MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Another major website shuts down due to Nintendo's lawsuit...what's next?

> > It's their property. It is against the law to pirate / distribute / steal / sell /
> > make money from someone else's IP in many countries.
>
> +1
>
> If Nintendo are still selling games, whether they be crappy old 80s NES games on
> Virtual Console or the latest Switch games, it is up to them to make sure their IP
> remains protected - that's the entire point of copyright.
>
> There are way more companies that are more strict than Nintendo, for example movie
> studios which are enforcing copyrights over films that haven't seen a release in over
> thirty years (including those which have never had a home release at all), with them
> making sure those pesky old VHS rips and bootleg DVDs are pulled from the internet
> ASAP (especially on YouTube), despite having no intentions whatsoever of releasing
> the movie again, be it digitally via Netflix or on DVD/Blu-Ray. The Keep Circulating
> The Tapes trope is a real thing.

The thing is a lot of that content IS NOT available to purchase these days, even if people want to.

The most popular 1st party games tend to be, although not always in unmodified form, once you start drifting beyond that it gets sketchy, very sketchy in terms of what you can purchase.

Sure, you can purchase the original cartridges, and hardware, and hardware to work with that hardware (because if you conntact a NES up to a modern set you usually get a really bad display with lag and disappointment)

For the rarer, more obscure titles you're often looking at high prices too.

I have several friends who collect older platforms and games, so they legally own them. You know how much money Nintendo get from those people? £0 because after paying out the nose for a lot of these classic games in original form they don't have the money to buy the new stuff.

We've already seen the 'war on 2nd hand games' with the digital movement, DLC etc. because the manufacturers / developers got pissy about people buying 2nd hand games, so clearly they don't actually see that as better than people pirating them anyway, except it's legal. I'm sure if they could get away with saying it wasn't legal they would there too.

So it's unclear what Nintendo actually want people to do here, simply not play the old games that aren't on their digital store at all? Only play exactly what is currently being offered via official digital stores and those piss-poor 'mini' consoles?

It's a balancing act, as I also have friends who download tons of games, emulators etc. and still spend a fortune on original Nintendo material. Nintendo are directly making a lot more money out of those people than the people actually going the legal route for playing these old games.

I'm not so much into Nintendo stuff myself anyway, but say this was Sega instead, I remember "The Super Shinobi" as being the game with Batman / Spiderman in it (as it was one of the import games I had) yet outside of downloading the ROM, or finding the original cartridge you literally can't play that version anymore, even if the game IS offered. For legal reasons, the proper version can't be sold even by Sega / Nintendo, instead we have to live with a modified version of history, that doesn't match what we remember. Do Sega / Nintendo want me paying what could be upwards of £100 for the original of something like that, with none of the money going to them, or would they rather I bought whatever new games they have coming out?