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Comment by konfusinomicon | Hacker News Reader

every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past, 100 people discover emulation. the barrier to entry as far as technological know how to procure and operate said emulators has gotten easier and easier as the years go by. they in turn tell more people, who keep the news flowing to more and more and more. the losses by nintendo, and the publishers of games added up over all that time must be astronomical. imagine the emulation capabilities of launchbox combined with a library of roms the size that most the target demographic could pirate online with a negligable amount of effort, on a non jailbroken ps5 or xbox or switch. these companies are missing out on so much cash flow from what are essentially dead revenue streams. and customer satisfaction would be through the damn roof..

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They can't do it. Most of the games in their console libraries aren't theirs, they belong to third parties. They can't even offer it for purchase. I've been wanting to buy the older Ace Combat games on PlayStation for years but they never come due to idiotic licensing issues nobody cares about.

Copyright industry will always defeat itself. Anything short of everything humanity ever created in one place fails to compete with copyright infringement.

Hey you know, it’s a good thing! This helps you not be attached to the past, and let’s be honest here… people make things for money, not love or art. Otherwise they wouldn’t copyright it.

I'd argue people make things for money AND love. It's just the money you need to survive, and the love is just nice and fulfilling-- so you can guess what people end up hyperfocusing on

Uh, it’s not love if you’re doing it for money. It’s work. You might enjoy the feeling of getting paid but that’s not love.

It’s possible to enjoy doing something, and realizing you can make money on it after

Yes that’s called enjoying making money. It’s not love. Why is that confusing to so many people?

Because if the thing I'm doing is, for instance, making artisan screwdrivers, I don't spend my whole day making money. I spend my whole day making screwdrivers. If I love making screwdrivers, then I love making screwdrivers.

Now that I have all these real nice screwdrivers lying around, I can sell them to other people who might want a really nice screwdriver. Not only did I get to do the thing I enjoyed doing: making screwdrivers, but I also made some money off of it. Some of that money can be used to cover cost of materials on the screwdriver I made, the rest of it can be used to enrich my personal life, or maybe grant me access to stronger tools to do the thing I enjoy doing.

Making something and selling something are two different tasks. I can love making things and still sell those things for a profit, and my love for making things can have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I get money out of it. Where do you get the presumption that you can't possibly do something good that you like and still make money off of it?

You never had a job that you enjoyed?

I would like to say yes but the reality is no. If you would like to talk about it I don’t mind. I have decided that I’m going to engage people on a more limited basis because no one seems to want actually discuss the topic at hand.

At every job I’ve had there have been days where the alarm goes off and I’d rather stay in bed than go in that day. Even if there are other days I enjoyed the job, the money is the reason I go in on the days when I’d rather not.

> people make things for money, not love or art.

People make things for all sorts of combinations of various amounts of money, love, and art.

The idea that motivation must be purely extrinsic or purely intrinsic is false and toxic. It demeans paid work and discourages people from seeking meaning in their jobs.

It’s my perspective. I think that money is toxic and demeaning. You won’t change my perspective on that.

You're certainly welcome to your perspective. You can also choose to apply it to other people. But that doesn't magically make it their perspective or motivation.

Saying, "I don't like mint chocolate chip ice cream" does not spontaneously cause sales of it to plummet across the world.

> it’s a good thing! This helps you not be attached to the past

What an interesting way to spin into a feature the copyright industry's inability to give people what they want. You know what else is a good thing? Emulation. Amazing thing.

> people make things for money, not love or art. Otherwise they wouldn’t copyright it.

Not only is this false, it's a huge factor in authenticity and quality. We want creators who have an intrinsic drive to create, who something to say, who have a vision they want to realize, who would create regardless of profits. Nobody cares about cheap cash grabs. The money is meant to enable their creations.

“ The money is meant to fuel their creations.”

I’ve never seen this in practice. It’s usually to fuel buying some big house that no one normal could ever afford and then acting like you were granted a lordship.

I am more than happy to change my perspective but not to have a headache by deluding myself that “everyone just has to take profits!”

Maybe that’s the world you live in. I don’t want to live in it.

This is survivor bias.

Investment into information property (IP) goes unseen because you only ever publicly see what happens after the success. Without a legally guaranteed return on investment on IP, investment into developing it would be stunted.

Now is usually when someone counters with open-sourced initiatives, but they themselves still have copyrights legally protecting how they are used after being developed.

