Retro gaming YouTuber Once Were Nerd has been sued and raided by the Italian government.
That's insane. I know many of these handhelds come with pirated roms but taking it out on a youtube reviewer is outrageous. Why don't they just ban them from being shipped to italy?
Easier to stomp on one individual than to crack down on the businesses importing this stuff. They’re probably also collecting some kind of import duty on them too.
Nintendo 5 years from now: "After suing multiple fan projects and intimidating them to cease projects, Nintendo admits that they were just fan projects"
This is the company by the way that's behind on the times of technology. Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
They killed Splatoon's grassroots Esport community thanks to them making a quick buck with splatoon 3, that promised a bunch of network functionality improvements that never materialized.
So now, a game that used to have multiple small but growing international tournaments now has nothing. Hell, they used to have tournaments on the main stage at PAX East.
It’s a great game with a very high skill ceiling, but the MMR and team balancing was absolute garbage. It was very rare that it was a close match. You usually clapped or got clapped.
How they treated professional Melee and especially Project M was the moment I realized Nintendo was just another out-of-touch company. So many indie devs would kill for fans that passionate, let alone a modding scene that robust. Nintendo threw it all away.
Edit: and that ignores the graveyard of fan games Nintendo has killed. AM2R, Pokémon Uranium…
I recommend going the extra mile and no longer buying their hardware or software.
Emulation is in a great state right now, and it’s only getting better. The fewer resources scummy companies like Nintendo have from sales, the fewer resources they’ll have to go after community products.
Really hoping this isn’t a 3DS situation where they added a notch to gamecarts. Its so dumb that we can’t use game consoles like a PC and just fucking install discs if we want to without a shitty checking system.
I never understood why they abandoned Splatoon 2. Like, I get that they have a new game, and that’s great, I guess…but why not support Splatoon 2 until Switch 2 comes out? I never bought the splatoon 3, because I JUST bought splatoon 2 like 2-3 years prior when it came out. You NEED online to play that game.
So you’re paying $59.99 for the game, and then $20 a year for online. All for a game that exists in a time bubble. Once it’s time for the next game, fuck you. Buy the new game. Your old game means nothing.
Well fuck you too Nintendo. I’ll just not buy Splatoon 3, and not pay for online anymore. How about that?
As one of the leaders in said community for the NA scene I wouldn’t lay the blame entirely on Splat3. Things were slowing down before then and a lot of the old guard were hanging up their hats.
Networking left much to be desired, but we also started the grassroots on the Wii U after all.
Fair, I have connections to a few that were fairly serious during 2, most of which were in tournies, one of those never bought 3, but the rest gave it a shot.
The ripoff that is S3 seems to be nails in the proverbial coffin.
Yeah the transition between games was hard. 1 to 2 was ok-ish as there was excitement on the switch. 2 to 3 was rough as the average comp player was between high school and college aged which had less disposable income to get the game right away. Not to mention each time was a hard reset on both maps and equipment that slowly rolled out over time made getting cohesive teams extra hard…
Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
As on addon or built-in? I know the GameCube had an Ethernet add-on and I think the N64 had a dialup addon (Would have been the fastest at the time for home users, nobody had home broadband on N64 release)
Yep, and some PS2s (like mine) came with the network adapter built-in!
Never going to forget the days of having a 30-foot ethernet cable running across my living room (right under the doorway) so I can play Battlefront 2, Ratchet and Clank 3, and of course, MGS3 online.
Folks pointing out GCN/Wii internet abilities are missing that the experience was awful. Like sure, the guts of broadband were there, but actually playing a game with friends online was way more trouble than it was worth.
So to your point, real online gaming was indeed way behind other consoles (IMHO).
I stopped playing Mario Kart online with others on the Wii. Some players had set an infinite blue shells hack on. Just wasn’t fun to play. Complained to Nintendo and they replied like there was nothing they could do or something like that.
Yup, they changed their minds. Bluetooth, Titles on mobile. It’s this mish-mash of bullheadedness for the sake of being bullheaded, then the try like a decade later.
Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.
They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths… They’re one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.
That’s great if you like Zelda and Mario games… but because they’re run by a bunch of old-school grandpas… they’re not good at much else.
Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it’s games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it’s usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.
The only reason they’re still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.
