What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?
Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Console or however it's now called on the Switch.
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
> emulator and hardware developers [...] now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material.
You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.
>> "On 27 January 2006, the developers responsible for maintaining the ReactOS code repository disabled access after a meeting was held to discuss the allegations. When approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. Since ReactOS is a free and open-source software development project, the claim triggered a negative reaction by the free software community; in particular, Wine barred several inactive developers from providing contributions[citation needed] and formal high level cooperation between the two projects remained difficult as of 2006.[33] Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted post-audit, and low level cooperation for bug fixes has been still occurring."
And indeed there is little to do except discharging responsibility:
>> all developers were made to sign an agreement committing them to comply with the project's policies on reverse engineering. Contributors to its development were not affected by these events, and all access to the software development tools was restored
Also relevant:
>> the 2004 leaked Windows source code[38] was not seen as legal risk for ReactOS, as the trade secret was considered indefensible in court due to broad spread.[39]
The emulation community seems to have never cared all that much about legality, given their relationship to the warez/cracking scene. I know WINE has been quoted as an example a few times here, but that's a slightly different case --- that's the free software/GPL community, which is far more uptight about legal issues.
Legal always claims losses in the billions, then accounting files the 10-K form and its de minimus and doesn't even show up in the financials.
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
Sure they still sell old games on through their retro console but these can be pirated easily on existing consoles.
This wouldn’t affect the bottom line really at all since this will not make piracy easier.
The only possible loss here is due to fines from regulators or law suits from 3rd parties which had their licenses IP exposed but the latter would be a hard thing to prove or estimate it would be hard to claim that 25-30 year old SGI IP would be that valuable to their competitors today especially since SGI is dead and who knows who owns that IP right now.
Chinese factories have been doing this for decades already. I bought a 100 Games in One system at my local mall kiosk ten years ago that had an NES on a chip built into a game controller that plugged into the TV.
Given their place in the electronics supply chain, China has an incredible ability to clone hardware.
There were clones of NES/SNES when these machines were on the market I had a Famiclone in the 90’s, the games were also mainly bootleg.
Today you have pretty expensive high end SNES clones on the market on top of the 100/1000 games in one HDMI single SoC clones and Nintendo doesn’t seem to care.
I guess they can make the argument that it will damage their financial prospects of reselling old games on digital platforms, such as Virtual Console.
But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales.
I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators has some glaring issues still.
Several legacy Mario titles are expected to be released this year on Nintendo Switch's online subscription service. (Galaxy, Sunshine, Mario 64 is the rumor. The NES and SNES titles are already available and this stuff is driving monthly subscription fees)
It could be mildly bad if someone discovers Nintendo devs were like Disney animators and sneaked in "sex" (The Lion King), a drawn penis (The Little Mermaid), or a topless woman (The Rescuers).
If Nintendo offered N64 games to be purchased for the Switch people would still pay for them in droves. It's weird that they don't offer so much of their past works in any legitimate capacity.
It's genuinely weird that they still don't have a virtual console for anything other than a select few NES games. We're midway through the Switch's lifecyle already!
I've never heard a compelling reason for Nintendo not doing this. Why don't they have a full catalog available on the Switch? It's technically feasible and would make them boatloads of cash.
It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.
This information was actually leaked from a subcontractor, not from Nintendo themselves. It's not clear if Nintendo ever had access to it in its entirety or even knew about it. The subcontractor company is also quite obscure, it's hard to tell how they ended up developing this stuff.
Heh I hope someone finds a way to get reliable (or, for the new generation, any) homebrew on the Switch. The Switch has a built-in browser, Bluetooth and probably a h264 accelerator somewhere in the GPU stack. A proper media player and the ability to easily transfer screenshots via BT would be so awesome.
With many games being outright f2p or very cheap (except AAA titles) I don't get why they all are so uptight about DRM/piracy...
Their copy protection schemes do largely stem from the basic ‘signed personalised tickets’ thing they’ve had going on since the iQue Player and then the Wii, but insofar it seems to have held up to attacks and no fatal fundamental flaws have been found yet. Short of software exploits, until 2048-bit RSA is broken it’s not a concern really
You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is only bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo hates losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property".
Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.
Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.
> It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]
You oversold both examples.
2, 3, and 4: That's a hosted(?) emulator distributing, or at least referencing, Nintendo IP, and not in a fair-use context.
You're mildly right about 5 and 6. Nintendo stole the header of ROM files of content that was stolen from Nintendo. The author of the header would have a claim against Nintendo, but seeing how they'd have to explain how the ROM got distributed in the first place, and it's not clear there's enough information in the header for it to be eligible for copyright, I doubt they'd say anything.
5/6 sounds interesting to me. On the one hand Nintendo is the IP holder of the original ROM, so they would be the only ones allowed to legally download it if I understand it correctly. On the other hand the ROM was modified and contains a header which was made by someone else. So, to that part they don't hold the rights to download it? Or is it okay, because it's a derivative of their work?
Just like mp3s cannibalized the music industry. While they did get hard after the lat 90s I would consider routine grwoth year over year to be good. 17 percent in 2017 was considered a bad year
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.