I have worked for ~4 years at Nintendo in production planning and inventory management/demand forecasting. I'd just like to clarify one thing - which is repeated so frequently but just plain wrong:
There is no secret "scarcity" creates more demand masterplan from Nintendo.
- Nintendo sells to retailers (for the most part) - so any type of price gouging isn't benefiting them.
- Everybody at Nintendo would prefer retailers to never run out of stock. The second a retailer runs out of stock - overall customer demand drops. There is no secret evasion to other channels (which of course are also out of stock) happening.
- Hype effects are only _maybe_ valid for very niche core gamer titles (Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, etc.). Yes, sometimes these titles benefit a little in the beginning pulling in demand from week 2 & 3 into week 1 if presales are closed very early due to limited availability.
- Core gamer titles generate furious outrage on the internet, which sometimes even spills over to mainstream journalism, but are barely relevant to the bottom line compared to mass market titles (Mario, AC, Zelda of course but also titles like NintenDogs).
- Production Planning starts anywhere from 8 weeks to 6 months in advance of a titles release. It's damn hard to predict how well a title will sell that early on. It is even worse for HW which has lead times much, much longer.
- Games are shipped via air and final assembly happens in the region where they are sold. HW is shipped via boat from Asia directly. This means right about now somebody is ordering Christmas HW. How do you think the red left joy-con will sell in December? We had tricked-out time-series forecasting statistics at the end but still got it wrong ~20% of the time.
- Overstock is crazy expensive, both in the channel and in Nintendo Warehouses. If you order too much of a title and it turns out the title only has a core day 1 audience you or the channel which you made believe in the title is totally screwed.
This is all about day-1 production-run planning. But what about follow-on runs? The "weird thing" about Nintendo, to me, has always been how little "greater-than-expected demand" seems to influence the supply, even on a 6-month delay. A lot of Nintendo products sit around "sold out" on Amazon for months/years/forever, despite a thriving secondary market for those same products, often with scalpers now charging higher than MSRP for the products.
For example — Amiibo. Why don't Nintendo keep pumping out Amiibo figures until the volume swamps scalpers and people can actually buy the things for $10? It's not like they're trying to create a secondary market for collectors; they want to sell these things to kids, as practical toys, in volume. So where's the volume for the popular figures?
This is so clearly Nintendo's pattern, that it was a big shock to gaming journalists when Nintendo actually decided to restart production for the NES/SNES Classic. Why is something like that such an exception?
Oh and on emulators: Again - old titles are not relevant but for the smallest minority of noisy internet nerds. Whenever we released something in that direction, it got nowhere near the needed reaction from the market to justify its investment. It only appeases the noisy nerd minority.
Make no mistakes - many many people working at BigN belong to that minority, especially in the lower ranks. But management needs to make decisions that are profitable - otherwise, there wouldn't be enough runway to make bold bets like WiiU, Switch, Tomodachi Life, Splatoon etc.
You’re severely underestimating the amount of people interested in retro gaming. “noisy nerd minority” is pretty offensive - companies way bigger than Nintendo basically rely on nostalgia nowadays.
Their online offering is a ripoff and a disgrace to their legacy. Even the Wii U VC was technically and quantitatively superior. Not that I wouldn’t mind paying for it, if their first party titles had networking made with any kind of competence.
Are they interested enough in it to do more than buy merch? My impression is people collect way more of that stuff than they actually use, which isn’t a good sign for continuing investment.
Nintendo game remakes don’t always do well; the Mario&Luigi developer AlphaDream went out of business after their remakes failed.
I think a substantial part of that hype was that it was a limited-time thing. But hey, apparently Nintendo doesn't do scarcity to drive demand, so what do I know?
I think the real reason is that noisy nerds are the most likely to notice Nintendo half-assing it and most likely to remeber the rugpulls that always followed the half-assing.
If you need an example of a company that has a solid reputation for whole-assing, keeping rugpulls close to zero, and is convenient, checkout valve and their product called steam.
