While Valve shouldn't have done this, Yuzu (and emulation) is completely legal. Nintendo cant do anything unless they want to go hard against emulation itself which brings us to the same are APIs copyrightable debate.
Wait, why should Valve not have done this? I know Nintendo likes to bully smaller folks but it's not like Valve is small or that they rely on keeping good terms with Nintendo, right?
Edit: I guess I didn't realize Portal was on Switch.
It seems like Valve has re-uploaded without the emulator, but I think there's a case to be made that this sets expectations for Valve and Nintendo in an important way.
Valve is not selling a walled garden product and if you are expecting them to administer the steam deck like one you will be disappointed. If that's not for you then you should not go into business with Valve - it would be painful for both parties.
Nintendo doesn't have a relationship with anyone (content creators included), apart from their lawyers.
Despite the video being retracted the desired effect has been achieved. The flurry of news has more lay people thinking about the Steam Deck in the same class as the Switch, even if their intent is not to emulate.
Sometimes when you have a sensitive relationship, it can be helpful to support the thing that makes the other company uncomfortable without openly advertising it.
what relationship? Valve is pretty much PC only other than some ports of old source engine games. Nintendo is first party console and handheld with couple of iOS/android apps. their isn't really any relationship to be sensitive.
No one is abusing the legal system. They're using the legal system. The way to fix it is not to try to stop people using the system 'wrong', but to update the system so it's appropriate for modern tech.
While that's strictly true, morality is not the same as the legal system. Using the legal system in ways that other see as immoral does not and should not make friends.
Do they have that much of one? I think they've had one Switch title (the Portal collection) and Nintendo doesn't really have anything on Steam as far as I know.
Even then the relationship more Valve repo acces and licencing > Nvidia's First Party Studio > Nintendo. And obviously Nividia has a good relationship with Nintendo because of the Tegra X1 powering the switch so it's not a situation of Valve communicating with Nintendo as much as it's Valve letting Nvidia make ports out of their back catalog by occasionally going "I will allow it" whenever Nvidia Lightspeed Studios asks politely enough.
I would guess its much more subtle than this. Consider potentially nintendo refusing to port games that were on steam, or demanding more money/control over games that have overlap with steam.
Punishing publishers for choosing to release on a competitors platform they don't like would hurt those publishers more than Valve. Nintendo's relationship with third parties is already often strained, doing anything like you suggest would in particular cause indies, which Switch relies on to fill the gaps between Nintendo releases, to flee the platform.
I think it’s pretty obvious most people using Switch emulators are getting the games on the net for free. So it’s awkward to show that on promotional material of another handheld device.
Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
If getting switch ROMs were as easy as buying any other game on Steam, most people would probably pay, the same way most people already pay instead of pirating PC games.
It's extremely easy to buy Switch ROMs and is just as easy as buying a game off Steam. Just buy it off Nintendo's website, the eShop or Humble Bundle or wherever.
Dumping the game so you can use it on an emulator isn't as easy but removing the DRM from a Steam title isn't necessarily easy either (especially if it's a new release).
That's not buying a ROM. That's like saying when you "buy" a movie in Prime Video you are buying an mp4.
Buying a ROM would mean buying a ROM. As in, you get the .ROM.
Steam DRM by the way is trivial to bypass. From Steamworks documentation:
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
Of course some games have third party DRM, and in the store it will tell you that before you buy it.
But the problem is not the DRM here. Your average gamer wouldn't care about a non invasive as long as they could get the same or better experience than they can now using a pirated ROM.
What system uses .ROM files? Nothing. Buying a Switch game is literally just as easy as buying a Steam game. In either case I still have to bypass some DRM to use it somewhere else. It's not a service problem because fundamentally they are the same.
While emulation CAN give a better experience it can also give a worse experience. Not every Switch title is playable, many have glitches etc.
> Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
how many rootkit-level DRMs does Steam need to distribute before we can throw that comment of Gabe's out the window? They own the PC market, they have just about mastered software distribution, and everyone seems fairly happy with the service provided, yet piracy still exists and most everyone on the Steam marketplace go out of their way to implement various methods of software DRM to prevent it.