I don’t think people remember, but there was a time when no twitch streamer or youtuber would play Nintendo games because they fucking take down their streams for copyright infringement.
That’s not entirely true, you could keep the videos up if all the ad revenue went to Nintendo. In other words, if you paid them so you could promote their game.
I’m personally surprised by Nintendo continuing to include user accessible SD cards in their consoles from the DS through the Switch. It becomes incredibly convenient for piracy and I would have thought they were doing it on purpose to at least sell the hardware if it wasn’t for all the evidence you the contrary.
The ps5 port only requires one screw to access. I know the hard drive on the PS4 was only one screw to access as well. I’m uncertain of the Xbox, they had a proprietary hard drive for the 360 so I didn’t go down that path. While that is slightly more complicated than inserting a SD card, it is not technical.
M.2 seems easier for normies to mess up and SD cards have traditionally been significantly cheaper… plus a microSD card is smaller than M.2 by an order of magnitude.
Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
While I agree they’re behind the times on their consoles re online, I think it’s more a software issue. I don’t think criticising the hardware functionality is quite fair.
The predecessor to the Wii was the Gamecube which came out in 2001, where few people had broadband internet
The other consoles in that generation were the ps2, xbox, and briefly dreamcast. Of those, only the xbox came with built in networking, until the playstation slim release in 2004. The dreamcast, ps2 and Gamecube all offered additional adapters to provide ethernet (and the dreamcast and Gamecube had dial up modems available too). So the Gamecube was in line with most of the competition.
The Wii had out of the box WiFi (and an adapter for ethernet available) which put it in a similar space to its competitors. Only the ps3 had both WiFi and ethernet out of the box at launch. The 360 only had ethernet until a refresh that added WIFI. And the Wii was also coming in at a significantly lower price point.
Fascists care about setting precedent and “purchased vaguely illegal content” is some great precedent.
This just also is a smart attack because the usual crowd is going to come out to insist that it is OWN’s fault for playing Nintendo games and piracy is the greatest problem facing the world and that Nintendo Switch Online™ is a great service.
Its the same as when the christofacists attacked Pornhub via Visa et al in the US. Everyone hates revenge porn and child porn (well, except for certain heads of state…) so nobody is going to complain but it made it very clear the path to destroy content that goes against the fascists’ interests.
Italy has always been a bit odd - I remember a group of scientists were convicted of manslaughter because they didn’t predict an earthquake that killed a few hundred people.
The USGS still claims, as it did in 2009, that earthquakes are unpredictable. At best they’ve been able to communicate when/where seismic events happen slightly faster than they propagate through the earth.
most of the time i get the “you’re having an earthquake” text a few seconds after the shaking stops, but a few times it’s come before it started so hey
What about that American college girl whose roommate died and they accused her of murdering her in a satanic ritual which all turned out to be made up by the Italian prosecution?
In 2011, in a second autobiography called Starting Over, La Toya Jackson retracted her allegations against both her brother Michael and her father Joe, saying that she was forced to make them by her husband at the time, whom she accused of being abusive.
“My family and Michael knew that wasn’t really me talking,” the Daily Beast quotes her as saying in an interview. “I never believed for a minute my brother was guilty of anything like that.”>
The Daily Beast reports in 2013 that after very publicly and repeatedly defending Jackson, Robson now says that Jackson sexually molested him for seven years.
Two years later, in May 2015, a judge in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Mitchell L. Beckloff, dismisses Robson’s suit against the estate, saying that he waited too long to file his claim. In December 2017, the same judge dismisses the rest of Robson’s suit, filed against Jackson’s two companies, MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, because the two corporations could not be found liable for Jackson’s alleged behavior. Notably, neither of these judgments address the credibility of Robson’s accusations.
James Safechuck files a similar suit against MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures in 2014, alleging that Jackson abused him on “hundreds” of occasions between 1988 and 1992. Beckloff, who is also the presiding judge in this suit, rejects Safechuck’s suit in June 2017 on the same grounds he gave Robson.>
His sister walked back her accusations citing her husband being abusive to try and get money from Michael’s downfall. The two accusers, AFTER HE DIED, were literally told they had no case. One of them had originally defended MJ.
Idk their emulation is garbage except for the suspension and rewind. A lot of the open source emulation I have seen, especially of Nintendo products, is immaculate.