Because it isn't true. The GP is either intentionally misleading people or they are as out of touch as TV execs were when they proclaimed that streaming will never be more important than TV channels. Also, since Nintendo Switch Online exists, someone at Nintendo seems to disagree with them.
So if they’ve determined old games won’t be profitable, then why do they make it so difficult to access and play games that they haven’t sold for over 20 years? What do they gain from shutting down ROM sites other than the hatred of online communities?
Have several years experience dealing with supply chain from the retailer side in the past, and your comment is spot on.
Anything that is: expected to be in demand during Q4/Xmas season, manufactured in Asia, electronics, etc., demand planning and orders are in minimum 3-6 months in advance.
Even if a retailer wants more supply, many manufacturers are extremely hesitant to overproduce.
Here's some rough napkin math to help illustrate the cost of being overstock (caveat: I have no idea actual costs of video games, using best guess), applies to both retailers and manufacturers:
$60 MSRP Switch game, cost to retailer: $48 ($12 profit/unit)
Let's say a retailer orders 100k units of a game in Q2 for the upcoming holiday season, but sells only 70k units during Q4. 70k * $12 = $840k profit. Meanwhile, 30k * $48 = $1.4M of inventory is sitting there, that cash is tied up so the company can't buy inventory of new games releasing in the future, and there's some non-trivial cost for each subsequent month that merchandise sits unsold in the warehouse. That's for under-selling forecast by 30%... now imagine if you're off by 50% or more an any individual game.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
I’ll never understand why Nintendo doesn’t do a subscription to play any old game older than say three generations.
Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.
There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.
You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.
I learned about this when I read the book "Console Wars"
Nintendo has always been all about artificial scarcity and increasing their products' value that way, ever since the early 80s
If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.
When you think of "Playing a long game" when applied to a tech company, you probably think "longer than the next year". Maybe you think "the next 5 years".
Nintendo was founded in 1889. They are for sure playing a long game measured in decades. They definitely don't obey the same "laws of physics" other console manufacturers seem beholden to.
It's unwise to think Nintendo is acting out of ignorance.
> It's unwise to think Nintendo is acting out of ignorance.
Their repeated failures in the online space makes me think it's at least a little bit of both greed and ignorance. They just don't seem to "get" anything once the internet gets involved. When it was all playing cards and game cartridges they didn't have to worry about building a sensible online account system that could handle purchases and game content being accessible worldwide and supported from one Nintendo console/device to the next.
The world, the internet, and the expectations of players have changed and Nintendo seems to have lagged behind. It might all be some super well planned and calculated move by savvy Nintendo execs to piss off their customers and deliver a shitty experience in order to maximize profits, but I doubt it.
I play a lot of SSBU online and it works well. Rollback netcode would be a huge improvement, but the game is definitely playable. Online play clearly isn't a focus for Nintendo, but it's hard to argue with their success. Perhaps their focus on building self-contained experiences is part of their secret sauce.
Honestly the fact that you don't have many complaints after less than five years is a good sign, but tell us again in 10 or 15 years how well your online SSBU games are going.
I'd actually be okay with it if Nintendo just came out and said that online wasn't something they were interested in. I'm one of those people who is perfectly happy with physical media, single player, and local multiplayer.
It would have spared them a ton of trouble with things like the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Service, DRM, friend codes, eShop, Randnet, Nintendo Network, DLC, WiiConnect24, the wii shop, even Pokemon home/bank, etc. and they could have just kept on delivering gaming experiences that worked for players no matter what servers were offline, kept on working for decades as long as you had a disk/cart and the right console, you'd never have to worry about your purchases being pulled out from under you, and all of it could be lent/traded/resold/handed down freely.
Very few consoles, let alone games, last 15 years. Requiring an online experience to work well for 15 years, while nice, is not a realistic requirement for a majority of games.
> Very few consoles, let alone games, last 15 years
The PS3 is older than 15 years! The oldest console in my home right now is an Atari 2600 and that's 45 years old and works just fine, as does its games.
Same with the Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, One of two original gameboys, most of the rest of the gameboy and DS lines, SNES, N64, Gamecube, the PS1, one of two PS2s (disk read issues on the larger one), and the PS3. all their games still work.