What kind of fantasy service provided is he imagining that would put a stop to software piracy?
Safe to say that the comment was plain wrong at this point, no?
Gaben's comment is related to how you can curb the effects of piracy by making games accessible and easy to install, which Steam undoubtedly does. There will obviously be people still not willing to pay who pirate games, but these were never a marketable population anyway. By improving your services you reduce the relative appeal of Pirate sources for the actual target population of these games, i.e. people willing to pay.
Piracy often wins in cases when it provides a vastly superior experience than official channels themselves. A LOT of today's AAA titles end up giving a massively better experience in Pirate releases than in official ones - Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series, Bethesda's Doom and Wolfenstein series, the Mass Effect series, Rockstar's GTA series,... the list goes on and on - plainly because the official releases are so insufferably bloated and ridden with consumer-hostile designs. Piracy is indeed a service problem. Ensure your services are good and people won't turn to Pirate releases anymore.
I have a Steam library like many people (with 500+ games I will never play) and have not pirated a game since installing Steam.
It is easy, affordable, and acceptable to me. I think the user experience can improve a lot. At this moment however, it is my preferred method of buying games.
The service problem is the problem for me. A Prime example being that I "pirate" movies available to me as a Amazon subscriber because of the VPN policy.
Tbh Nintendo does make it particularly hard to pay and emulate. To legally emulate switch games you have to buy and then dump them, but if you hack your switch to dump them, you get banned from the estore so you can no longer buy them.
Personally I'd be happy to pay money and get access to the game ROMs to run on an emulator because I find it more convenient to play them in an emulator than to switch a bunch of cables to put the switch on my monitor.
>but if you hack your switch to dump them, you get banned from the estore so you can no longer buy them.
You actually don't, and I have to give credit to nintendo for this one, there are only a few ways you can get banned (the main one being installing pirated games, the switch has telemetry that sends back data about the signatures of the games you have installed) but just running simple homebrew isn't one of them, you can load up custom firmware and run a game dumper without getting banned just fine. You can even play online with it active (I have done it).
The bigger problem is that only very old models of the console can be hacked without having to solder a modchip so this is completely inaccessible to most switch owners.
>I think it’s pretty obvious most people using Switch emulators are getting the games on the net for free.
Have people already forgotten what Gabe himself said all those years ago? Piracy is a service problem, Nintendo does not provide any way to obtain these games legally for emulation (and often does not provide any way at all of accessing their games from previous platforms), so of course people pirate them. I thankfully still have a fully working launch year Switch so I can do whatever I want but it's not particularly convenient and most people don't have this privilege at all.
The more emulation becomes mainstream the more money Nintendo will invest to illegalize it. You cannot legally get roms of commercial games, even if you own the game. Breaking of DRM is automatically copyright infringement according to the DMCA.
I will admit that I am mildly concerned with this myself. I dislike that everywhere now there are youtube videos showing off how you can make play Switch games, but on Deck. We are effectively forcing Nintendo's hands. While it was a niche thing, they mostly didn't have to care and now they might have to..
Things MAY work out to the benefit of regular users ( though often they work out to the benefit of those with best lawyers ). All I am saying is, if push comes to shove, as much as I would like to believe Gabe will actually fight this should Nintendo go after them somehow ( and I will actually spend money on Steam to fund it if needed ), it would have been so much better if it stayed a hobbyist thing.
Edit: And for the record. I love my Deck. I love that in the sea of closed off crap, Steam made it all this magic come together.
Emulation hasn't been a niche thing since the 90s, emulating older systems has always been wildly popular.
Emulating the Switch specifically is maybe a niche thing because the emulators are relatively new, the system is still sold and you can easily buy the games.
Yes, but in the 90s there were no esports, gaming wasn't a billion dollar industry ( with advertising[1] to support that ).
<<Emulation hasn't been a niche thing since the 90s, emulating older systems has always been wildly popular.
