This is Nintendo trying to enforce Japanese law on a global scale, again.
Nintendo, I used to love you. Now I hate you. Stop it.
Nintendo was never reading my comment to begin with. Its merely an expression of disappointment and frustration. I never expected it to ever actually do anything.
I know, the joke was there and I had to take it. I wholeheartedly agree with you however
They only listen to Ja Rule, hopefully he can help us make sense of this
Why is Nintendo such a gigantic piece of shit about fucking everything
Some of it is pure hubris. But some of it is American IP law, which will punish you if you don’t zealously prosecute people in defense of your patents. Its sort of like laws on squatting. If someone is openly and notoriously using your IP and you don’t try to sue them for a long enough time, they can claim the property as functionally abandoned.
For Nintendo, which hasn’t had a particularly good new idea in 20 years, the idea of losing Mario or Link or Pikachu to a legal loophole like this would be devastating.
I’d agree with you, except Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community that is just desperately trying to enjoy games in their own way.
Sony has left basically all emulation projects alone as well as modding projects like 60FPS patches (there was one emulator that they took to court in the 90s, Bleem, but Bleem was charging money for the emulator. Funnily enough, Bleem won the case and was allowed to continue existing, but the company went under due to the cost of the legal battle) .
Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this. They actively choose to stifle such products so that they themselves can offer tightly curated versions on their own schedule and at their own price. This isn’t an IP protection strategy, it’s an agressive cornering of their own market.
Sony probably just learned their lesson when they lost their case against the Bleem! emulator back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. They were, originally, just as rabid as Nintendo against emulation. And perhaps they also learned that you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Then again, while Sony isn’t as aggressive as Nintendo, they are a bit slow on the up take and sometimes do really dumb things. Like their current strategy of releasing the first thing of a series on PC but the followups only on the PS5 to try and get PC gamers to buy PS5s. Why would I do that if my save isn’t on that platform and there’s no way to convert them?
The followups do usually come, just later. It’s more like the GTA double dipping strategy where they get console users (and impatient PC users who buy a console) then PC users, both often paying at full price.
That’s the thing though, they really were never as rabid as Nintendo. Bleem wasn’t the first PS1 emulator, it was just the fact that it was a commercial product that Sony took issue with, honestly understandably so.
There are actually PS1 emulators from the pre-Bleem era that are still available. Sony did nothing to shut those ones down because they were being offered freely.
Piracy is a totally different deal. I’m not delusional, any company that owns an IP is completely within their rights to aggressively stomp piracy at every turn, and I think it’s silly to criticize a company for trying to protect one of their main sources of income (I mean really, do people expect a company to spend billions on a product, then just be okay with the theft of that product?).
That’s not to say I’ve never sailed the high seas, or think it’s objectively wrong to do so no matter what, but I tend to save it for times where I really wouldn’t be able to enjoy the product otherwise (abandonware, or in Nintendo’s case, games they stubbornly lock behind ridiculous paywalls).
Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community
What IP does Sony hang its hat on? I’m hard pressed to name a uniquely Sony-esque title or franchise. They partner with Square Enix on the reg, but Square is also horrifyingly litigious.
Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this.
No. There are proven effective ways to monetizing the modding community and exploit them for their free labor. And that’s not part of the Nintendo business strategy, possibly because their creative directors’ egos can’t handle it or possibly because some bean counter thinks it’ll hurt profits long term or maybe possibly even because Nintendo has a better-than-average work culture and the staff doesn’t like the idea of being undercut at their jobs by hobbyists.
Idk. But I also just don’t get the desire to bang your heads against this wall over and over again, on the modder side of the equation. There are other franchises and platforms to mod on. At this point, it feels more like a battle of wills than a rational strategy on either end.
What IP does Sony hang its hat on?
Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.
I mean, I get what you’re saying, they don’t have something as iconic as Mario, but to say you’re hard pressed I think is a bit of hyperbole. Sony has had a really well rounded line of exclusives for decades. Sure, some are on PC now, but they’re expressly “PlayStation ports” not console ports.
There are other platforms and franchises to mod on
I personally disagree with that attitude. If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly because we’d just move on to the next thing. There are people out there who really don’t care about modding Skyrim, they want to mod BOTW.
Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.
