They said capitalism bred innovation too but all it actually bred was profit. Innovation is work. Why improve a bad product when you can cripple or buy out the competing ones?
I’m reminded of how the English tried to lower the cobra population during their occupation of India, offering a bounty for each snake head that was turned in. The locals started breeding cobras into a profitable enterprise. When the colonials realised what was happening, they cancelled the bounty; all the breeding stock was then simply released. Yet more cobras.
The metric by which a system is measured will determine how that system is optimised, not the system’s original intention.
Schools measure grades, not learning. The English measured snake heads, not population. Capitalism measures capital, not innovation.
I feel strongly that once games reach a certain age, there should be laws preventing companies from going after freely transmissible copies of said game. If you can’t buy a console from the manufacturer and you can’t buy the game from the publisher, then where’s the harm?
If anything, emulating Nintendo games has furthered innovation. The PC port for Mario 64, any Pokemon romhack, etc, all can only exist because of emulation
It stifles innovation in the same way that museums and libraries stifle innovation ie. in no way
Isn’t there a Retroarch core for Doliphin? And Retroarch is on Steam. Maybe the Dolphin core is not available on the Steam version though.
Anyway, thankfully if you are tech savvy enough to get Dolphin to work, you are more than likely also capable of side loading it on the Steamdeck.
It’s amazing how they can be so over zealous about protecting their IP and at the same time do nothing about conservation of their older, less blockbustery games.
Must be so tough giving your all to a Nintendo game and seeing it disappear from the face of the earth, having only the retro gaming community and emulators working to keep your work alive and in the hands of gamers.
Nintendo is a incredibly poor steward of their own legacy. They hold amazing pieces of software hostage to… lets face it… average to unnecessary hardware. And if a game is not moving console sales… they just let it rot.
@Mars Tbh this is the risk with making games exclusive to any console (as well as any platform, speaking more broadly), or for any publisher.
The games industry across the board is largely terrible at preserving their past works, with it only recently becoming even of slight interest to any of them (e.g. Microsoft backwards compatibility). They’d rather old IP rot & be forgotten than risk releasing it & losing the slightest profit opportunity from a nostalgia cash-in.
That’s why I like GOG. No DRM bullshit and they actually put in some effort to make old games run on modern hardware.
When it comes to console games, emulation is the only way to go most of the time. If only they would just let you buy ROMs legally for a fair price. Instead Nintendo likes to give you a sub par experience and only if you subscribe to their service. No way to purchase old games. Not that you ever really owned the eShop games you bought, but at least it was not tied to a bloody subscription service.
My brother bought an original box case of SWAT 4 for over 100 dollars, saying it was the only way he could get it, I then bought it on GOG for 9 bucks lol. He then swapped to saying he wanted it for the box and art and all that (which is a valid reason), but that definitely wasn’t why he spend 100+
He then swapped to saying he wanted it for the box and art
I would guess that was after he found out the disc doesn’t run on a modern PC.
It actually did work! idk how lol
Video games are a very interesting medium to me, when it comes to preservation. With movies, TV, Books, and Music, it is very easy and convenient to experience older content. CDs, DVDs, Bluerays, etc are very easy to play on almost any hardware (if you’ve invested heavily in Laser Disk, I have some bad news for you, though). Meanwhile any game ever made is largely trapped on the console it was designed for. If I want to show someone Casablanca, I can easily show them; but if I want to show them Ocarina of Time, I would need to have a 30 year old console if you believe Nintendo. This, to me, is absurd since A) Nintendo doesn’t make any money even if I do buy the N64 cart, and B) I would need to buy and maintain every console that has a game with any cultural relevance for the foreseeable future.
Emulation is a very useful tool for game preservation. I’ve heard Nintendo is actually very good internally at game preservation and has original source code from every game they’ve ever made; but that doesn’t do a lot of good when older generation games are left in the Nintendo vault. I wouldn’t have a problem with Nintendo being so staunchly anti-emulation if they actually made their older games available, but if you ever want to play games like Chibi-Robo you either need to be OK shelling out ~180 USD for the game and ~80USD for the GameCube, or emulate it
I wonder how much money they’d make if they just put all of there old games on the eShop, like, I cannot think of a good resource my self to just not have access to most though official means, it’s just loss sales, and it also hurts your customers
The crazy thing is they did that for a while with the Wii virtual console, and I think they also had a Wii U Virtual Console and a 3DS one as well. The problem is the titles never transferred over, so you had to keep buying them over and over (though this is still preferable to the current NES/SNES/GBC Virtual Consoles in the NSO subscription). One of the things I think Microsoft actually does well is their Backwards Compatibility. If you buy an old game on from an old console, it’ll still carry over (though my understanding is this is only possible due to having a PC-like architecture across all their consoles, so it’s easier to achieve)
The copyright term for works owned by a corporation should be cut wayyyy down. I’m fine with a long copyright if it’s owned by a person, but corporations shouldn’t be able to lock down things that are older than like 20 years old. People shouldn’t be forced to buy a long discontinued console in order to legally play a old game.
With that strategy, we’d wind up with shell people holding copyrights on behalf of corporations.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I am definitely for the reduction of copyright duration, just that this particular solution has a somewhat amusing flaw.
Well then make it impossible to transfer the copyright. In most jurisdiction it’s not possible anyway. You can only licence it, not transfer.
I guess it might be difficult to figure out shared copyright in teamwork, but indie teams work just fine, and it’s still a better option than corpus sitting on a golden pile of IPs.
I like the idea of non-transferable copyrights a lot. That would make the “this is motivation for innovation / just protects inventors and artists” claim a lot more believable to me. I don’t think it should even be passable to descendents/“estates”.
And maybe also disallow “our employees’ inventions/creative work copyright automatically goes to the company” clauses. This would be… Waaaay more complicated to sort out, but still worth thinking about imo.