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Comment by Fej | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising, but still disappointing. Emulators preserve games of eras past.

So do "Virtual Consoles" which are releasing more and more past games on different platforms and charging for it. I'm guessing if emulators weren't so rampant on the PC then companies like Nintendo would have or would think about creating a Virtual Console on PC for NES/SNES/N64, etc.

Commerically released emulations of older games almost always just package up whatever open source emulator, usually some old, broken version, with limited rom selection.

No thanks, ill stick to the latest versions I can actually get games im interested in for.

…why would Nintendo port their old games to the PC? They develop almost exclusively for their own platforms.

...why not? I'm not saying it's the correct business decision and there are pros and cons. But if Nintendo released an official Virtual Console for PC, Android, iOS, etc. (not their own platform) it'd sell like hotcakes if implemented and priced correctly.

One of the reasons they wouldn't do it is because emulators and ROMs are already rampant on PC and mobile (less so). So the idea of all of a sudden releasing a bunch of classic games in your pocket is heavily diminished.

> One of the reasons they wouldn't do it is because emulators and ROMs are already rampant on PC and mobile

Then why do many other game developers and publish make PC ports of their old titles which use emulators?

Why is Nintendo different?

That you can emulate old titles for free isn't stopping people paying for them, clearly.

Your logic doesn't make sense. I never said it was the onyl reason they don't or even that it was a BIG reason, just that it's one possible reason that may be a small percentage of the entire reason why it wouldn't make business sense.

So to answer your question - because those businesses have looked at the financials and decided that the lost potential sales due to people who use emulators are worth the effort do develop games. Nintendo has decided differently. It's possible that the other publishers weren't simultaneously pushing a hardware platform which also comes into play.

I never said emulation prevents all people from paying for virtual consoles. I simply was pointing out that it diminishes the value. For example, if Nintendo released virtual console on PC today, I wouldn't buy it when I've already got emulators and raspberry pi's running arcades. If there was no way for me to technically play emulated games and VC was released on PC - I'd buy it immediately.

So there ya go. One lost potential sale, how many more?

Yet emulators have been a niche before virtual consoles for better on two decades. Only a handful of people I knew ever used them (myself included). Most folks that play games today rarely knew of the older consoles nor are they even that curious. So to blame a few dorks like myself for not abstaining from ripping our ROMs to play on our crappy college laptops back in the early 2000s is nonsensical. It's up to the firm to find out if a market is viable, not the consumer.

"Virtual Consoles" do not preserve all games of eras past, they have licensing issues to deal with. Luckily the Microsoft /App/Play/Game Store will never be the only options for software distribution.

Having to rebuy the license to pay the same game over and over and over again so you can play it on a slightly updated and still working hardware is downright Kafkaesque.

Nintendo and other copyright holders want to act like you're licensing software (so they don't have to be beholden to first-sale doctrine, laws concerning the ability to make local backups and other consumer protections), but they also want to prevent you from using that licensed software on newer hardware and want you to pay for 35 year old game over and over and over and over again. It's downright absurd, how many times do you want us to pay for the same piece of Super Mario code?!

It really takes away from the good will I might have toward the Nintendo brand. My son wanted the new Zelda game for his wii u. He earned it and we got a download code from Amazon. One week later, Grandma bought him a Nintendo Switch. Guess which downloadable game only works on the Wii U? If we want the same game (downloadable too) for the Switch that will be another $60!

When I buy a game on my iPhone 6, it works on the new iPhone 7 and it works on my iPad. Apple isn't perfect either but at least they understand that once a consumer "buys" a digital product, they don't like being told they have to buy it again and again.

The little facts you are ignoring is that Wii U and Switch aren't the same hardware, nor do they run the same OS.

Yes, different hardware. Yes, different OS. But when a new downloadable game is available on both platforms and is linked to my Nintendo account I expect I can play it on Nintendo hardware that supports the game without having to buy it twice. Switch even offers the concept of "Active Console" where all your switch downloads can be moved to different hardware.

It isn't technically the same game, they cannot match 1:1 in features and gaming experience, given the differences between Wii and Switch.

That's getting really picky. It's almost identical.

The game was written twice for different hardware, having different CPU, GPU, memory constraints, controllers and operating systems.

Who is supposed to pay the salaries of the development team that wrote the Switch version?

So all digital assets are supposed to be pay one take two model?

99% of people are only buying one copy or the other copy. Your question is just as valid with the way nintendo chose to do things, and already has an answer.

They don't make a meaningful amount of money by requiring some people to buy two copies on the same account. They make a marginal amount of money as a tradeoff for being visibly customer-hostile.

> So all digital assets are supposed to be pay one take two model?

This is already a buy one take one hundred model, in that you can redownload it as many times as you like on as many sequential devices as you like. The only difference is that the downloads are restricted to one flavor of device.

So the next time you buy lets say a game on Steam, do you also feel entitled to have the same game for free on Wii U, Switch, PS4, XBox ONE, iOS and Android, regardless of the development costs and amount of people that worked across all those devices?

If this is a game where they are traditionally going to sell no more than one copy to me, and it's 99.9% the same across all those platforms, and it wouldn't cost them money to do so because of clunky licensing agreements, then yes I would want my copy of the game to be portable across those devices.

I get one for Linux and Mac OS X for free so it makes sense.

Do I expect a Steam purchase to be available on Wii U, Switch PS4, etc.? No (and at least in my case, the games usually don't exist on those platforms anyway).

What I do expect is for it to be available anywhere a Steam client is, and indeed almost every game for which a port exists can be used on any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer (with different processors, GPUs, etc.) for no additional cost.