Ok but that’s assuming I have empathy for investors; I do not.

Right, and your lack of empathy is likely due to survivor bias, having never seen or put significant resources into developing IP yourself.

That's the world we all live in, you alone are not entitled to be the only rational, self-interested person.

Well, I have developed IP myself. Emphasis on myself. Half the time dragging along people down a path they can’t see. I’m not sympathetic or empathetic to anyone doing the same because in generally they’re doing so from a perspective of having more resources.

In other words: dude I have done things for rich people like crazy rich people, and they’re babies who can’t do for themselves and got money through generational wealth or wealthy relatives or knowing wealthy people. I have done for myself with less than most get and my lack of empathy comes directly from people who are allowed to fail in luxury.

So because a couple people you worked happened to be wealthy and you didn't like them, we should throw out protecting IP with copyright law everywhere?

You don't need to have empathy for investors, you simply need to acknowledge that if the investors won't have the financial motivation to invest in something, they won't; so anything that needs investment to be created won't get created.

i was friends with a lot of artists for a while. some did it for the cash but others have a deep drive. some creators just want enough money to keep creating. one friend sold nearly everything that she owned in order to keep creating plush toys. i work sporadically and use the money i make to fuel video video game development (i originally did this to give myself extra time to self-educate on how to make games). I have been doing this for around 8 years.

I'm in the middle when it comes to money for creation. I'd buy a house and a car if i could because it would be nice to have a stable place to live as i get older and a way to get around, but my primary thought is always: "how can i make enough cash to give me the time i need to work on my project?" because creative projects are literally the only thing i do with my time. I can't live without creating things.

This is my drive.

I worked for over 35 years, to have enough money to be able to work on stuff I love to do.

I'm not rich; and never will be, but I have enough, not to be worrying about starving. That's a rare luxury.

And I work on the kinds of things that I want to work on; not that someone else wants me to do for them, so they can make a bunch of money. Most of my work is given to people and organizations that can't afford talent like mine.

Ideally someone would value your creativity or recognize the value in paying you enough to do a task that has value to them while also giving you time and space to work on the things which are valuable to you.

We can all be paid more and work less and things will get better. Now, making people actually understand that is an entirely different beast.

I can sympathize with your friend, I made digital art for a while and distribute it for free still to this day without any license whatsoever. Because I love to make art. I write with no expectation that I will get a book deal, that someone will pay to read it, or that I can convert it to some form of sellable text.

Because I love to write.

The more I’m on Earth the less I like it here.

> Ideally someone would value your creativity or recognize the value in paying you enough to do a task that has value to them while also giving you time and space to work on the things which are valuable to you.

You would think this would be the case, but I have only encountered this at one company. I was a professional web developer / designer who also learned to become a "full stack" engineer over the course of 20 years. it started out great and kept me satiated creatively for a long time but ultimately i think it lead to more trouble than it was worth (a career i mean).

The number of companies that have taken advantage of me in various ways is appalling. I decided I wanted to stop working 10 years ago but I still had debt to pay off and a number of other poor life choices that had me weighted down. I knew I wanted to make games but I also had never programmed any games (other than some qbasic stuff when i was a kid) so I quit my job and started contracting and learned c# and Unity3D and tinkered with games in my spare time.

I've also learned C++ and Unreal Engine and done a bit of just pure C++ game stuff but I haven't released anything official yet.

My current plan is to release a few well polished small games that I've been working on to multiple platforms and see what happens.

> I love to make art. I write with no expectation

This is exactly how i feel about the games. I have lost loads of money thanks to this and in reality it may never pan out financially, but at least I will get some creative projects out the door and feel satisfied that I didn't waste my entire skill set assigning scrum points to story cards, or working 18 hours a day for some other person's startup fever dream.

the past is soooo addictive though. its money that they could still be making.. they should syndicate it, like Seinfeld

See that’s actually a brilliant idea. Have a series of products, actors, musicians, and sign them all together onto similar platforms. I bet Amazon could do it.

You would only see these actors using these certain types of products and appearing in movies where the action or entertainment incorporates product.

Presenting The 90s, brought to you by Amazon. Beige computers, everyone has the same hairstyle, small town Americana!

I think most people are tasteless enough to really like this.

"Taste" is just a way to divide personal preferences into arbitrary acceptability categories so that some people can have an excuse to look down on people who don't share their preferences, while giving it a facade of legitimacy.