They’ve all got their own boutique developers and were simply published by Sony at one point or another (not even exclusively). Insomniac Games seems to be the real owner of the IP for a bunch of them. Hell, most of these are just knock offs of other franchises. Sackboy is a very obvious Mario/Sonic analog that simply never got popular in the same way.
If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly
There are definitely some publishers more open to modding than others. Early on, you could accuse Nintendo of being a sleeping giant who failed to give modders warning or opportunity to compromise. But now modders are just trying to hug a very large hedgehog with it’s spikes out.
It’s not patents, it’s trademarks. Kleenex is the best example: Overuse of it as a generic term leads the company to call it “Kleenex brand”. Lego has fought this for years, with the boxes promoting calling them “Lego bricks”, lest all building bricks become generic “Legos”.
Patents expire after 17 years regardless of usage, trademarks can last forever.
American IP law
IP and copyright are two entirely different things.
IP stands for “intellectual property” as far as I know, and copyright is one form of that
Right, but when companies go after pirated games, they are going after them because of copyright, not patents or trademarks. The way copyrights are enforced and the way the law works is a lot different than how it works with patents and trademarks.
There is no “use it or lose it” clause for copyrights. If somebody is breaking copyright, you still have the right to enforce it for a long as the copyright is still valid, and don’t have to vigorously defend it to keep it.
There are people commenting on that article that are saying they don’t even think modding games is “right”. Talk about a bootlicker 😅
A lot of that seemingly came from when modder = cheater in GTAV. Saw a huge swing to that at the height of that game’s popularity.
Edit: Read through the comments and it’s related to GTA but in a different way. The guy was comparing bootlegging to modding because someone in his country, Indonesia, was modding GTA:SA to add children’s show characters to it, changing the packaging to make it more appealing to children, and then is selling the discs to people. Which is a whole other can of worms.
Anyone else that mentioned they didn’t like modding didn’t really elaborate.
I wouldn’t even call that ‘modding’. It’s counterfeiting.
I mean if the way you get there is by modifying the thing, then it’s a mod.
Modding is to speciation as counterfitting is to convergent evolution.
and because of an attitude like this, my family wil never buy anything from nintendo again.
Just buy used. You get all the goodies without supporting their shitty practices, while not even having to deal with the ethics of piracy. It’s all win.
Honestly, pirating Nintendo products should be considered an ethical obligation at this point, just to spite them.
I have been since 1998, but I ramped it up recently since they went after Yuzu.
You know what they say; if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
It’s not stealing in any case, it’s copyright infringement. Which I will happily do!
Same. I’m not buying an entire console just for Zelda.
Same with Sony. I’m not buying a PS5 for final fantasy.
Fuck you Nintendo. Fuck you Sony.
I just downloaded the entire GameCube library on my seedbox yesterday, SNES, NES, N64, etc are next.
Not even just out of spite. In a way its another form of “voting with one’s wallet”. It will affect their sales, and if their heads aren’t too far up their assess (like, sitting on their own shoulders), they’ll finally get a clue.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Pirated copies of old ROMs that Nintendo doesn’t sell anymore cannot be counted as “lost sales,” so that really only applies to their latest releases.
You’re right. I wasn’t sure if you were talking about new or old games. I’ll always encourage owning ROMs as opposed to paying monthly to access them for the few years they’ll be available on [current device]. And with such a tiny library, too.
Then there are other factors, like not being able to access certain versions (Nintendo offers only the Shindou version of SM64 because breaking an ancient single player game for fun is verboten).
Personally, I think I’d rather not even give them the word of mouth of having played their game. There’s so much out there to play, and plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this, even if it’s second hand.
plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this
So you only play indie games? Because that’s basically the only way you avoid “companies doing lousy stuff.”
If there’s any time playing only indie games is viable it’s now. We’ve had high quality indie releases outpacing how fast you can play them for a few years now.
Especially on PC. Also, people forget that Indie doesn’t necessarily mean “made by a small team/low budget”. It just means it was produced by a studio that isn’t at the behest of some massive corperation/faceless number crunching shareholders. CD Projekt Red is an independant studio, as is Valve.
Also, some games are developed independently by small studios, but then marketed and published by a larger company. Devolver is an example of a publishing house with an excellent track record of just letting the indie dev teams they work with do whatever they want.