Compared to today it was popular amongst some enthusiasts, who already self-selected from perceived social outcasts. Gaming has only recently become more mainstream, socially acceptable AND ridiculously profitable.
The target is that much bigger. I stand by my 'it used to be a niche', because even being interested in computers was not a mainstream interest.
This attitude of "fearing Nintendo" strikes me as incredibly weird. Force 'em, who cares? That's competition. Love the Wii, but also it's obviously that they've had to make some terrible deals with the devil for the Switch.
And this is because Steam's model is broadly superior, for the simple fact that respects both creators and users autonomy more.
Nintendo can catch up to the times or Nintendo can get it's lunch eaten. But that's on them.
This is where I think the disconnect lies. You think it is about competition and business model. You think the best product wins. You think that just because Steam's product is better, it automatically follows that they would not be subject to whims and vagaries of the court systems ( yes, systems ). Creators and users are not meaningless, but serve as mere pawns to be traded between warring corporate entities. As users, best we can hope for is that current retarded copyrights are not enforced harder than they are already.
Nintendo's financial status is public knowledge as they are a public company. Steam's profit and warchest is unknown, but estimated below Nintendo. In short, if both sides dig in, it could be a while.
I am fine with Nintendo going down as a result of that potential fight, but are you ok with it being a pyrrhic victory, where US legal copyright landscape changes further to the user's detriment?
No no, your first bit doesn't capture at all what I was thinking, but your last bit does. And generally, across the board, I definitely do want this kind of fight because I believe that a good "public" fight is exactly what's needed, and I think this could be it, because it ropes in the massive community that is game creators.
Definitely a maybe. But I suppose I see game creators putting up a better fight than, e.g. the Tumblr adult material community, who more or less rolled over, no pun intended.
This is a very hazy area, made more hazy by the main method of getting games off of a Switch being a dev mode implemented by the hardware designers at Nintendo/Nvidia that is enabled by bridging two pins on the JoyCon connector which completely bypasses the DRM. Is using hardware features as designed "breaking" DRM? Hard to make that argument when they left the door wide open, unlocked and trivial to use.
The DMCA's language is something like "circumventing an effective technological restriction," but I don't think "effective" really gets much juice. Like, despite the total brokenness of DVD CSS by now, it's still going to be "effective." On the other hand "circumvention" sweeps up conduct that just bypasses DRM rather than actually breaking it.
Edit: for accuracy, it's "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work.
There's also an exploit in the USB stack of the boot ROM involved, so it's not quite "using it as intended". I'd argue ntrboot on 3DS is much closer to what you're suggesting, using a built-in repair access mechanism dependent on long(er) broken crypto.
If there is a way to make a backup of a game you own while still preserving whatever DRM exists, it would be legal. Like if you had some device that could dump the contents of the Switch cartridge without cracking any DRM, then your backups would be legal. The hard part is that "cracking DRM" could mean anything since it could be construed that any sort of electronic signals between your backup device and the cart that emulates a retail Switch is bypassing DRM. Ripping a CD or making a completely intact copy of retail software are probably the only legitimate backups you can make without technically breaking the law. Really the only "legal" thing you could do with Yuzu is to play homebrew. It would be like owning a really fancy bong in a country where weed is illegal, surely you could put legal tobacco in it but it really works a lot better with weed.
It is a big gamble. I mean, if any company can pull it off now, it is Steam. It has money, position and fairly vocal customer base, but are you sure this would be enough to stave off a relentless swarm of lobbyists descending upon WH?
Pirating games. Valve doesn't care if you play games you buy not on their hardware (being their original business), while Nintendo doesn't want you playing Switch games on a computer even if you bought the game.
Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved. Sure its not the most officially supported, but they hardly prevent you from doing it.
I think this is incorrect. I believe most Steam releases do require the Steam runtime to be present. Trying to open the game directly will "work", but that's because it's invoking the Steam runtime - just without showing the launcher.