Honestly, the consoles and games that don't still work are the exception. One original gameboy has a blank line along one side the screen (still pretty playable), The NES still works fine, but some of the games don't save anymore (battery needs replacing), same problem with some of the later gameboy carts. If some of the SNES games have that problem I haven't run into it yet. Several controllers, joysticks, and DDR pads have died over the years and had to be replaced though.
I have a harder time getting PC games to work (on modern hardware) than I do getting console games to work. I expect I'll be able to hand most of this stuff down and the kids will be able to do the same for their own kids with many of them before they stop working. With maintenance (which I've never done for any of them) they could last longer. The PS2 with disk read errors and the dead batteries are totally repairable.
I suspect that the PS3 and PS5 will die sooner than most of the older consoles. They really don't make them like they used to. I blame higher running temperatures, lead-free solder, and cheap capacitors.
Nintendo is a public company and wants what its shareholders want. That's why they had to ditch the WiiU entirely when they briefly stopped being profitable.
Shareholders want long term growth? I don’t see how being public makes Nintendo’s strategy any less true or any less good. It is generally profitable and does work as a strategy to increase stock value.
Nintendo being generally profitable seems like short-termism to me - Microsoft sells the Xbox at a loss to generate later sales, Amazon avoided profit for years and years. Nintendo doesn't sell anything at a loss.
Anyway, they're not family-owned like they used to be, so I don't think comparing them to when they were a private company is all that useful.
There is also the issue that most of those 3500 are never going to played for more than 5 minutes and will just be there as a curiosity.
There are the classics still worth playing, and the cult titles that hit some nostalgia button for a significant number of people. Beyond those it's just not worth it for Nintendo to even format a jpeg of the box art.
Personally I prefer a curated list with the scans of the manual and some history behind the game like they provide now. Otherwise you are in decision paralysis looking at 1000s of titles with no clue which is worth your time.
Them trying to ring out more money on top of the base Switch Online subscription for N64 games is my main issue. If they had not done that I would likely have subscribed again. The drip feed is a little too slow also, but I don't have the free time anyway so it's not a deal breaker.
As it stands I'll wait for my Steam Deck and not be able to decide which ROM to play on there ;)
I think my whittled-down NES ROMs dir that included probably a dozen games that aren't very good but have strong nostalgia value for me, plus a couple Japanese games in unofficial translation, ended up being around 80 entries. I'd probably cut that down to about 50 if I were setting something up for someone who wasn't around back then. SNES comes off a little better but my curated-for-others list would probably be around 70-80, including quite a few translated games.
Part of it's because a lot of "greats" have better versions elsewhere (arcade, for games like Mortal Kombat, Gameboy Advance in a lot of cases especially for RPGs, et c.) and part of it's because there was just a lot of crap on them (I think the NES had over 1,000 distinct games).
I think Nintendo knows that people don’t actually care that much about playing game boy games. They are boring and unpleasant by todays standards but they hold a strong nostalgia factor. So they drip out bits of content and sell it at a high price while a subscription service would just remind everyone how little they care about playing very old games.
And also de-value the newer games and/or remakes, I for one tend to buy "The newest zelda" if I'm itching for any zelda game, but if I had easy access to 10 older zelda titles that'd be it
This checks out. Nintendo really only seems interested in using their back catalogue to create a value offering when they are struggling to sell hardware. Hence why a lot of first party GameCube and Wii U games got reissued in $20 "Players Choice" SKUs late in their respective console's lifecyles while they Wii and Switch launch titles have remained full price.
I believe Disney did this with its films over the 80s and 90s. People built collections of these VHS tapes in big plastic boxes, it was a thing for an "old" film to get a release.
Good example. It doesn't really make sense logically to collect these (i.e., vs. just renting them). But I think I understand emotionally why people would want to collect things like this.
Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything, and well also when Netflix by mail seemed good (and that really did have almost everything), but once you hit enough things that you saw and wanted to watch later that weren't there when you wanted to watch... You start collecting them, so you know you'll have them.
> Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything
And just think, now it's smaller than ever.
