Lol it’s like Nintendo just wants to back itself into a corner and waste away with its IP. Jeez. I honestly have no desire to purchase anything from them anymore.
I still emulate a solid amount of their games I’ve had for most of my life because I don’t want to wear down my old hardware.
They haven’t gotten a cent out of me since the GameCube, though, so I understand I’m probably not going to be their target audience anymore.
Lol it's like Nintendo just wants to back itself into a corner and waste away with its IP.
This is a Switch emulator, meaning these are games that are still available for sale. It's not like taking down a SNES emulator or something Nintendo hasn't made available for 30+ years, it's involving games they're selling today. Taking down an emulator is literally Nintendo protecting its IP.
I honestly have no desire to purchase anything from them anymore.
If you were using this emulator, you weren't likely purchasing anything from them in the first place. And I'm no doctor, but... I'd have to imagine that's likely the reason Nintendo took this down to begin with.
I getcha, just have not been stoked about Nintendo’s continual deathmarch against the hydra of emulation.
I honestly think it’s more of a waste of money than it’s actually worth and the publicity of taking down emulation sites is pretty bad for them (especially when they take down ones which deal with largely abandonware or really old games, like Vimm’s lair did).
Without getting into the debate over the ethics of piracy or anti consumer practices, jumping into the fray by aggressively litigating and making a splash like Nintendo and Sony seem to focus on likely hurts their bottom line and certainly hurts their reputation with consumers.
While I don't support pirating products that are currently for sale, I do think it's essential that emulators like Ryujinx are developed now in order to preserve titles for later. Some Switch software already has been delisted, and someday eventually all of it will be.
While I don’t support pirating products that are currently for sale
I do when Nintendo refuses to make them available on other (higher quality) hardware and also treats their paying consumers and fans like scum. I can boot up Doom on any of a dozen different computers 30 years later and play to my heart’s content but that’s not an option for Nintendo. Piracy generally is completely justified by a vast array of anti-consumer bullshit. If they can’t make games without resorting to that bullshit, fuck 'em. I hope they go under.
The delisting is what gets me most (and we’re dealing with that in basically every media catalogue from film/tv to games).
Well, that and the blatant cash grabs I see with rereleases that end up being console specific and basically unsupported like with the cases of the Wii store and basically every iteration of their online stores since.
I played Wii and eventually Wii U with buddies for smash but am glad I didn’t own the systems. I know one of my friends gave a lot of money to Nintendo multiple times getting classics like Pokemon Snap and other nostalgia buys on multiple systems.
My most recent experience with Nintendo was borrowing a buddy’s switch to play Breath of the Wild back around when it came out. I’m pretty meh on their new content and by the way a lot of their recent releases were received, I’m not super interested. Might bug someone to play the Pokemon Arceus one which seems kinda cool, but that would be the extent of my interest and it’s not really nagging at me, anyway.
My main gripe is that they seem to be doing the bare minimum with their IP (with little innovation in the field/botched releases) and wasting money/resources on what I see as frivolous, shortsighted, lawsuits in the name of protecting their property as well as corporate heavy production that ends up with forgettable and formulaic games.
Maybe I am now become old, but I don’t care to see the most recent iteration of the Pokemon, Zelda, Mario, or Smash Bros sagas and am perfectly content with replaying N64 to GameCube classics in those series. Probably doesn’t help that I went to college with a bunch of friends who hung out and played Project M with some Halo 3 or Reach sprinkled in for variety lol.
If you were using this emulator, you weren’t likely purchasing anything from them in the first place. And I’m no doctor, but… I’d have to imagine that’s likely the reason Nintendo took this down to begin with.
Actually…I own a Switch and paid full price for TOTK on launch week. But playing the game in 30fps chunky resolution was very painful for me, as i’ve gotten quite used to 60fps+ over the last few years with 3D games. I almost put the game down in the first hour or so, playing the game was literally making my eyes hurt. That’s when i went poking into the Switch emulation scene and set up yuzu (RIP). Within a few hours i was playing TOTK at 60fps 1440p and it was mostly glitch free. I put another 20 hours into the game before putting that down. But it was a glorious 20 hours, as that game is absolutely beautiful when you can wipe away the greasy look of 30fps low-res Switch graphics.