> people make things for money, not love or art.

...you're on Hacker News. A significant portion of this website is just people talking about Open Source Software, something that consistently produces case studies about people making things for love or for art or for passion instead of just for money.

Plenty of people make things for value that isn't purely financial.

> Otherwise they wouldn't copyright it.

This isn't how copyright works, at least in the US. Generalizing broadly, you own the copyright of whatever you create unless you've otherwise signed that away. It's automatic. You don't fill out a form to have copyright over a work.

“ ...you're on Hacker News.”

Am I? I know that’s the name but it’s not really for hackers. It’s mainly for businesspeople who are very sensitive, don’t really know much of anything beyond their desk job or coding and don’t care much for the hacker ethos.

If I post like myself, really like myself, that is, extremely weird and sarcastic, I’ll get the Socrates/Voltaire/Diogenes treatment and be shown the door. I think people like to call themselves hackers, or pirates, or “code ninjas” —- it is escapism from the truth that they no longer do it for the love, it’s for the money, or they are doing it for the job, the prestige, the “do you know who I am?!” Effect.

Which I don’t care about cuz I’m a hacker. I didn’t get your fancy 4 year degree. I’ll write your code dude but I’m not going to fawn over wealth like it’s valuable because to me it isn’t.

I’ve seen many people get sensitive or bristly attitudes here, report the post, downvote, because they don’t have much to say or engage with.

They disagree, and that’s it.

I am “man you disagree with” and “bad man” because you disagree.

I'm not even going to bother with the first two paragraphs here - you're mostly just going on about how you don't like the people on HN and don't think they're real hackers and then you're deploying a massive and wide ad hominem against HN's readers. Luckily, I don't really identify with them all that much either -- in fact, I actually have a lot of recurring issues with HN's readership, but I'm saving that for another time.

The simple truth here is this: I don't have a four year degree. I don't even write code for a living. I work in IT, in a role that you would probably best describe as just 'IT guy.' I don't make more than $60,000 a year in the role I'm currently in. I care about money to the extent that I need money to live, to feed my car gas, to feed myself food, and to feed my computer at home electricity.

You're getting the cold shoulder here because you don't seem to have the nuance to understand how people actually interact with and care about their work. I feel like we live in a nightmarish hellscape where a significant portion of work is driven by nothing but desire for profit, but this doesn't suddenly make me think that everyone involved in making things is only there because they get paid. On the other hand, you appear to think any person who sells anything is going through this whole process purely for money.

The replies to you have been perfectly amicable, and encourage discussion. YOU have been shutting that discussion down because people don't agree with you.

Well, I beg to differ. Firstly I believe you should be paid more but that is an aside.

I also don’t think that what I wrote is an ad-hominem. It’s the truth.

“ I feel like we live in a nightmarish hellscape where a significant portion of work is driven by nothing but desire for profit, but this doesn't suddenly make me think that everyone involved in making things is only there because they get paid.”

I feel this is true but I disagree with your second part of the statement because that’s all that motivates me to go to work, ever.

To me merely being forced to attend some building or talk to some people at a certain time is said nightmarish hellscape.

I further disagree with your framing at the end. I think that it’s a challenging discussion but I’m not shutting people down, I am responding to them with my thoughts and letting them respond in kind. If anything your framing has these elements, but if you disagree just say so. It’s really not a heinous crime to disagree with me. Many have done so.

> I am responding to them with my thoughts

You're responding with your thoughts in ways that could seem calculated to inspire ire and to offend. Most folks don't consider that good-faith discussion.

I don't think you're doing it on purpose. But maybe you'll find more constructive responses if you more deeply consider the emotional charge of how you choose to put words together.

eyyy good troll

I’m going to respond to you directly and clearly. I dislike posts like this: they’re low effort and accusing someone of ill behavior because they have an opinion you don’t share is a cheap shot at best. I’m trying to be charitable here and I’m finding it unenjoyable because no one is apparently willing to have a serious discussion if we aren’t all constantly agreeing.

You really can’t imagine how disappointing it is and how little it makes me want to engage in the future.

Well said. On mobile at the moment, but will edit on my pc later to fix formatting if I remember.

I'll be up front - I do disagree with your take, at least partially. I quite like the screwdriver analogy used elsewhere in the comments.

I love working with computers. I have for years.