That’s just not true. They have their own emulators, but most of the time they are inferior to community ones. I think Virtual Console releases used some kind of optimized emulators for their hardware, but didn’t care about accuracy, etc.
So the lawyer says that Nintendo, despite knowing that the emulators themselves are legal, has unlawfully caused take downs and reputational damage. Sounds kind of illegal
Not really. It sounds like they haven’t gone after them for emulation, but instead for emulation-adjacent things: copying ROMs, circumventing digital locks, etc.
They explicitly mention (one of?) the developers of Yuzu sharing ROMs in the article.
In other words, the emulator itself isn’t illegal, but in order to use the emulator the way most people want, you have to do illegal things, and that’s what they go after you for.
Logical conclusion takedown of the ROM’s and not the emulator. ROM’s can be obtained without problems, I don’t regularly read that sites are taken down or people are taken up. That’s just a convenient excuse. Nintendo just knows that their only argument is exclusive titles. Who would still want a Wii if you could use it better on the steam deck with yuzu?
I also remember that I often read that you have to organize such and such files yourself. Where then reference was made to original hardware/data carriers and not to Rom pages etc. I had problems with Zelda in particular.
Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
I don’t want to contradict that at all. I’m not up to date and only read articles on “IT” sites, but these mostly refer to the fight against F/OSS which is then directed against the emulators. They hardly ever mention action against ROM sites.
The creator, assuming he didn’t do anything wrong, complied with demands, providing full transcripts of his conversations and chats with gaming handheld manufacturers. The officers also took his phone, promising to return it in a few days. It was returned two months later, on June 15.
Not sure why this is getting down votes. Price is the key factor most parents look at, and most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is or know what “gaming on Linux” means. That is what is stopping a good friend of mine. Price is a huge factor, but the intimidation from lack of knowledge is just as big
Nah, you’re not giving the steam deck nearly enough credit. It fills a very similar niche to the switch - a viable mobile gaming option that can also be readily used for couch gaming. You don’t need a large steam library to get use out of that, just like how the average switch owner probably only has a few switch games.
That is not true. Steam games are normally much cheaper, you can also get tons of free games over Steam or Epic. Biggest issue with Steam Deck is the size. It is adult sized even my wife is not comfortable with it and it is too big for children. You would need to use it in combination with a controller.
No, it’s just straight up misinformation, or at least a disingenuous oversimplification.
The base model steam deck is $400 (and you can get steam-certified refurbished ones for even cheaper), and we don’t know the price of the Switch 2 yet. If it comes with even some of the hardware upgrades that have been leaked, I very much doubt it’ll retail for as low as $350.
The base SteamDeck doesn’t have an OLED screen and is still more expensive than the Switch OLED. As for the price of the Switch 2, it’s a well-known and documented practice that console manufacturers sell them at a loss and make back the profits in games. If anything, you’re the one spewing misinformation.
The base steam deck blows the OLED switch out of the water specs-wise on everything other than the screen. Nothing I’ve said is untrue, the relevant top comment is pure speculation at best.
See? This is what I mean by disconnected from the real world. Next you’re gonna tell me how open source allows you to unlock the full potential of the Steamdeck’s hardware.
Nothing I’ve said is untrue, the relevant top comment is pure speculation at best.
Brother, you literally said the Switch 2 is not gonna be around 350 USD. You have exactly as much evidence of that as the relevant top comment has that it will be. The difference is that only your comment was serious.
Dawg you gotta be a troll if you think I’m “disconnected from the real world” just because I know that better specs is why the steam deck can handle modern games and the switch can’t. Also I said that we don’t know what the switch 2 will cost, and that I’d be surprised if it was that low. Don’t put words in my mouth.
Nope, you’re disconnected from the real world because you don’t understand the average user doesn’t care about specs they can’t see. You walking back your words now doesn’t mean you didn’t say them. Nobody is putting anything in your mouth.
I agree. Stupid lemmings not understanding that 400 usd switch 2, plus 70 dollar switch games that nintendo says you are allowed to play, plus paying for internet again is way cheaper than 400 usd steam deck that will get you around 20 or so games for the price of a single nintendo game off humble bundle.
I feel on every single social media platform I have ever been on I will see the comment
[This social media platform’s users] are completely disconnected from the real world.
