers will either not be informed enough about Denuvo to care or simply don't see the potential downsides (lower performance etc) as a major issue. Likewise publishers seem happy to lose some number of sales up-front if it reassures them about piracy.

Playing a game legitimately via Denuvo is still orders of magnitude more convenient than trying to pirate most major releases for 99% of customers.

What has actually combat piracy is gaming being more and more accessible in terms of pricing. The race to the bottom in terms of price that finally allowed many developing countries to finally buy those games, different region pricing to allow many people will lower salary to buy those games and finally then Steam come out. With them providing platform that allow people outside usual Western Europe, USA and Japan to finally been treated as normal gamer that want to buy stuff.

To put all the change simply on Steam success is literally throwing away what has changed in gaming industry and what lead to big growth in gaming sales nowadays.

I really don't care about whatever personal issue you have with Steam that requires you to constantly downplay and outright lie, which you've made clear throughout this thread. It is an objective fact that they jumped into digital distribution before any major distributor and were massively successful based on the combination of basic DRM/convenience/value-adds/regional pricing, which completely contradicted the narrative around piracy at the time.

 

[WildCard]

These are overblown and evidence-free assertions ("pretty sure x", "I bet y"), like most of the narrative around piracy as an issue. All of the scaremongering above re: 3rd parties is easily disproven by 3rd parties' extensive and constantly deepening support of PC, which is by far the most trivial platform to pursue piracy on. Nobody at Capcom or S-E is giving Nintendo a hard time about issues that almost entirely stem from a security flaw in the v1 Switch, just like none of them abandoned Playstation 1 or the DS.

Nintendo operate an integrated hardware/software business. People reverse engineering the hardware is an occupational hazard of that business. The way to overcome that is the same way Nintendo achieved success all the other times this happened (particularly the Wii and DS) - they make the value/service proposition good enough that 99% of customers will engage on Nintendo's terms. Most customers absolutely do not want to fuck around with the actual process of engaging with piracy.

The approach of third-parties (especially the Japanese ones) putting an additional pressure on Nintendo is worth to consider though.
Especially as Japanese third-parties don't have much the luxury of choice amongst business decisions these days, with SIE that has been more or less bailing out on the JP market after several self-sabotages of the Playstation brand. PC is a decent alternative for some of these third-parties but not for all either, some Installbase users in the previous Media Create thread (Week 38) pointed this out. Switch is pretty much the market leader so it's understandable that Nintendo doesn't want to be perceived as the easy-piracy system (with emulators facilitating it alongside of games being playable a week earlier), as third-parties are often showcased during its Direct events while their support continues to grow.

I remember Prototype, a visual novel publisher, making use of crafty anti-piracy measures on the Playstation Portable (on titles such as Flowers and Grisaia) late into the console's life. I do not recall everything but it involved at least temporarily ejecting the UMD disc during data installation as a check-up, something not possible to achieve on a CFW PSP or emulation.

@SquidEnthusiast is also right in that the two Switch emulators could have been ignored by Nintendo if the virtue-signaling, from the following base specifically, wasn't so strong these days to the point of easily exposing everything into light. I also believe the attempt of making Dolphin available on Steam was very short-sighted too. It was not only asking trouble from Nintendo, but could have caused an eventual shift of opinion from Japanese third-parties in regard to Steam.

 

[Fularu]

Far more people download full scummvm or exodoss packs then go out of their way to purchase the games legitimately on gog.

People are, once again, hypocrites because they see no moral issue with pirating a game if it’s not on their plateform (launcher) of choice (for example pirating gog, origin of epic gs exclusives because « they’re not on Steam »).

Piracy never was just about a « poor business model », it has a significant entitlement factor.

Also Steam was never about having a new distribution channel to address piracy, that’s a revisionist history.

Steam was a Battle.net copycat where Valve could channel their customers and better entrench them on their ecosystem with cross games functionality ala Blizzard

 

[Old sorta fan]

Musicians rely on literally everything except selling songs because their cut of revenue is near-zero. It's got nothing to do with some innate property of "services".

When a musician sells a record or CD, they get between $1 and $2 depending on their contract. If they sell 100,000 copies, the act gets about $100,000 to be conservative. That’s not zero, for a solo act or small band. It actually matters a lot for an individual person who is not at Taylor Swift’s level of fame. Back to her business later.

Back before the industry voluntarily nuked its sales revenues for nothing in return, popular musical acts regularly sold 1 million or more physical copies of their albums. That means the actual musicians got about $1 million for their record. Now, the musicians get nothing, the record labels get nothing except equity in a business (Spotify) that can’t ever be cash positive. The only one who won were the software bros.