So…I am a Nintendo customer that was getting a better experience out of my purchased Nintendo game by emulating it. I know that isn’t everyone in this scene - I see the reddit posts everyday for the past week about people playing leaked Echoes* of Wisdom. I get why that shit would piss Nintendo off. It just sucks that now, others can’t share the amazing experience I had with TOTK.
It’s funny, I own a switch and I would have bought the game (and I probably will still if the technical and QoL issues get resolved) but I’m emulating it better than the hardware can run it right now.
Lol it’s like Nintendo just wants to back itself into a corner and waste away with its IP. Jeez. I honestly have no desire to purchase anything from them anymore.
pretty sure the only reason nintendo cared is because ryujinx was prominently displayed in the leaked footage of echos of wisdom, pre launch
Nintendo’s been way too busy in this scene for too long a time for that to be the only reason. I can see that such a leak wouldn’t help, but they’ve been pouring money into these cases for years and have really ramped it up in the last five or so
That’s not the developer, that’s a Discord mod, and they said in that message specifically that they haven’t heard anything from the dev. It also says nothing about what “the agreement” is. It could very well be a legal settlement.
He is a developer (github) and in fact had a pull request merged in August. I suppose it’s possible it was a “legal agreement”. It seems implied that it wasn’t, and that was what I remembered when replying
It’s a fair question, but honestly I think Nintendo generally focuses on emulators that they perceive as affecting their current or near-future income. The Wii U is fully dead to Nintendo, at least for the moment.
…after knowing for damn sure it was a serious issue in two successive process generations.
There is no way this happened without a LOT of people knowing EXACTLY what was happening, and covering it up. The DoJ should really kick off an investigation into the situation, because it’s pretty obvious there was malfeasance at multiple levels. That, or their leadership and QC processes are both so categorically inept that one could argue the company should be straight up nationalized as a critical strategic asset.
Or force them to admit they are selling it for real without all the license mumbo jumbo. They have always known what “buy now” buttons were meant to lead you to believe. And — in my humble opinion — you aren’t wrong for believing that; they are.
Next: make it so games can’t suddenly lose their music license. This is so incredible annoying. I know it’s depending on what the publishers negotiated, but it shouldn’t be possible to suddenly patch out soundtracks because of a license expire.
Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that’s acceptable).
Some games, like Allen Wake, have been full out removed from sale because of expired music license. There has been other cases some come back later with the music stripped.
Let’s just face it. There isn’t ever going to be a publishing company that doesn’t fuck us however they can for an extra dime. Companies are machines full of people deciding whatever they have to for money.
There also will never be a way they can keep us from just copying files.
I don’t buy it in that case, but it takes me a lot of leg work a lot of times just to figure out what I’m buying, because no one is interested in making it clear besides GOG; even then, there are things I wish they did better on that front.
Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.
For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.
And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.
Ubisoft is nothing compared to Valve… You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam and it’s the biggest store by a huge margin, don’t know why Ubisoft is mentioned specifically…
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
So they’re not DRM free then if you need Steam to download them. You also need to be connected to the internet at least once to confirm ownership, so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical. The closest you’ll get to that with digital games is through GOG or Itch.io or anything similar where you can download the actual install files and you don’t need any launcher at all.
You can purchase the game in a web browser and use steamcmd, which (one could argue is still requiring an app) to download and install. In cases where the publisher is not invoking DRM (Larian games like BG3, DoS2, etc. for instance) once the game is downloaded you can certainly archive it and transfer it to another machine and run it there without Steam. In the end you are likely purchasing proprietary software (though again it’s not always the case on Steam) and we could say you don’t really own that either, so maybe take your complaints to the publishers or just use the power of your wallet and not buy those games and support libre games, of which there are many, another way. That said, Valve is actively making things better for users by developing and contributing to useful libre software like Proton (WINE, DXVK, etc) that can work outside of Steam.
once you downloaded the game you can copy it into a pendrive, upload it into mega or whatever storage and use it. I don’t get why y’all get so held up at the fact that steam might stop offering infinite downloads. Once you have downloaded the game you are free to burn it or store it wherever! This is different from streaming music for example, since with music you never have a local copy you can work with.
so even if you download it once and think that you can now just transfer the game from one PC to another without an internet connection or without Steam, you can’t.