CD Projekt is publicly traded.
Yup. I tend to like Annapurna published games.
Steam Deck and other Linux handhelds make it super easy to play indies.
So you only play indie games?
Pretty much.
More specifically, I only play new games that I can verify the author is receiving a fair wage. That tends to be pretty indie.
In the rare case that I’m somehow caught up on my indie game library, I also play open source games and AAA title abandonware.
Moving from “patient gamer” to “gamer with a strong stance against Nintendo’s and EA’s bullshit” honestly wasn’t a huge deal. And it continues to be easy on my wallet.
More and more lately, but not exclusively. I have an increasingly long list of things that are deal-breakers for me, and I haven’t run out of stuff to play.
Why bother? Paid, non-transferable cloud backups, low-spec hardware that wears out in a few months, over-hyped/half-finished games (assuming they’re ever released), back catalogs that aren’t available if you don’t subscribe or repurchase every generation… Just skip em.
If you want AAA games, there’s plenty you can play mobile or on PC (or both), or if you specifically want indie, there’s plenty of them too on Itch.io , individual websites, and steam (among many others; GoG, HumbleBundle, etc). You frequently don’t even need to pay for these games, since a lot of them are free or via user-decided donations (mostly re: indies).
Hardware that can run them range everywhere from GPD handhelds to Steam Deck to any number of either’s competitors, and they also function as more than just game machines since they run either Linux or Windows.
Nintendo who?
You can also get an Odin 2 for $299, that runs quite a bunch of Switch games plus every earlier generation of games too.
Nope. I’d still have to buy games somehow and I’m fucked if I’m paying a tenner less for second hand because Nintendo games rarely drop in price. Also not paying full price. If anything I’d buy a hacked switch and pirate the games.
I’ve got 500gb of games on my switch, about 10 of them were bought…
Good for you mate. I have about 20 and I hardly ever play the damn thing. There hasn’t been enough exclusives on it that has made buying it worthwhile and I don’t play handheld ever so I just buy multiplat on pc or ps5.
Yup. This is also why I stopped buying Nintendo products.
This has been my stance for decades. They’re worse than Ubisoft when it comes to immoral and unethical treatment of their fans and customers.
I do get the Ubisoft hate, but at the very very least, they don’t shut mods down. There are still mods being actively developed for games like Ghost Recon 1 and Rainbow Six 3.
They can still get all the way fucked for pulling The Crew.
They’ve been like this for decades.
My last Nintendo buy was a wii for homebrew…
GameBanana mods have saved me so much wasted time while playing animal crossing nh with my daughter.
The game is cute but it’s so slow with many long loading screens and has one if the worst UIs of any game I’ve ever played. Mods were able to help a bit atleast.
Fuck Nintendo.
I am getting really tired of these all these chucklefucks being in charge of things they patently do not understand. Modders are the modern lifeline of gaming. They work for free, fix your fuck-ups, and breath life into games that are years and sometimes decades old. Rimworld and Factorio both started their crowd funding campaigns in 2013, and both are wildly popular 11 years later, still selling copies. Factorio is just now coming out with their first expansion, and Rimworld just came out with their 4th. Neither Ludeon Studios (Rimworld) nor Wube Software (Factorio) have had ANY financial need to produce any other projects besides these games. Why are they so wildly profitable and evergreen? They both have rabid modding communities that have been supported and cultivated by the developers constantly fixing and expanding modding support to allow for an infinite variety of new content to be created for their games. Hell, the Vanilla Expanded team of Rimworld modders have actually turned it into a primary income source via Patreon.
AAA devs need to just sit down and thank these modders for tirelessly working on their games after release for free. Ever since DoTA became more popular than Warcraft 3, they all have their panties in a bunch and keep trying to claim ownership over all mods. No, bad developers smacks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. God, it pisses me off to no end.
They both have rabid modding communities
Minecraft would have been dead a decade ago if it wasn’t for modding. Look at all those custom servers and hosting platforms. All the Youtube content.
YouTube changed because of Minecraft and gaming. Used to be, shorter videos were YouTube MO, and that’s how you were paid well. Long form videos changed the landscape, and those videos started at gaming content, Minecraft being the main attractor.
*Nintendont
The lawsuit company which makes games on the side strikes again.