I don't think it's even a requirement. Games can utilize steam apis to have a better integration with friend list / invites / drm purchasing...etc. But they are not required to. You can just upload a standalone executable without calling steam api at all, steam won't prevent you from doing so. Actually, most visual novel games is in this category. Copy the game file and run it at some other place will just work.
Another example is original sound tracks sell as game dlcs. They are simply downloaded into game directory, nothing is protected.
Steam dont require games to have any DRM. Developer might avoid Steamworks altogether and can also make it degrade gracefully: for instance disable online features if Steam API is not available.
This is entirely up to developer to decide how they use Steam.
Not sure where the confusion lies here. If the developer wants Steam DRM, then Steam enforces it. It's not just the Steam API integration, if the game has Steam DRM and you try to start it without the Steam-specific files and your cached login present on the system, it won't work.
I call that "enforcement", and most significant games on Steam use it.
The sentence "Steam doesn't enforce DRM" has only one valid meaning, that Steam the platform doesn't require you to have DRM to be on it.
The alternative, that Steam DRM is used but doesn't actually do the thing that DRM is supposed to do, ie prevent copying, is nonsensical, and thus can't be what OP meant.
Therefore, we are forced to assume that they meant that "non-enforcement" means that Steam the platform doesn't require DRM for your game to be on it, which is true, it doesn't. That's the only reasonable interpretation.
>> Can you play the same game on two devices from the same steam account without hiding offline?
> Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved.
Giving this answer to that question indicates that OP really did mean that you can simply bypass Steam's DRM enforcement (e.g. of playing a game on only one device at a time) by clicking on the launcher directly.
can confirm, I was trying to set up my(is it really mine?) copy of obra dinn for my mother to play. and was unable to get it to run given the time I was willing to invest in it.
I was vaguely surprised because I figured that obra dinn being a small single player indie title would not have any drm. and I don't think it does. I think just linking it to the steam dll(for steam integration) makes the check occur. I suspect the solution is a bogus steam dll. but did not find one in the couple of minutes I was looking.
Note that you can copy a game to a friends computer then authorize them to play it, so good for valve, but I did not want to set my mother up with a steam account. so did not use this feature.
Valve provides a way to use Steam as DRM but it's entirely optimonal. There are many games on steam where you can just run them directly or copy them on to another computer and they run fine. So its just up to the game publisher to decide what DRM they want.
So it claims, but many games let you click X on that dialog and play other games. I have an old laptop which is basically a dedicated Civ 6 machine. I can still play any other steam game on my desktop while the laptop has Civ open.
This is a weird claim given all of the free work Steam has upstreamed to WINE, and released with Proton, that allow you to play your Steam games on any Linux system you want.
There are replacements for steamapi.dll that let you play games without needing to have Steam open (e.g. "Goldberg"). These are sometimes called 'Steam Emulators'.
Yes we all know the joke, but it very much is an emulator. Otherwise Yuzu is not an emulator either since it mostly just translates the Switch graphics API calls to equivalent DirectX ones
If saying it like that, proton is technically windows environment emulator in Linux. So if Yuzu and co is prohibited, won't proton and wine will be prohibited as well?
For instance, I run qemu all the time to emulate various android devices.
I suspect that you're thinking specifically of game emulation though.
Running software on an emulated device is fine legally as long as it doesn't violate copyright law.
For instance, you can legally backup software that you own in the US [1] - that extends to games as well - and because emulators themselves are legal (although you may also need to backup the device's BIOS), you can have a completely legitimate archive of copyrighted games to run via an emulator.
That said, it's unlikely that most people archive software themselves, and it is not legal to distribute backups in the US, even if both parties have legitimately acquired copies of the source material.
Torrenting is a pretty standard, official, way of distributing Linux ISOs. Linux' license also doesn't really stop anyone from doing so, as it very much wants its users to share it with others (GPL v2, see the 4 freedoms of the FSF). There could be problems distributing e.g. Red Hat-owned stuff (trademarks, copyrighted things, non-FOSS software and such) without permission, but Linux itself is completely legal to share.
Torrenting also isn't illegal by itself or a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of sharing pirated data.