Recently, I turned that into a job. I enjoy my job, though I wouldn't say I love it. However, it does allow me 5o practice and learn, so that I can improve my skills when I do perform a labor-of-love project.

If I were to make a labor of love project, and then someone were to pay me to support it, why would that project atop being a labor of love? There would be extra workload that would not (billing, other business cruft, etc), but I think the core of it would be.

Similarly for art/music - if I producea song because I like writing music, and people are willing to pay for a high quality download, would it stop being a labor of love at that point?

Curious to hear your thoughts on these edge cases.

Feel free to disagree again: I think you’re either being unclear with your definition of enjoyment and love, or you are perhaps confused between the two.

Which isn’t to say you aren’t having positive feelings at your job, I think that’s possible and in general ideal.

Enjoyment out of spending more time the way you want to as opposed to the way others have dictated it be spent is very natural, I believe. But I have to draw the distinction between love and enjoyment. Love (to me) is the expression of an idea from the soul, and the willingness to nurture this idea from the perspective of nature and harmony. There is a harmony in creating order (code, poetry, music), and there is a harmony in creating a roughness around which order and harmony form. (Clouds, fractals, abstract ideas, natural patterns) to experience this as the self with the world and with others in the world is how I believe love exists and comes to be.

When you’re paid for this process it diminishes love with the element of time, and space. You have to do it by so and so time, or there will be a material consequence. (Even if the time is very far away)

I don’t think that your labor of love becomes undone, but it’s something else. It’s enjoying the fruits of your labor, and that is not the same as laboring for love. Not to me at least.

I even would say you can enjoy making things others love. But for you yourself, it’s not possible.

And for me, in practical experience, I don’t get many who love what I do, and I don’t really enjoy the climate around me full of people doing nothing but stacking up money for no purpose.

I suppose my real gripe here is that I wish things were good or meaningful.

I was not accusing you of ill behaviour. That's why I said "good." I thought you were making a subtle joke and it generated a lot of discussion which is what good trolls do. I was trying to be friendly because the alternative is worse.

It's pretty horrifying that someone really believes "people make things for money, not love or art." and frames it as "let’s be honest here," implying that to hold any other belief is lying to yourself. That's textbook expecting everyone to agree with you.

If you're not joking, then I've met someone who disregards my entire career and background as a lie. You really can’t imagine how disappointing it is and how little it makes me want to engage in the future.

Seems to me those 3rd parties would want access to that cash flow, even if Nintendo took a percentage for making them available on the latest system. The app store model.

It may well be that either the third parties who created the game are no longer around (making their intellectual property difficult/impossible to license), or that they in turn had licenses for various assets (images/sounds. etc...) or other technologies to parties that are not longer around, and under licensing restrictions that never envisioned this sort of use.

Sometimes tracking all of this down to even know what the pieces legal provence is would be more trouble than it would be worth.

This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms.

Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.

Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.

This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.

I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.

If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?

Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.

Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own.

In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity.

It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part.

If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?

It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium.

Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it.

This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.

> It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing.

that's why we should have kept copyright limited to human creators and not allowed them to be bought up by effectively immortal corporations who can pass, sell, or auction off those rights to other corporations. Just one more way the public is being robbed from art and creative works that should be freely and easily available to them to enjoy and build off of.

I think it's a bit hard for things like games or even movies to be owned by a person given how many people have to work on those. Having a shorter time limit from publication would be easier and better for the public.

I agree 100% about the shorter time limit being preferable but only as long as that limit is significantly shorter than the life of the copyright holder and can't be extended. With things as they are today, the real benefit of denying corporations the ability to own copyrights would be in that humans actually die.

I don't see much of an issue with multiple individuals having equal share of a copyright though. We already pretty much have that now as it is. For a single recording of a song you're already dealing with a large number of rights that may not all be owned by the same people covering things like the composition, the performance/recording, synchronization, and distribution which could itself include separate licenses for different mediums (radio, physical media, streaming) or markets (domestic vs international), but somehow we manage to work it all out most of the time.

The important thing is that the problem of perpetual copyright goes away and people can start accessing and building on their own culture without fear of being sued for massive damages.

If copyright was limited to human creators, then you'd have to track down and get a license from every single person who touched the pixels and code in the game rather than from the one corporate entity. That would be thousands of people in a modern game using a mature game engine.