You can. I have several games where I can literally copy the game folder into another computer, press the executable and be able to play it offline. Terraria, vampire survivors, stardew valley, pathfinder: WOTR, Grim Dawn, AoE2… And more. I literally have “backup” zips of several path versions of grim dawn to play different mods because I’m too lazy to patch the game each time I want to replay different versions.
DRM free and actual ownership means physical
Once the game it’s in your system it’s as physical as it can get. There’s no difference of storage in your disk, a pendrive, an external drive or an optical CD. You give the example of GoG, there’s plenty games in steam that once “installed” have all the files in the game folder and you can easily move them.
In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network,” Valve reps have said, “measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
Except they have proven this so far to be accurate. Games that have long since been removed from sale are still downloadable for people who purchased them at the time. Which is more than others can say.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
But the steam network is still around. When steam actually shuts down and no longer has the infrastructure to provide downloads for games, I have no idea what their plan is. They hypothetically could provide a way to remove the DRM, but I doubt that it’s something the publishers of games would allow.
Just people trying to ride the wave for internet points without really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s just the popular “current thing” to hate on.
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).
There is a bigger barrier to them being able to take it away from you. But they absolutely can. Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.
This is about the medium by which the license is provided, there is no doubt whatsoever that the license is the same. This has been proven repeatedly. The difference here is that the distributor can be legally forced to remove the content by the owner of the media. So, if for instance you order a physical disc and pay for it ahead of time and then the place you order from loses the right to distribute that disc, you absolutely won’t get it in the mail because they’re required to send it back to the owner.
You’d likely get a refund in that case but that’s because you didn’t get to actually enjoy that media at all. But buying a license to a show on Amazon or something is different only because it’s likely that they have pull the show after you paid for it and outside the return window. Meaning in theory you have enjoyed or consumed the media you paid for. So the license is legal.
What really needs to change imo isn’t the transparency. This discussion keeps being had repeatedly and people keep being outraged by it as if they have never heard that this can happen. Its been 20 some odd years of this and I would think it would be common knowledge by now.
What really needs to change is the terms by which the owner who licenses the content in the first place should either be required to provide a refund or equivalent on a different platform, or they should be the ones held liable for their terminology in the licensing agreement that would require that license to be null and void for people who have already purchased it.
But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.
Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.
Yeah, that’s because you own the property, not the intellectual property. This is copyright law, not an affront to your ownership. When you “buy” a movie digitally on Amazon, you’re only buying access to their copy of the movie. Amazon bought the right to distribute it to you. When that contract expires, they can’t distribute it to you anymore. That’s why it’s not ownership. When you buy a game on GOG, you download the installer, and they cannot take it away from you, no matter how hard they try; that’s their whole shtick.
But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.
Someone has probably explained the above to you before.
On the basis of technicality, it will depend very wildly on the ToC of said intellectual property. As you said, GOG just distributes the installer and that is it, the IP holder can technically revoke your/GOG license if that is in the ToC somewhere.
Yeah, hence why I said that technically the license can be revoked. Enforcing that is another matter. Without going into the weeds, we need to rethink how to handle it. At minimum, we need to make sure that if the license is revoked not from breaking ToS, the Copyright/IP holder must refund the purchase too. The copyright/ip holder still has the right to their creation but the consumer is also protected via those refund. It is indeed not bulletproof but whether you like it or not, copyright/ip protection is needed to some extent.
Not trying to argue, but I don’t believe I can re-sell my copy of a game I “bought” on GOG, so in my view that’s not full ownership as most people understand it. If you’re a full, legal owner of some property, you can sell that property anywhere you like.
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