I went over my Amazon Prime Video watch history recently; almost nothing on it is still available. They even managed to somehow lose the rights to a decades-old low-profile Chinese film.
> If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.
It also might expand the fan base loyalty to their valuable IP franchises.
I know there's a bunch of Nintendo nerds on HN that would play emulated games on their switch but how many switch owners actually want to play old games? There's a lot of kids out there that like playing new games that have modern graphics and gameplay. There are plenty of handheld or console devices out there that can emulate old games but none of them ever sell that well. Nintendo has spent some resources developing the emulators but it likely died when they realized it wouldn't sell that well and that many games would be unavailable unless Nintendo felt like relicensing games from publishers that are owned by competitors.
I remember the games had to be ordered via catalog (toys r us, jc penney) and took 6+ months to arrive.
Blockbuster ate their lunch with rentals. BB and Hollywood Video went to town on this with the SNES with guaranteed in stock new games for rental.
On the switch Nintendo charges insane prices for re-released (read- emulated and poorly). If you want to play their shitty emulation of an N64 game it's like $70 US/year.
Publishers want to get to the point they charge us per minute played or per boot.
I'm over Nintendo, and I once cherished my complete collection of Nintendo Power mags with all alternate covers.
I pay for Nintendo Switch Online, which includes access to a handful of games from the NES and SNES consoles. If I want to pay more I could also get access to games for N64 and SEGA Genesis (SEGA Mega Drive outside of North America if I'm not mistaken).
I would have to assume (may not be correct) that Nintendo Switch Online will roll over to their new console(s), albeit under some other name, including the emulation software and game access.
You mean in that you can not play the Virtual Console on Wii anymore. (It does help to point out that they can choose to end the service whenever they want.)
It is still a point that the games which were made available on the Virtual Console could still simply be made available on Nintendo Switch Online. It seems to me that the Virtual Console for the Wii (in effect) became the emulators that were made available with Nintendo Switch Online.
That's the standard every other platform has moved to. If I buy a game on the play store I can use it on any android I own. If I buy Banjo Kazooie on the Microsoft store I can play it on my 360 or Xbox one or series x and probably the next five consoles Microsoft puts out. Nintendo's rabid anti-consunerism will bite them one day.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized. I think it's been fairly easy for Microsoft because they basically just put out a standard PC every console generation, and their controller design has been pretty much exactly the same since the beginning. But Sony and Nintendo have had some weird hardware. The PS3 was infamously difficult to develop for because it had some wacky architecture under the hood, and we've only recently seen somewhat capable emulation efforts for it.
And Nintendo's in a particularly weird situation where even if it wasn't just the underlying architecture, the consoles all have some kind of "gimmick" where you couldn't really play them on a different system without rethinking the entire game. Like, if you bought a Wii U game digitally, the game was designed around being played on a TV with a secondary resistive touchscreen controller. How would you play that on the Switch, where you only have one screen which may be either on the TV or handheld, and it's capacitive instead of resistive? Nintendo has ported some Wii U games to Switch, but they involved manual work to change how some stuff works. Same with when they port Wii games to it. Super Mario Galaxy was made for a Wii remote and nunchuck, and had a lot of motion control gameplay elements that had to be redesigned to work on Switch.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized
Yeah, it's tough when the consoles have roughly comparable performance. When they don't it's less so. Amateurs without access to source code got the Dreamcast to run Playstation games better than the Playstation. They got the PSP the run N64 games. They've gotten the Switch to run everything from the Dreamcast down. It's less work than that for internal developers; Nintendo basically made an N64 emulator for the Gamecube as a lark just to offer a free pre-order disc with Wind Waker.
Yea I was also sort of pointing to the fact I can't play any of those games I had to purchase on Wii virtual console unless Nintendo decides to release them via Nintendo Switch Online - of which I also pay for.
Why would they did that when they can make more money porting the games, touching up the graphics and rereleasing them as "new" games every generation?
3 generations is GCN and N64, last I checked emulation of these is still not a fully solved problem even on highly speccd hardware. Their existing subscription service does emulate systems older than that, but the limited selection of titles is I think an unfortunate necessity of the licensing.