Emulation and virtualisation is a pretty standard, official, way of running software on other devices, where the software licence also doesn't stop anyone from doing so.
Emulating also isn't illegal by itself of a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of playing pirated games.
I assume you are probably trying to make fun of the comment or playing devil's advocate or something, but you are correct. The illegal part comes when you try to share things you have no rights to share, such as the ROMs or BIOS.
Just as you can go to to arch linux' web page and download through their recommended method (torrent), you can go play old PS1 games on the PSClassic (based on the PCSX emulator), or play GB/GBC games on your 3DS Virtual Console (in house nintendo-made emulator afaik, correct me if I'm wrong).
I interpreted the comment as a comparison between torrenting and emulation, "but torrenting isn't illegal but is used for illegal things" and thought it was implying the opposite for emulation, i.e that emulation was illegal.
I was making fun of that comment to point out the same is true of emulation. However I obviously misinterpreted the initial comment since you're clearly aware emulation itself is legal. Sorry.
No, in the way that advertising that your product can play a few homebrew games when it already can play thousands of Steam games makes no sense. It's obviously to hint at playing Nintendo titles.
Why does that matter? It's like torrents and Linux distributions, perfectly legal, it's not the software developers intent that makes the file sharing be legal or not, it's the users usage of such software.
1. Then you don't have to carry a steam deck and a switch.
2. This way you can buy physical copies of games, keeping full control and the ability to resell them, while also carrying your current game library on an SD card.
Edit: I forgot modding! That's a huge use of emulation.
So you don't have to travel with both your Switch and your Steamdeck. So you can play games at higher resolution and fps than the Switch. So people can make playthough and tips/tricks videos of Switch games without needing to buy a capture card. So you can use game mods without jailbreaking your switch.
While this is legal, Nintendo is very vocally anti-emulation. Nintendo and Denuvo announced anti-emulation measures for switch games in August 2022. There's a big difference between support and marketing support. Nintendo doesn't care what other companies do internally, but cares a lot about what is shown publicly. I remember when Nintendo took down a bunch of youtube videos showing how to jailbreak the original switch. Nintendo isn't coming to PC anytime soon though, so I can't imagine this having any major impact, but it is bad manners. Video and thumbnail edited out Yuzu.
I haven't ready any public writeups from emulator developers, no games have been released with it but Zelda BOtW2 is expected to have it. Some guesses are that it will be based on measuring specific call execution times.
The switch is already weak in terms of hardware so I am not sure how many games will end up integrating it. Regardless of what Denuvo says in marketing, it will slow down games. Nintendo has since tried to distance itself from it, but Denuvo has said they have entered NDA agreements with large publishers already. Denuvo would also need low level access and approval from Nintendo, so I am not sure why Nintendo is pretending to separate itself from this effort.
If Denuvo wants it to be effective, they need low level access from Nintendo. It's not possible for this to get approved to run on the switch without going through Nintendo. Depending on how effective this is, Nintendo would most likely be the first publisher to use it. Nintendo develops many of its most popular games in house. There was a lot of negative reactions to this so I imagine Nintendo wanted to distance itself from it publicly. It is the same company that took Game Genie, a game cheat cartridge for the NES, to court on the basis of "copyright infringement". Nintendo lost that case, but they have won recent cases taking down rom hosting sites.
They used to sell emulators on their marketplace for their back catalogue under the 'virtual console' brand and more recently on Switch include emulation for NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 titles as a benefit on their online subscription model.
VALVe themselves have game IPs they want to protect. Within the boundary of "it's legal, wygd" there are always ways to make pirating VALVe games easier and VALVe will stand no ground to ban those.
I don't think valve ever tried to do that seriously. Even games checked purchasing status via steam api at startup are usually one dll away from allow it to run completely locally. They don't say them allow it, but don't seem to seriously fight against them either.
I think what they sells are more about services that support the game. For example: you can find l4d2 crack easily. But you are never able to join to the official community server list without a proper purchase.