Putting everything on Spotify has been a business disaster for everyone, just like the movie business putting everything on streaming. If you engage in a race to the bottom with pirates, you end up at the bottom with a product that the market no longer values and the pirates still pirate. Everybody loses except the pirates and the software bros.

Taylor Swift has been acting a lot like Nintendo in recent years. She has been working to re-train fans to buy her work on vinyl records and CD’s. Her albums are ubiquitous from Target down to mom and pop indie record stores. She tries to make them premium products with multiple versions that include posters and artwork and extra songs that aren’t on Spotify. She has been through a bad scenario with her previous record label where some behind the scenes manager sold her catalog and cashed out. She is making that purchase worthless by re-recording her catalog music as well as re-selling it on records and CD’s. She is also proving to the industry and retailers that physical music has value. She is using her clout to fight back on the misguided idea that the way to profit in the entertainment business is to pro-actively reduce the value of your product to zero. Musicians should be compensated when someone wants to listen to their work, just like a video game maker should be compensated if someone wants to play their game.

Sounds a lot like Nintendo and their fight to preserve the value of their software. Piracy is not a service delivery problem. Piracy is when someone wants to play a video game and doesn’t want to pay (or can’t in developing countries). Nothing more complicated than that. That quote about piracy being a service delivery issue was made by a guy selling his online PC game store to PC game publishers. It was just self-serving salesmanship. Nothing wrong with Gabe Newell being a businessman but let’s not pretend he’s some sort of impartial expert.

 

[KarlRemarx]

Why are you again explaining music industry revenue to me when I literally just explained, and everyone already knows because we've all seen the revenue splits, that game industry revenues operate completely differently? The move to digital increased the revenue split in the games industry, not decreased it. Likewise, "just be Taylor Swift" is not relevant or even sound advice to the videogame industry.

Anyway guys you win, it is incredibly tiresome to read 3 posts of "no, you're wrong, there couldn't possibly be any more complexity to this than pirates are simply satan's little envoys on earth" for every 1 post of mine. I'm out.

 

[Fularu]

Maybe if the crux of your arguments wasn’t essentially made out of strawmen and whatifs and instead focused on tangible data and an understanding of software piracy from the 80s (when Apple was basically orchestrating the distribution of illegal software to facilitate the Apple II’s adoption rate or how Microsoft turned a blind eye to illegal software installs with every pc sold) up till now and how it actually functions (no, it’s really not just a matter of ease of distribution and software piracy was mostly reduced by how complex, risky and troublesome it became to pirate software) then we could have a discussion.

Instead your sole point is « availability and pricing » which is barely the tip of the iceberg.

I mean, video, books and manga are widely pirated even though they’re just as easy to access as your typical Steam release. Same with classic games (gog), older console games (say up to PS2/WiiU/Switch/3DS) and legacy software.

Why? Because it’s trivial and you have whole sections on the internet dedicated to providing people with 0 effort solutions.

When someone releases a monthly PC game pack with super clean, fully functional, properly cracked games, then you will see how this « piracy issue » never left.

 

[Djehuty]

I think it’s important to remember

The lead dev came into an agreement, and thus the project was terminated.

That is all we know.

 

[KtSlime]

I think it can be a bit hard for people who pay for their software to feel much sympathy for people who decide to not pay for their software. While I do sympathize with people who are unable to afford certain luxuries, I think many people when they can't afford something just choose not to get that thing. It's not like there aren't other things they can afford that they can do instead, the Internet is full of free things people can do to entertain themselves without resorting to piracy.

While obviously not everyone using these emulators are pirates, and I think people should be allowed to used emulators if they want to (if they aren't using it to play pirated software or software that has yet to release), however I don't really think they should feel entitled to it. Nintendo isn't doing some evil against you just because they want to restrict access to emulators to pirates, they aren't infringing on your rights, they are just taking measures that they think will be most effective in protecting their business and assets. I don't personally see the need to emulate my Switch on a PC so that I can get better graphics, I think for the most part everything runs and looks good enough, if you want to run your software in an emulator - have fun, but you should understand that there is a chance that Nintendo will use their resources and the law to interfere with distribution of such emulators, and you either just got to say "oh well it was fun while it lasted, whatever" when it happens or find a new emulator, or work on your own. Getting upset and screaming "but my rights" when no one has infringed on your rights just seems really silly to me.