They're still kind of flailing with their entries into the mobile game space so I can see why they would be hesitant to jump into the PC software world, this is not a core competency.
Albeit with a limited library (Although I'd say nearly every game worth playing is already on there, besides a couple N64 games). For reference, with the Switch Online subscription you get
* NES
* SNES
* N64
* Sega Genesis
I guess you could argue that Gamecube isn't represented yet, but that's the only major out of date system that isn't included (Understanding that almost any game playable on the WiiU is also on the Switch).
You don't get N64 or Sega Genesis with the basic Nintendo Switch Online subscription, you need to go for the more expensive "Expansion Pack" subscription to get those.
The N64 library is quite small, and only has a handful of games. I mean, the ideal N64 library is also quite small: only 306 North American or PAL (~English language) games were ever released. But 306 seems so eminently achievable that it makes the small selection of games on the service that much more dramatic.
What would you say they're missing? I mean, all of the NES, SNES, and N64 Mario games are on there, along with all of the Zelda games on those consoles. Nearly all of Nintendo's IP's are on there. I can't really imagine anything that it's truly missing.
> all of the NES, SNES, and N64 Mario games are on there
Super Mario RPG isn’t.
Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy 6, Mega Man X, TMNT. I’d even pay a couple bucks to waste an hour playing Bart’s Nightmare again.
Pokémon is a nonentity.
It’d be a hell of a nostalgia trip to play Rampage, IronSword, Monster Party, Linus Spacehead, Treasure Island Dizzy, Super Robinhood, or Boomerang Kid.
Chrono Cross and FF6 have rereleases out now (don't remember the platforms). The issue with that being you have to play Chrono Cross, which you probably don't actually want to do.
Both the NES and the SNES have emulators which are cycle-accurate including the weird peripherals and cartridges with strange extension. They are by far the easiest system to emulate properly nowadays.
Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of games have been perfectly playable on emulators since the 90's, but they may not have been totally representative of the look and feel on the original hardware. If you look at emulator compatibility docs they frequently will list an estimation of how faithful it is to the original hardware, and as well denote, "Completable" (i.e. you can actually play the game all the way through without something devastating happening, or you getting stuck because a door never opens or something like that)
> Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of those were there in the original, especially flicker on NES, which was due to the sprite limits. That's actually something you can turn off in modern emulators, because it's an old and annoying hardware limit on the number of sprites per line.
Some of the weird flicker/color glitches in the corners weren't visible or as noticeable on old CRT monitors, but they were still there as well because CRTs had rounded corners and some of the pixels there could be lost.
If anything, emulators let you have an experience superior to the old days to filters, ways to bypass sprite limits, etc. And some games have been extensively patched by fans (Final Fantasy 4/6j in particular) or were only translated by fans, etc.
That said, there are some differences in viewing things on a modern monitor vs. a CRT because of how the CRTs had more persistence due to how phosphors work and this could cause color bleed that's not there any longer.
No offense, but this really reads like a post from 15 years ago. It's not true anymore for NES and SNES and has not been for years. Look at mesen and bsnes -- 100% compatibility, indistinguishable from real hardware on every released game.
Your post is still accurate if you're talking about newer hardware like the Wii or PS2. Even N64 emulation is still kind of sketchy 25 years later due to the weird exoticity of that system.
yea gonna have to call BS on this. there's more NES and SNES emulators around these days than any other systems and their compatibility and accuracy is mind-blowing.
Being unable to find a legit way to play GBA games was what got me into emulators in the first place. Eventually I "cracked" my Nintendo 3DS and turned it into a homebrew console, which was for me a really interesting and fulfilling technical challenge. It basically allowed for the whole Nintendo handheld catalogue (barring technical capabilities of the hardware itself), as well as some really cool customization. Highly recommend if you're looking for a handheld device that can play most Nintendo games pre-Switch.
(a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1)that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2)that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
it's only legal to emulate if you dump the ROM from the physical cartridge you own first. downloading the ROM off the internet is still illegal no matter what.