I mean, I don't think this is really that big of a problem? The reality is that currently, those people are assigning their copyright to the company. They are already participatories in the licensing of that game, they just sign away all their rights, including surrendering their involvement in the term of the copyright.

I think what we're really talking about here, if we wanted a copyright system that didn't allow corporations to own works, would be ending copyright assignment.

In that case, it's likely that part of your employment agreement would simply include a perpetual, exclusive, licensing agreement as well for all works performed on the job. It would be important that the company keep these licensing agreements on file, and would change the legal bias from "company presumed to own" to "company must demonstrate it owns," but that shouldn't really be that onerous. Companies already have to establish contractual basis for nearly everything they do anyways.

And it would put the cards on the table and it would probably make it easier (or at least more possible) to negotiate things like royalties on work that currently almost never gets it.

Also it'd make it a hell of a lot harder to exclude someone from the credits of a game because they quit 2 weeks before it went gold.

> In that case, it's likely that part of your employment agreement would simply include a perpetual, exclusive, licensing agreement as well for all works performed on the job.

Exactly, creators would license their work to their employers and if not much much sooner, at least when the creators have died the copyright would expire and the company (along with everyone else) would be free to continue doing what they want with it.

But what advantage is there for them to partner with Nintendo for it versus shipping the game with their own emulator (or a FOSS one) in a standalone package. Capcom has done this with their Mega Man X collection for example.

The same advantage as putting your app on Google Play instead of just an APK download link on your website.

If it's on the Switch, it's on the Nintendo eShop is my point. It's not just the developer's own website, it's the "Google Play" of Switch.

So what would a second, smaller, pricier 'emulator store' offer over that?

Nintendo's old game catalogue strategy devolved into the Netflix model: subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online and you get an app with some old games in it. You don't pay per game.

The trouble is that the third-parties have all sorts of aspirations to make a lot more money by 1. doing half-effort "remasters" of their works into some kind of "Collection", that 2. they can then charge full "new small game" price (~$15) for.

The fact that these third-party publishers are doing this despite adding basically no value (and often stripping away value, by e.g. not supporting rewind / save-states in their own emulation) is bad enough. But often they don't even actually do this; they just vaguely think about doing this, and the imagined potential upside of the option of doing this, keeps them from going with Nintendo's option.

ace combat rules!

The game industry is so unstable, it can be nearly impossible to even tell who you should pay for something.

An anecdote: Master of Magic is one of my favorite games of all time. The company that made it was acquired; the acquirer, I think, shut down. Anyway, the upshot of all that was that the source code was literally lost. Nobody has ever found it, and people who wanted to mod the game had to do it in bytecode.

Even the license was sort of lost for a couple decades; a known company owned it but they were too large to care about deaing with this old, niche license. A few years ago, someone (Slitherine) finally persuaded them to sell. A remake of the game was then able to be released commercially, and a sequel is in the works. But it took over 20 years for that to happen.

It really should at least be able to protest and prove some IP has been abandoned. Granted the law would have to be carefully written or it’d just be gamed and perverted.

I have long thought that a precondition to the continuation of any IP should be that the rightsholder make the IP available to the public on terms somewhat similar to the IPs original publication. So if a game or other work ever goes out of print, the copyright to it evaporates. I think this would be perfectly fair to ensure creators get their payday without depriving the public of access to good old works.

There should be a yearly filling for each copyrighted work, with a fee starting at a trivial amount and doubling each year...

I agree in principle but I feel a doubling may be a bit too steep.

I actually like this. If you start with 10 cents for the first year, it's $100 by year 10, $100k by year 20, and 100 mil. by year 30, around which it becomes impractical for any IP. So a decade for small projects, two decades for commercially successful stuff, and 3 decades for company-driving IP.

Squatter's rights, for IP. If you notoriously develop a new work based on the license, and nobody sues you for three years, it's your IP now.

That’s more or less how trademarks usually work and people generally seem happy with them.

Hey Slitherine is also the company where Tyrannosaurus Tex, the Game Boy Color first-person shooter was developed. The main developer left with the source code near the end of development, and it took decades for versions of the game to surface. Now it's commercially available, completed by a somewhat problematic reissuer of old games.

There s a great documentary of NoClip about GOG where they talk about this subject. As they sell a lot of old games, they need to do the detective work to find the license holders. Highly recommended!

Nobody knows who owns the rights to the No One Lives Forever series, but something like three or four companies have stated they will fiercely defend it as if they do if someone tries to do anything with the IP.