I never know how seriously to take this. I always want to automatically dismiss it because it seems like a “everyone here is delusional” type of comment and if I have had a majority of pleasant, reasonable-seeming interactions there I will really not like the idea that these seemingly nice people who had a civil, reasonable discussion with me are actually delusional, and by extension I probably am delusional too. And since I have seen it everywhere it basically seems to say nowhere online has (a decent amount of) people in touch with reality. But setting that aside for a moment…
Obviously every platform will attract different types of people, probably not a fully representative sample of the population, a skew towards this or that type of person… but how far skewed from the “normal” experience is each platform on average? What is normal? If one platform has a wild skew towards one type of person, but that type of person makes up most of what I’ll see in real life due to my environment (like who my friends and family are, what my workplace is like), does its distance from normal matter if it’s no different from my real life normal? How much? Given that a lot of people spend a lot of time online, in which they often express opinions they truly hold that they would not vocalize in real life, would you say people who eschew social media have their own disconnect from reality in some way? What social media platform is closest to the average real life normal, which is the least “disconnected from the real world”?
Let’s preface by making clear that when I say Lemmings are disconnected from reality, I don’t mean they’re delusional. I mean they’re so immersed in their unix-like free-as-in-freedom open-source technobubble that they’ve forgotten what regular people want.
As for the rest of your comment, yes, every social media will attract its own niche of people but not every platform is equally as disconnected from the real world. For example, nobody in Fragrantica (perfume social media) would recommend a regular person to buy a perfume that smells like cocaine and magazines, even though its one of the most popular fragrances among people who like perfumes. Meanwhile, on Lemmy, people love to pretend the SteamDeck is an actual alternative to the Switch.
Thanks for clarifying. I do my best to compensate for any of my differences from what the average person wants, but it’s a bit hard if you and your environment also skews in that direction.
At least with tech I feel I’ve got a somewhat decent handle on “normal,” at least for my age group, which is not “grandparent struggling to turn on the computer”. I probably skew a little more crazy compared to average, I did switch my computer’s OS to Linux, but way less than people on this instance. Although I have no comment on the Switch/Steam Deck thing, I have zero desire to participate in console gaming and none of my friends are passionate enough about consoles to leak any information over to me. I’ve seen Switches around and have no idea what a Deck looks like, which might be telling, but it is also possible some of my friends have Decks and I just dismissed it as “some object”.
Plenty of people do or use a lot of things that more people don’t. My point was that not everyone knows what a SteamDeck is. You rebutted by saying people on steam know what it is. Do you not see how terrible of an argument that is? You were basically conceding, but you worded it like you weren’t trying to make my point, even though you did.
Yes, people on steam know about the SteamDeck, the majority of the US and world population, do NOT know what steam is. Therefore, by your own logic, most people don’t know about the SteamDeck.
It’s getting down voted because it’s not $600 it’s $400. Which is exactly how much the switch costed at launch. Well not exactly. The switch cost money to play online. So it’s actually cheaper
Additionally you can get the games much cheaper. Steam games are normally much cheaper than the Nintendo closed store. You also have Hero launcher which allows you Epic And Gog games. Epic gifts every week a new game. That alone is more than most switch players will own.
Don’t you gotta buy Switch accessories too? Like kinda the same things, if you need them… a dock, extra controllers, memory card, etc? But the deck, you can use existing controllers (from other consoles, or a mouse and keyboard you might have lying around) and buy a 3rd party dock that works just as well.
I have a switch and I loved it for some games, but now that I have a steamdeck, it’s the most I’ve played games in years. Comparing accessories is moot imo, and can be cheaper on a deck… and the deck is just way more versatile overall. The Switch’s benefit is proprietary Nintendo games and that doesn’t tip the scales enough for me to buy a 2nd gen version. I’ll choose the versatility of the deck any day, it got me playing more games again
I have 0 accessories. You get everything you need: case and charger. Most accessories are completely pointless rice, unless for some reason you want to use your deck as a pc. In which case it is still cheaper than switch and a pc.
Since I bring mine to libraries and gatherings, I use it like a Switch to plug into big TVs and four controllers. Thankfully it’s all still cheaper than the good stuff for a Switch 👍
SD is way cheaper in the long run. You already have a sizeable library and if you don’t 620 on steam deck and humble bundle is going to get you way more games than 620 spent on switch and overpriced nintendo copy paste games. Didn’t you have to pay for the internet again on switch?