And this is why I haven’t bought anything Nintendo since the DSi. Fuck you, Nintendo.
Buy nintendo stuff.
Just buy it used, and hack it, lol.
Its what I did with my New3DSXL (god I hate the naming conventions on these things…)
Stop playing Nintendo games and buying Nintendo consoles. Why support a company that is so hostile to its own fanbase?
Because their games are so good. There is no denying that Mario games are incredible platformers with super tight controls and any Zelda game is going to be a good adventure at the very least.
That’s why pirate then, anyways.
The latest Mario games have seemed to been quite meh for me, like out of watching gameplay of them anyway. Legend of Zelda though I’m not a Zelda fan but dang was tears of the Kingdom fun to watch, almost made me break my boycott on their products, thankfully though they’ve issued like three rounds of dmca since which has firmly solidified my decision.
Have they? IMO Super Mario Odyssey is the #1 Mario game ever made (Super Mario World being #2). And Wonder is pretty good. Heck, even tbr 3d remake collection thing was pretty nice, as far as “remastered” releases go.
Outside of a few first party titles (Even those have been lackluster), Nintendo doesn’t really have much going for it lately does it? I know the Switch 2 is coming which I have no desire for. Hell, my Switch hasn’t been touched in a couple years. So many other options that Nintendo no longer sits on the pedestal it once did.
Switch 2 is coming which I have no desire for.
I was hyped for the Switch 2 until the latest round of bullshit lawsuits. Now I’m going to pass.
I’ll be sure to buy an emulator from China pre-loaded with every Switch 2 title in about a decade, though.
I honestly care more to see what comes out of a Switch 2 emulator than what games it will play.
It’s the typical end-of-generation lull right now, but even with that, the brand is broadly, wildly popular. The Switch is approaching the PS2’s sales record. Throw in all the money from MTX now and it’s surely the most profitable venture ever in traditional video games.
That’s precisely why Nintendo can afford to burn up goodwill with trash like this move.
I couldn’t disagree more. Other than Pokémon their first-party releases have been pretty much flawless this generation, it’s arguably the strongest lineup of games any Nintendo console has ever seen. There’s a reason the Switch is currently in route to become the best selling console of all time. That’s not an excuse to their legal team shenanigans, of course, but credit where credit is due.
I’m sure the fact that Nintendo systems sell well with families and has been massively cheaper than a ps5/Xbox series x plus been available for much longer and there’s been very little stock problems unlike the ps5 has nothing to do with why its one of the top selling systems… Comments like yours always read like propaganda as they never mention other factors than games.
Why, just because I decided to leave my honest opinion instead of trashing Nintendo like every other comment here? I can see where people are coming from with their complaints but to say Nintendo’s games have been disappointing is absurd. Yes, there are other factors contributing to these sales numbers, and none of them would matter at all if the Switch didn’t also have great games on it.
I’ve been the same way with my switch, I haven’t touched it for probably a year and a half outside of a short bit when tears of the Kingdom launched where I replayed some of breath of the wild and a small portion of Animal Crossing, I agree
They had been falling for at least 4 years now, I had already strayed from doing anything on the switch from lack of appeal, but their crackdown on dmca with the yuzu Community was the final straw for me, I didn’t even use the emulator myself but I’ve always heavily embraced emulation and the ability to Tinker with stuff that you purchase and that just didn’t sit right with me.
It was also around that time that I actually read into what happened with Gary Bowser, and that made me sick to my stomach, because it was essentially the equivalent of Prosecuting a cashier for the crimes that the CEO did.
Honestly even if they were still prospering I wouldn’t recommend the products, it’s hard enough to recommend their product to customers in the first place due the platform restrictions and the fact that they just keep regurgitating the three same IP over and over again, and that’s without the active hostilities towards their fanbase
ahh Nintendo. don’t like our game our way? fuck you.
Modding is not a commercial venture, Nintendo! Get fucked.
Yikes
uBlock stopped at 53 blocks.
Went on to that modder’s profile and I can only see comments on randomizer mods? How is that infringing lol. That’s a shame since I loved replaying the original Breath of the Wild with the Linkle mod that even changed dialogue.
The mods only work with ROMs, so the idea is to take down anything that might make people want ROMs to emulate. Whether they have a legal right to do so or not.