Yeah, it sucks. These corporations have already made their fortunes several times over. It makes no sense for stuff released 10 years ago to still be protected. It's pure greed and eternal rent seeking.

yup sometimes it comes down to the music in the game having a specific license so you can't now sell your game on a different system

Ace Combat doesn't have any licensing issues. They rereleased AC5 and AC6 as preorder bonuses for AC7 just a couple of years ago. The stated reason the series producer has for not rereleasing them is that they wouldn't want to sell the games as-is, and they don't have enough resources to remaster them.

Nintendo has a legendary 1st party catalogue though, yet they can't even seem to offer that up.

Counter argument: by drip feeding emulation titles they way that they are, they’re introducing gamers to a great many lesser known titles.

When someone has 100+ games to choose from, most people will be overwhelmed by choice and end up sticking to the household names. But by limiting the choices you perversely encourage people to try games they haven’t played before.

Seems like you would do just as well to front page promoted games and let the rest be searchable. Right now I make zero purchases because I don't want to invest in a platform that has 1 out of 20 retro games I'm interested in.

The Switch, like all consoles, makes the bulk of its money from games sales. Thus if you’re only interested in free retro games then Nintendo are doing the right thing, financially speaking, by not catering to you’re specific requirements.

Like yourself, I’m a massive retro gamer but at the end of the day current generation consoles make their money from games licenses. So any support they throw in for older games is strictly a loss making fan service.

> Thus if you’re only interested in free retro games

Why did you change paid retro games to free retro games? Nobody was suggesting they be free. Nintendo is throwing money away by offering so little.

In a way they do already charge as they're only available as part of the Online package (and N64 + Mega Drive are only on the deluxe Online package, whatever that's officially named).

As for why aren't those games sold individually, Nintendo used to do this with the Virtual Console on the Wii U -- which was literally their previous console. I'd wager there wasn't enough money in it to do that again. Or that they feel the Online subscription earns them more money than selling those ROMs individually.

Let's also not forget they've relatively recently launched a range of mini versions of their classic consoles. Granted they're just (IIRC) running emulation on-top of Linux but it still demonstrates that they're aware of this market.

Much as we'd like to assume Nintendo are incompetent because they're not catering to our specific needs, I think the more logical explanation is that us retro gaming nerds are a vocal minority. We love to moan about how much money Nintendo could make but if that were true Nintendo would already be doing it because they had done it previously, recently in fact, and thus already have figures about how popular these features are. And given how successful they are as a business, and how successful they are at milking their IP, they certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to sell ROMs if they felt there was a market there. But when you have Switch games selling for £50+, even years after their release, it's hard to disagree with Nintendo's outlook that Switch titles are a bigger source of revenue than re-releasing the same ROMs they've already re-released several times over.

You want to buy them. And maybe you will, if the price is low enough. But that does not mean that the process is commercially viable. I doubt enough people would care.

> idiotic licensing issues nobody cares about

The owner of the license cares about it.

This is not copyright being self defeating. This is copyright working as intended. If the persons who own the rights to something don't want to sell it, why do you think random third parties should suddenly be entitled to sell it instead and keep the money?

Sure it's frustrating as a consumer sometimes, and the copyright expiration periods are way too long now in the us. But how is the concept itself flawed, except to self-rationalize theft/piracy?

My latest irritation on this front is the movie Strange Days. One of my old favorites, and my partner has never seen it. The police violence narrative is powerful. Angela Bassett's performance is fire. Juliette Lewis's musical performances are great. It's not available for purchase on bluray in the US, and it's not on any streaming services in the US. Press speculation reports James Cameron owns the rights, and wants to personally oversee the remaster instead of trusting it to others. And he's not got around to that yet. Are you arguing my desire to watch the movie should override James Cameron, the producer and copyright holder's decisions on when or how to sell their artwork?

> But how is the concept itself flawed, except to self-rationalize theft/piracy?

People want to buy content and yet they can't due to this bullshit. It's that simple. Nobody cares who gets paid or not, they want the thing and the copyright industry is failing to deliver. Guess who's not failing? Pirates.

You have it backwards. "Piracy" is actually the natural order of things, it doesn't need any rationalization. It's the copyright system that's self-rationalizing. Artificial scarcity is an illusion, data is infinitely abundant. It's how computers actually work and also how they should work, there is no need to justify it. It's the copyright industry that keeps ruining it for us with their eternal campaign against computer freedom just to protect their irrelevant business model.

