People have gotten cease-and-desists from their lawyers for drawing fan-art of their characters. Streamers will get strikes/takedowns for playing their games. And similar stuff...
If you don't want to get legal threats, I recommend to never mention their name, any of their trademarks, or even ever publicly acknowledge their existence.
They have become the-company-which-may-not-be-named.
Nintendo as a company does greatly benefit from people talking about it and it's products. That's publicity, word of mouth, free advertising basically.
When they abuse takedowns, strikes and other measures, they do not want to stop that free publicity and word of mouth advertising. They are attempting to control it, manipulate it, and limit it to company approved screenshots, videos and information only.
If those attempts generate more publicity - including making the taken down screenshots go viral (Streisand effect style) - that's beneficial publicity and word-of-mouth for them and their products. And it also amplifies the message sent to others: use only approved materials, or face our wrath!
Therefore providing them with improved visibility and publicity - more word of mouth - and helping them spread their "fall in line!" message, can be seen as "rewarding" what they are doing. If instead most people were to completely ignore them and stop talking about them (out of fear)... THAT would hurt their publicity.
One reason is that playing the emulated version is a better experience. Why would you play Breath of the Wild at 900p/30fps, when you can play it at 4k/60fps AND have all the customizability of running it on a PC.
Emulators illustrate that Nintendo forces you to buy an outdated tablet to play an intentionally hamstrung version of their game, so that once you are bought in to the hardware, you are more likely to buy more of their games.
How is it not? By having a good emulator, one can easily play Switch games without paying. I'm aware emulator devs don't provide game ROMs and usually have certain mechanisms to ensure you have a "legal copy", but these are all very trivial to bypass historically.
(I'm also aware there are claims that piracy does not hurt revenue of copyright holder. I can get behind some points in these claims, but not entirely.)
IIRC, a significant fraction of the studies of the subject tend to show that it even positively affects revenues of IP rights holders.
I subscribe to Patreon artists frequently. Lots of them, especially Japanese artists, have expressed that they hate piracy (i.e. repost their paid rewards on interweb) simply because it's (in their opinion) wrong. They're fully aware people who pirate is unlikely to pay a single penny regardless, or that piracy actually increases their "exposure".
At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
That's exactly what I mean. At the end of the day, what they believe is what drives their behavior.
> At the end of the day, in my opinion it's right holder's call, regardless if their decision is based on emotion or rationale.
I'm not disputing that here.
Edit: oh, this isn't a response to the comment I though it was. The comment when I'm saying roughly the same as you are and I though was misinterpreted is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39788265
It simply isn't a threat to their business in any way. Also, that argument leads to a lot of insane consequences once you start arguing that you're not allowed to do things because they're vaguely, potentially a threat to a company.
Go nuts.
There's the people who will never pay a penny to Nintendo anyways and there's the people who just want to run their own games in something better than a choppy 1280x720@30FPS
So you're saying that Nintendo's hard stance on emulation is working?
(I don't think this is the reason, but I can imagine someone in management deducing that from the facts).
Obviously not since this console has the highest quality emulators I've even seen during the console's lifetime. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely as good.
So we can confidently say that emulation being available didn't affect the high sales of the console.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-Americ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuzu_(emulator)
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/687059/nintendo-switch-u...
I've never seen such a competition of very high quality emulators in the lifetime of a console. Usually you need to wait 5+ years after the console dies to get anything remotely useful.
There's a lot of people who want to play Nintendo games in a higher quality who use emulators for it.
If their device isn't good enough to put itself above others, it is not worth buying. The 1 or maybe 1.5 exclusive they have has zero worth these days. Every console has their exclusives. And among them you will always find something enjoyable. Just stop watching ads/campaigns, who decide for you, and you'll be happy to find many "under the radar" (aka not sold at full price so not marketed) titles.
Tangent - This is a disgusting practice to keep us paying for deprecated electronics. By them and the rest of the console companies. Arm wrestling law makers to vendor lock us is not a business model.
The Switch has been Nintendo's only game hardware since 2017
Say whatever else you will, the "every 2-3 years" argument does not hold water when complaining about Nintendo
Yes the Wii-U was very short lived, but it was partially because it was a massive flop no one was buying anyways
> The 1 or maybe 1.5 exclusive they have has zero worth these days.
Again, this holds no water for Nintendo. The Switch had more than that in exclusives on day one, games that are still exclusive now. I mean really the list is pretty long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_Switch-only_...