Valve has set a standard for the behavior of downloadable games across platforms, and it's totally understandable that customers would feel "ripped off" by Nintendo's approach.

But the value that the customer can extract from the game is almost the same whether they got the Wii or Switch version. It doesn't make sense to charge double the price for two different licenses when the value gained by being able to use either console is small.

Why not, most likely they weren't even written by the same developers, who pays the salaries of the Zelda Switch team, when one adopts take two pay one?

Who pays the salaries of the Zelda Wii team? The publisher, obviously, who also published Zelda for Switch.

It's true Nintendo had to spend effort creating a port of Zelda. But they didn't do it for the sake of customers who have both consoles. They did it for the sake of customers who only have a Switch. For customers that have both consoles, the effort of porting the game was already wasted. So they are not losing value by offering those customers a new license, except the minor value gained by being able to use either console and having access to any minor improvements in the newer edition of the game. That is not worth the price of the full game.

What does it matter? You bought a licence to play for example Zelda Breath of the Wild. You should be able to play it on any hardware.

How do you expect to achieve that, given the technical differences?

Did you miss the fact that the game is actually release and runs on all those platforms?!

So if you buy a Square Enix game for iOS you feel entitled to have the same game for free on Android?

That's complicated because the Android and Apple app stores are run by different companies who have no incentive to cooperate. But some software stores do work this way. Steam for example. When you buy a game on Steam you are buying a license to all versions of the software -- you don't have a buy a Windows version, a Mac version, or a Linux version -- you get them all (if they exist). You even get versions that get released later. I've purchased games that only run on Windows and if they later get ported to Mac or Linux they show up in my library.

There are reasons Nintendo has burned a ton of goodwill to the point where it made the difference in my not buying a Switch. But buying a game on one console generation and having it work on the next has rarely been the norm. Nintendo did decide at one point to pour a lot of separate money into developing the Wii U game for the Switch as well. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make a game work on multiple consoles. And unfortunately when you buy a copy digitally you also lose the ability to sell or trade it, so I never do that.

I had the opposite experience with Apple. My iPhone 3 got unacceptably slow when the next major version of the OS came out. There were games/apps I couldn't use anymore unless I wanted to do a factory reset to the older OS. That was after only 2 years. I got off the platform a long time ago and haven't had that problem since.

You can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games on a Game Boy Advance or SP or Micro, or even a SNES or GameCube with special hardware accessories. You can play Game Boy Advance games on a Nintendo DS or DS Lite. You can play GameCube games on a Wii, and Wii games on a Wii U.

There was a specific effort to include hardware from the previous generation in the next, for at least one step of backward compatibility. The GBA had a separate Z80 in addition to the ARM7TDMI to do that. The DS and DS Lite had dual processors and dual cartridge slots, but the DSi ditched the GBA slot. Thus, those were technically capable of running ROM images of GBA games if you found a way to load them and start the ARM7 processor in the correct mode. The 3DS can, of course, play DS and DSi cartridges, having both ARM11 and ARM9 processors.

So it is apparent that Nintendo has supported backward compatibility by essentially packaging two hardware systems into one box. That isn't what I would do, but that's what they did.

They burned goodwill with me for not writing decent SDKs for their hardware, such that about every game has to do a roll-your-own reach into the hardware. Which doesn't translate to the next generation of hardware. Stupid. Just write a damned SDK, and make the 3rd party dev shops hate you less.

I always keep my old cartridges, even though most of my old hardware is no longer capable. It's my proof of license, for when I download the ROMs to play on emulators.

Well, I've misplaced my receipt for The Legend of Zelda that I bought 30 years ago. Ideally they'd have had an infrastructure in 1986 to manage my ownership of the product in perpetuity across media and distribution channels. But they didn't, so I can either hold on to my feeling of entitlement that Nintendo owes me the virtual console version for free or I can pay $5 to play it on there.

Or you can download an emulator and a rar with all 721 SNES games for free.

I could also sneak into movie theaters to see all my movies for free. It's not stealing, right? I haven't deprived them of a physical product? There's no marginal cost to them to show the movie to one extra person, right? They lose no revenue because I wasn't going to pay to see the movie anyway, right? And movies are terrible right now, aren't they? Everything's a sequel or reboot, there are no more original ideas, right? And the way they show ads before movies now, they have no right to do that after I've already paid for a ticket, do they? And people are always talking in theaters and they never do anything about it, right? And they turn up the air conditioning too high...

I'd really have to be a sucker to pay for movie tickets given all those reasons not to, right? I think I'll still do it, though.

If you want to pirate movies that are 20+ years old I'm not going to judge you for it. It's not that I disrespect copyright as a whole, it's that I think the length has gotten way too long.

And piracy is not the same thing is downloading something you already have a license to.

idk dude. It's the same argument as pirating Game of Thrones. Most people when offered a convenient and safer channel would probably just pay for Game of Thrones, but many have no simple recourse other than paying out the ass for cable.

e.g. I live in Canada. Pretty sure HBO Go doesn't support Canada, and I'm sure as hell not wasting my money on cable TV just to see Game of Thrones. I'd rather pirate it. But if I can watch something on Netflix, obviously I'd rather just do that and pay for the service.

I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space.

Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions.

So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles.

To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is.

All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.

Not to mention that Nintendo took the iNES header for their own use, despite it being a product of the emulation community they espouse to hate.

But they don't monetize them ;)

If you allow emulator on your console that will eat into your game sales. I think this happened to the psp when it got jail broken .

If the psp game sales were so low, it was mostly because of the very limited size of the library.

The nintendo DS had both flash carts and emulators early in it's life and it did just fine.

Good original games sell consoles, the PSP had PS2 ports with worse graphics.

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