> Are you arguing my desire to watch the movie should override James Cameron, the producer and copyright holder's decisions on when or how to sell their artwork?

Absolutely it should. That work was released almost 20 years ago now. By all reasonable expectations it should already be part of the public domain. What the creator wants doesn't matter, he's already made his fortune off of it and it's time for him to move on to new creations instead of milking past successes forever.

>> every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past

Due to licensing, this isn’t possible. So there‘a going to be an infinite amount more days like this.

Even just supporting first-party titles would go a long way. In the particular case of Nintendo, many, if not most, of the most universally acclaimed classics are first-party games.

What first party NES and SNES games are you missing from NSO?

The games in question are for handheld systems (Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, specifically).

Seems like the sentiment is that Nintendo should have all their first party titles available.

Why would any sane consumer purchase those games when Nintendo has no track record of honoring purchases? Nintendo aggressively cuts off access to consumers past purchases in the hopes that they buy the same retro games again on the new system. Not just by not sharing retro game purchases between systems, but also not even letting consumers still download their purchases on older systems.

It's like buying a book that's set to self-destruct a decade from now - no sane consumer would buy such a product.

I bought a couple of Virtual Console games on the Wii. Those same games were transferred to my Wii U system with an SD card. The same games are now included on the Nintendo Switch Online service and many others too.

Which is to say: you had to wait for years for them to come out on Switch, and then pay again. Forever.

No, I’m pretty sure they were available very early after I bought the Switch console. Maybe within a year?

Late 2006 I bought the Wii and then the Wii U in 2014 and now I pay the family plan at maybe $70 a year?

Doesn’t seem different to buying songs on iTunes in 2006 and now paying for Apple Music every month now.

It was 18 months between launch of the Switch and of NSO, so we can split the difference :)

I disagree. You should as far as I'm aware be able to still use those songs

Depending on where you live it’s very possible iTunes songs had DRM in 2006 so you’re limited to playing those everywhere.

Does anyone do this as you’d like to see it with software? Maybe Valve?

I agree that DRM isn't ideal either.

Well, it's not that anyone is necessarily perfect. But the other major console players certainly seem better - if I bought a PS4 game a few years ago then I can reasonably expect to still play it on PS6 and probably onwards. X360 games have been brought back to life by MSoft.

Steam is generally pretty good yeah but it doesn't have the issue of consecutive consoles to deal with.

I’m not sure if every Microsoft released Xbox or Xbox 360 or Xbox One or Xbox One X game is available on Xbox Series S/X?

A fraction of those games are available on the Nintendo Switch Online, and you have to pay monthly for access to something you previously bought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_Online...

I’m having a hard time finding any NES or SNES games on that list made by Nintendo that aren’t on the NSO service.

Plus the article mentions that NSO service has some games that weren’t available elsewhere.

NSO is a subscription, not a "purchase".

There are good arguments to be made against subscriptions in comparison to purchases, but lots of "sane consumers" do buy in to such subscriptions with volatile content libraries that might have pieces of content self-destruct at any time (Netflix and Hulu).

Plus, an NSO subscription is needed for online play, so many consumers have subscribed to NSO to play online with their friends, and access to the NES and SNES libraries is a freebie bonus.

Okay, sure, there are plenty of great old games that Nintendo doesn't own, but there are also many properties that Nintendo has complete ownership of and can easily make more available. They can definitely lower the wall on those.

Isn't this what Nintendo is already doing with hundreds of games?

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/the-classic-ga...

Sure. But you can't buy them. You can only get them if you sign up for their monthly service, "Nintendo Switch Online." And you can't have all of them. You can only get the N64 games if you sign up for the separately monthly. "Expansion Pack" service. And you can't play them on multiple profiles. Your son can only play Mario 64 on his profile if you sign up for the "Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack + Family Pack" subscription, which is about $80 per year. It's so expensive because they bundled it with a bunch of other stuff (hooray now I can also play Switch games online and I have access to the latest patch for Animal Crossing and some extra tracks for Mario Kart).

But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.

Pricing is a different complaint from hoarding copyrighted classics though.

Sure, Nintendo isn't pricing their franchises at the price point you want, but in context to the discussion they're at least re-releasing what they can and making them accessible.