Yes, this wasn’t an admission because it’s a well-known fact that is not inconsistent with Nintendo’s earlier actions. The headline is deceptive and people don’t read the article. The article itself contains no new information and it is only worth reading for someone who has been deceived by the headline and needs to be set straight by the same people who wrote the deceptive headline. It’s click bait that shouldn’t exist.
Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.
This was settled with the Sony/Bleem debacle. Bleem only provided the software by which one could emulate PSX games but never the ISO files themselves. Those files could only be provided by the end user regardless of how they obtained them. Sony, of course, couldn’t give less of a shit and sued them anyways. Judges, however, took Bleem’s side on the basis that no copyright infringement had been committed on their behalf. Although Bleem would ultimately win ever lawsuit brought against them, the sheer size of the legal costs led to their closure which makes you wonder if that was Sony’s endgame the whole time.
Here’s a video by Nerrel about the legality of emulation. It’s from 2020 but it is still relevant.
The legality of ANYTHING, is subject to local jurisdiction, in this case it will be in EU/Italy. Also, while emulators may not be illegal, copying ROMs that are copyrighted to Nintendo of whichever may be the company that published said ROM, are.
Alternativelly, some higher-up got pressure via some politician after talking to some lobbyist or golf-buddy, to “do something”, and some lower-down who got the hot potato covered their ass by finding something they could do, all of which quite independently of any strategical considerations.
If one doesn’t assume the Justice System aims be Just, a lot of things become easilly explained without the needed to find some kind of Master Strategy Beyond Our Comprehension to explain them.
Yeah, it’s weird bcs as I understand that copyright law from 1941 is for the actual distribution, and if he never got paid by anyone in the distribution chain (tho as understand he did get some free consoles to review), then he wasn’t part of it - just filming himself saying what can be bought on the market.
The exact specifics change country by country, in Italy there are a lot of horseshit rules around it because one of the most powerful unions lobbies (our equivalent of the RIAA) for more exclusive control over media at every chance they get, to the point that you’re not allowed to distribute even your own media through physical sales without paying a cut.
Almost certainly there was some kind of pressure by somebody well connected on some higher up in the Italian Justice or Political Authorities of the
“Something Must Be Done!”
kind.
Followed by whomever was the last link in the shit chain coming from above, following the mental process of:
“This is Something we can do”
“We shall do This!”
It’s pretty standard in the stuff which isn’t their daily bread and butter that Justice Systems are driven by cronyism at the higher level and cover-my-ass at the lower level, especially in countries which have a culture of Cronyism.
(People are people, and even in Justice Systems they’re no more impeccably honest and fair than elsewhere - in fact positions with power tend to attract people who are less honest and fair than average, IMHO).
Often this shit gets overturned when it gets to court or on at least appeal (generally the system gets less crooked as you go up, though I know of cases in other similar countries in Europe were only when it got the European Court Of Human Rights did the injustice go made right) and once the Press’ (and the higher up’s) attention has moved on, but that is a mentally and economically very costly fight for individuals to fight, which is why poor people almost invariably get shafted in such a system when they cross the wrong person or “don’t know their place”.
Sounds like a massive overreaction and abuse of century-old laws.
If those devices are so bad, why not forbid selling them in Italy, instead of punishing people who buy them completely legally. Imagine going through all of this because you bought a laptop and posted a review online.
There’s nothing new in this article. And I don’t think Nintendo ever said that emulation is illegal, just emulating their games is, which technically is true to some part at least in the United States, where sometimes you need to circumvent some security measures to get games emulated which is a forbidden (this is mentioned in the article).
Yea, if I recall correctly, the Yuzu team was sharing roms of latest Nintendo releases internally and Nintendo was able to prove it. At least Jeff Gerstman podcast suggested something to that accord when reporting on it.
Yeah and the Yuzu people had made something like 4 million bucks on the project too. When you start making serious cash off of tools for piracy (and when we’re talking about a current-gen console that’s essentially what it is, not a tool for preservation like older emulators) then you should expect some heat to come your way.
Nintendo has always been a bit on the bastardly side of things when it comes to fan projects but I can’t say that I blame them for going after Yuzu when they felt like they had a winnable case.
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