Whether or not those are all games you care about or want to play is a wholly separate issue
I'm not trying to fanboy for Nintendo here. I think their litigation tactics are massively awful, but it really seems like you're coming at Nintendo with complaints about Sony and Microsoft. At least make arguments about the stuff they actually are doing badly
I've sailed the sea a lot myself, but I don't believe the meme "pirates wouldn't have bought it anyways". It's not a 1:1 loss, but it's not zero either.
And for me, piracy used to be an accessibility issue. Living in the mountains I could wait for a week to get something by mail, or click download illegally and play immediately. With today's online stores that's no longer an excuse.
Yes, PC games usually have DRM, but Denuvo offers their services for the Switch platform too. In fact, they specifically claim that they can resist emulation of protected titles: https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio...
And yet, no commercial games have been released with this protection yet, probably because it isn't worth it for their bottom line.
These actions ensure that I'll never buy a Nintendo console or games anymore, even though I'd be their target audience (both myself and my three kids).
They'd have to have a string of probably 10 consecutive years putting out absolute dogshit before they'd get even close to feeling the pain.
I can still emulate the games even if they don't do this you know? It doesn't stop a motivated actor actor after all.
On the other one can argue that people pirating does not improve their economics either so why risk it ?
I get your point – I just feel like there’s not a lot of potential economic improvement to be had here, but apparently there is.
But it's not as if corporations acted rationally anyway, they are led by humans and as such they are mostly driven by emotions.
And in case of game consoles, that also means they have to buy the hardware even if they only want to play one game. This is very significant potential income for Nintendo.
All my friends that are into games have a PS4/5 just to play exclusives, even if they play games on PC 99% of the time. And non-trivial number of them play XB3 in emulators so they don't need to buy a Switch just for that. If there is no emulators, they probably would.
All Nintendo did is make it easier for people on the fence to decide if they want to financially support them or pirate.
But Nintendo also has absolutely no incentive to care if it's used for pirating. Users want to put in term of morality, when it probably doesn't matter much.
Even if there was no pirating angle, emulation is a revenue drain from old title they could bundle in the Nintendo Online subscription and remix as remake games (what we saw with the old Zelda games remade for the Switch for instance).
Even if people were using the emulator after buying the Switch and the actual games, that's still a stream they don't control (can't check if the game is played on multiple consoles for instance, etc) and there's nothing positive for them coming out of it.
If you download Higan and play pirated SNES games, not much of a threat. If you download Yuzu/Ryujinx and play pirated Switch games, that's an altogether different picture.
Right now i have a laptop connected to my TV to play steam games that support controllers. I'd much rather just have another USB-C to HDMI converter plugged in to a device designed nearly completely to play games.
A huge use case for me would be using wemod/cheatengine and in general steam workshop. The second biggest reason is shovelware. On the switch if i buy a game because it looks good, AFAIK i can't refund it if it's actually a garbage game. On steam, i've requested refunds after playing (some*) games for several days.
* mostly incremental/clicker/idle games, because they're designed to be crappy to start out, so 2 hours isn't even enough time to expose 1% of the content or gameplay.
Citation: I own a steam deck and an ROG Ally. The Ally has the best controller on the market but it's hamstrung by the screen simply having too many pixels. Well, that and Windows.
I have a steam deck. So far, I have bought roughly 5 switches. One for myself that I gave away as a gift, and 4 OLED switch gifts.
After seeing what Nintendo is doing, I will never buy anything from them ever again, nor will I purchase Nintendo products as gifts for anyone.
They are greedy and immoral. This is the consequence of attacking open code.
Nintendo, please sue me! I would love to help establish more case law here
Perhaps Nintendo should provide a better way to play their games themselves then?
Of course, my other view is that emulators should be perfectly fine and a great exercise in reverse-engineering, but Nintendo won't see it that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to release a high-performance emulator console that only worked with the physical (presumably legally-purchased) game. Perhaps it would fill a similar legal niche to DeCSS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
And I also love Nintendo, but I mostly play GBA and SNES games from my childhood.
I completely understand it too because I've been pirating since games were on tapes. But, surprisingly perhaps, I have the ability to view things from multiple perspectives. And clearly Nintendo don't want their titles to be pirated while they're still making sales.
At some point in the future, just like with GBA and SNES emulators, I'm sure we'll see the same for Switch emulators.
More importantly Yuzu was known to essentially have a culture of not caring about the DMCA themselves. I don’t think they did anything illegal in the emulator code but they did totally have a private pirated game stash and were selling TOTK compatible builds via Patreon before the game released which violates basically every rule of clean room disassembly.