(And if it was really about letting your son play Super Mario World, you can pay $8 and he can play it for three months)

It's not just the price, though. Selling, say, Super Mario Bros. for $5 would be bad enough, but Nintendo has been forcing people to buy the same games over and over again because there's no way to move them to newer consoles when they come out.

(I could be wrong about this. If so, please correct me.)

No you're right, but a lifetime license to software on all platforms is a losing proposition for any company, since there are non-trivial costs to re-releasing on new technology.

Also it may be easy to link digital purchases right now, but proving past cartridge purchases would be very difficult.

They actually got rid of exactly that. You cannot buy Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Switch. You can only subscribe to a service that contains Super Mario Bros.

They are not releasing everything they can. They still cling to the idea of releasing games drip-feed. The apps for Switch do not have every single wholly owned Nintendo title. FAR from it.

Which is pretty typical of a release process that requires updating and testing software on platforms that are ~30 years apart.

> But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.

Nintendo obviously agrees, since they charge less than that for Mario 64 on the Switch.

https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-3D-All-Stars-Nintendo-Swi...

It even comes bundled with Galaxy.

People complained about this release - seems like some people will complain about anything short of free - but I thought it was a pretty good value.

Well, the obvious complaint is that it was time-limited. That was a ridiculous decision, and the complaining is richly deserved.

I don't see any problem with the content, though.

The complaints were that the digital release was available for a limited time only. It's even more insulting that they're still selling the physical cartridge version of it. But if you want to own it digitally keeping the store page on their servers for more than 6 months was too difficult? I specifically didn't buy this because I don't want to normalize the trend of time-limited digital game sales. Shutting down your online store long after a product lifespan is over is understandable. But a 6 month purchase window is just trying to profit off of FOMO

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/super-mario-3d...

> It's even more insulting that they're still selling the physical cartridge version of it.

Are they still manufacturing the cartridges, or did it just sell really poorly?

Officially, the cartridges stopped production around the same date the digital version was "taken down". It just sold exactly as poorly as every other retrogaming/nostalgia cash grab remake, and I say that as someone that bought it and has preordered the Advance Wars remakes. The only reason you can still find cartridges of the 3D remakes is that third party sellers (amazon, gamestop etc) still have tons of stock of it.

They're doing an incredibly slow drip feed to keep people subscribed. There's tons of titles they own 100% and are not available so they can 'add' a new ROM every month or two.

Which is pretty typical of a release process that requires updating and testing software on platforms that are ~30 years apart.

> that requires updating and testing software

If this were the actual reason, Ocarina of Time would not have released on it with so many graphical glitches and input lag which they eventually fixed later.

Short of anyone here working at Nintendo, we have no insight into what the bar is for release, the LOE to fix graphical bugs, or any of the challenges they face between platforms.

an unfortunate reality indeed. and the worst part is, that the ones who hold the license are the ones really missing out. And us peons are banished back to launchbox land, to so many games that even just the act of nostalgically scrolling through them is enough entertainment for an evening

Add to this a bunch of very cheap (even ~35eur) hardware devices with a bunch of emulators and games already preinstalled, and available on sites like aliexpress and even amazon.

The percentage of their customer base that regularly uses emulation is so insignificant you should be happy they offer it at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436

You're looking at nintendo customers and not old game players...

What percentage of eg Super Mario bros players, play the game on original hardware and how many emulate it? Or legend of zelda, link to the past? Wario land?

If you want to play these old games, emulation is currently the best and cheapest option for most people.

The only losses Nintendo makes wrt emulation is doing it at all in the first place... it does not make them money and only appeases the "smallest minority of noisy internet nerds" according to this former employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436

The only platform I'd be interested in emulating old consoles on is my smartphone. Where it is also not available, for similarly artificial and annoying reasons.

Yes yes I know the workarounds I'm not willing to switch phone OS or substantially modify my current one though.

the controls on smartphone emulation just isn't the same but that may be because I don't really play games on my smartphone

There are bluetooth controllers, although they all seem to have latency problems.

What OS does your phone run and what emulators do you want?

I was sick of this so I made an online emulation platform https://afterplay.io. It's the easiest way to play your retro games.

This looks amazing! But if it's streaming copyrighted material, how will it survive legal action?

Thank you :) Users have to upload their own games. You can only play games that you upload. It's like backing up your music to google drive and not sharing it with anyone :)

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