Yeah, it’s about control, not the technique
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It’s interesting because I don’t think Nintendo was really wrong about the threat posed by emulators, if you assume their perspective on intellectual property and their right/responsibility to defend it from unauthorized distribution. The widespread availability of emulators and the ease of file sharing meant that almost everyone I knew had a seemingly limitless collection of NES roms by 1999! I don’t want to get into the weeds about whether “lost sales” is a fallacy and all that (I think it mostly is). But emulators as they existed in 1999 directly led to the widespread unauthorized and uncompensated distribution of Nintendo-developed software.
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I am also the idiot who has a copy of Super Mario Bros., authorized or not, installed on every one of the dozens of machines I have that has a screen and still wants to buy that SMB game & watch thing.
EDIT: This really has nothing to do with anything. I just needed you all to know my shame.
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In videogames especially, where they are notable as a medium that experiences anti-displacement. Piracy leads to a notable rise in sales.
(I read through that 300 page report on piracy that the EU funded and quickly buried because it revealed the truth that piracy is simply… not a big deal)
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Interest in emulation lead directly to the virtual console as far as I’m concerned, Nintendo has piracy to thank for 90 percent of their nostalgia sales
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I can’t subscribe to this with what I know but I think ‘it’s not a big deal’ is as much as most people need to think about it.
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Emulating Nintendo properties is actively harmful to Nintendo, imagine how much better off they would be if no one ever hacked the Mario games and created a whole subgenre that more or less pointed the way directly to Mario Maker. I’m glad they were able to survive the well over 10 million copies those games have sold.
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Since we’re getting into the usual pro-piracy/fuck-Nintendo arguments now, I want to restate that I am an avid software pirate of retro games and I was just expressing that I think, whatever their other evils may or may not be, Nintendo is not being hypocritical by offering their software via controlled emulation.
(not that y’all are arguing with me necessarily, but also I don’t think these are arguments against anyone who’s actually here)
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I’m curious, because I’m working off of this and I spend perhaps too much time trying to explain why anecdotes don’t reflect the bigger picture so I’m wondering if you have anything of comparable depth of analysis
For games, positive effects of illegal downloads, streams and games played on
chipped consoles on sales can be concluded, in particular for legal downloads
and cloud games such as Gaikai and Onlive. These effects are significant at
even the 1 per cent level and are similar for illegal downloads/streams and
games played on chipped consoles: 34 and 38 extra legal downloads per 100
illegally accessed games, and 60 and 63 extra cloud games played per 100
illegally accessed games. Other effects of illegal downloads and streams are
not significant at even the 10 per cent level, except for free games where
displacement by illegal downloads and streams can be concluded and the
displacement rate can be anything between 0 and 100 per cent, with 42 per
cent the most likely displacement rate. However, since it is free games that
are displaced, this implies that no sales of games are displaced by illegal
downloads or streams, although advertising revenues may be lost.
The overall conclusion is that for games, illegal online transactions induce
more legal transactions. For the other categories music, audio-visual and
books illegal downloads and streams tend to displace physical sales, although
the error margins indicate that with 95 per cent certainty only a displacement
between 0 and 100 per cent can be concluded. For music, audio-visual and
books illegal downloads and streams are found to have positive effects on the
number of legal streams, and insignificant and mixed effects on the number of
legal downloads. The effects of illegal downloads and streams on live visits are
positive for music (live concerts) and negative for audio-visual (cinema visits).
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I think that’s a good source and certainly better than anything coming out of IP industries.
The direct experience is that, from the perspective of a given product, piracy mitigation up to a certain level is effective. There’s a measurable impact from hardware that’s trivially hacked like the PSX or Dreamcast or early-model Switches and software methods that blunt piracy while the hype cycle is at its apex have measurable effects on the incredibly-important day 1/week 1 sales period. On the other hand, negative press cycles surrounding onerous DRM or restrictive user licenses are likely counterproductive and many have been abandoned (the late-360-era use of DLC keys for integral parts of games to deter piracy and resale wasn’t effective at either).
(Unfortunately, I have to speak in generalities here – this is from sales analyses run by publishers and industry groups. Not good science but I think in a perspective limited to a given producer’s interest it holds).
You can analogize current best practice to PC antivirus: you need something, a bare amount of friction. But above a certain bar of protection, you’re making things worse for yourself.
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yeah I can agree with that 100%
Typically the anti-displacement exists, speculatively, because of this barest amount of friction to effortless piracy.
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Remember when the roms on the Wii Virtual Console were watermarked roms from a website el oh el
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I’ve got that Okami Wii copy with the IGN watermark
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idc about emulation vs porting I just want them to actually remake mario 64 with improved camera controls and stuff
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Get someone at Nintendo to call Bluepoint lol.
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First Look at Bluepoint’s Mario 64 remake:
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weren’t most of those cases people misconstruing VC roms having iNES headers and then it turned out they had iNES headers because Nintendo hired the guy who wrote the format
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yeah no studio but nintendo could pull this off in a way that doesn’t completely suck
even then they’d probably nerf all the fun physics stuff about 64. I guess it’s possible that something like this may emerge from the PC port (lol)
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nintendo hire this man!!!
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every now and then go down these rabbit holes and
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