What crime are you being charged in? Piracy of a game cartridge is a clear crime. Downloading an emulator that interacts with a game cartridge you legally own? Not so clear.
The controlling case is Sony v Bleem, which was ruled in Bleem's favor: distributing (and selling) software to emulate proprietary platforms is legal, full stop.
For those of you who aren't up on your Nintendo emulation pricing schemes, here's the current model. If you want to play an old NES, SNES, and N64 game, Nintendo makes those available on their current console, the Switch. However, unlike other games, those classic Nintendo titles are not for sale. Instead, you may access them via a monthly subscription, "Nintendo Switch Online."
However, the N64 titles are behind a second paywall. If you want to play Mario 64, you need to sign up for a SECOND monthly subscription called the "Expansion Pack." Also however, if you want your kids to also be able to play N64 games on their profiles, that requires a "Family Membership."
Nintendo ties a few other perks into the plan, like a really tiny Amazon Prime, so the base subscription also unlocks online play in general (like an XBox or Playstation subscription), and expansion packs for certain games require the second subscription, like the latest features for Animal Crossing or new tracks for Mario Kart.
Charging me $20 to play Ocarina of Time is a lot, but it's a reasonable price that I would probably pay well before I started looking into emulation. But renting Ocarina of Time to me for $80/year is just awful.
My guess is that this will be officially released as GB/GBA apps for the Nintendo Online service once the eShops for the Wii U and 3DS are discontinued next year,
Finally. This barely helps, but at least now there might be some access to legacy portable games that does not require a significant monetary investment and/or piracy
The only major monetary value I see to these emulators on Switch is:
- an extra thing to make the money you're paying to play Mario Kart/Smash/etc online with your friends a bit easier to stomach
- an extra multiplayer option to have when your friends are bored of the other games
Gameboy games don't offer much of the latter and I think the general response to seeing GB games on a big screen at this stage is probably closer to "I can't believe it was so primitive!" than anything else.
When you go past the number of people who use emulators on PC/android devices, the number who engage in netplay services is astronomically low because it requires a bit of effort on both sides. I'd imagine the novelty of easy access functional netplay is probably worth drastically more than a more complete or better optimised set of emulation options, and even then it's not worth that much.
The evidence that it's not official based on a menu option showing EZFlash doesn't mean it's not official only based on my knowledge that some first party and close third party console developers in the past have used whatever is cheap and easy to get their hands on.
> experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD)
I thought I was having a stroke when I first booted up the NES virtual console and the start screen from Mario Land (original GameBoy) flashed on screen for a split second. Anyone else have this experience, all most two years ago?
There is no secret "scarcity" creates more demand masterplan from Nintendo.
- Nintendo sells to retailers (for the most part) - so any type of price gouging isn't benefiting them.
- Everybody at Nintendo would prefer retailers to never run out of stock. The second a retailer runs out of stock - overall customer demand drops. There is no secret evasion to other channels (which of course are also out of stock) happening.
- Hype effects are only _maybe_ valid for very niche core gamer titles (Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, etc.). Yes, sometimes these titles benefit a little in the beginning pulling in demand from week 2 & 3 into week 1 if presales are closed very early due to limited availability.
- Core gamer titles generate furious outrage on the internet, which sometimes even spills over to mainstream journalism, but are barely relevant to the bottom line compared to mass market titles (Mario, AC, Zelda of course but also titles like NintenDogs).
- Production Planning starts anywhere from 8 weeks to 6 months in advance of a titles release. It's damn hard to predict how well a title will sell that early on. It is even worse for HW which has lead times much, much longer.
- Games are shipped via air and final assembly happens in the region where they are sold. HW is shipped via boat from Asia directly. This means right about now somebody is ordering Christmas HW. How do you think the red left joy-con will sell in December? We had tricked-out time-series forecasting statistics at the end but still got it wrong ~20% of the time.
- Overstock is crazy expensive, both in the channel and in Nintendo Warehouses. If you order too much of a title and it turns out the title only has a core day 1 audience you or the channel which you made believe in the title is totally screwed.