Name one instance when Valve showed even a fraction of the amount of aggression Nintendo shows to protect its IP. Pirating Valve games has always been easy - it's as easy as copying the game folder anywhere else and running the game executable.
When you are confident in your own products, you don't have to stoop to cheap user-hostile bullying tactics to protect your wares.
Emulation aside, the Steam Deck has been compared to the Switch in some capacity or another in almost every single review I have ever seen of it. While I wouldn't think it's had any negative impact on Switch sales, it's a absolute fact that the Deck can emulate a multitude of games at performance parity or better than the Switch itself. The deck is constantly lauded as an emulation powerhouse and the Switch appears frequently in the discourse.
Emulation legality aside, Nintendo would certainly be the company I would expect to pressure Valve for a case against enabling and abetting piracy given their history of legally attacking perceived "competition".
ultimately the iwata strategy of 'sell hardware that is underpowered compared to the competition & and bank on 1st party titles & exclusives to stay competitive' was going to create this problem sooner or later, even 10 years ago it was relatively trivial to run games in dolphin that offered parity if not better performance than official nintendo hardware (not to mention far superior netplay with less headaches). unlike the wii or the ds, the switch's central gimmick, 2-in-1 portability is not some niche offshoot but rather the logical path of progression for pretty much the rest of the market and was already a fairly occupied space before either nintendo or valve decided to pursue that direction. if nintendo continues on this path, then nintendo devices will no longer be the best way to experience nintendo games; arguably that has already been the case for some time.
Oddly enough, the light that Humble Bundles have shone into gaming revenue cycles has made me question our copyright system as a whole.
Stay with me.
In Europe during the time of Mozart, composers were incentivized to be prolific by only getting royalties off the first public performance of their works. Now that is not fair today because of course we can losslessy reproduce such things infinitely.
However, Humble Bundles (and really, steam sales and other similar discounts and give-aways) work because the vast majority of the money a game is ever likely to make is early in the revenue cycle. Not 20 or 10 or even 5 years later.
We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
I'd prefer a system, where the author has to actually and actively be trying to make money in a specific market, before the copyright can be applied in that specific case (as with trademark law, where the owner has to actively protect the trademark).
Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictional losses for the copyright holder. What losses? If you're not selling the game anymore, how can you have losses from it? If you're not selling that movie in my country, how can you show a loss from me downloading it?
I always think about this with the Black and White series. You can't download it anywhere. EA has it listed on their website but its basically just marketing material which is bit of a tease.
The entry on the GOG.com wishlist has 36K+ upvotes with a new comment posted every week or so. Seems like low hanging fruit for someone at EA to make a quick buck.
You can blame the copyright, trademark and possibly patent if it's not that old for that.
The problem is, a game is not owned by single entity. There were multiple persons and organizations own the game.
Some persons are now deceased, some organizations are now bankrupted.
It's almost impossible to find all entities who own the rights, negotiate the share. It costs more than the potential profit of the old games.
What we need is a copyright exemption law(or recognized as a fair use if you're living in US common law system) which allows unlimited use of copyrighted works(including commercial use) if the copy of the work cannot be obtained from the author.
Some may argues that they want the right to not distributed, but the very reason copyright exist is to give temporally exclusive rights the the author for... you know what? distribution. If the author don't want to distribute their works, it's shall not be copyright protected in the first place.
Nintendo makes a lot of money rereleasing games. You might not be able to buy an n64 or a copy of mario 64 new anymore, because they aren't manufactured anymore. But people will pay for a rerelease of mario 64 on the wii or switch, possibly highly (a bundle of 3 rereleased "unavailable"mario games was going for $50-$60 new on switch recently).
Also the games aren't 100% unavailable, they're perfectly available on their original platforms on the secondary market if you want one badly.
Whatever the merits of your sugggestion, verifying that a company was "actually and actively be trying to make money" would be wide open to abuse and practically speaking, impossible.
This could be easily solved, if the burden of proof was on the company itself... when they report/sue you for copyright infringement, they'd just have to prove, that it's reasonably simple for the person to obtain the material legally (so, is there a (eg nintendo) distributer in the country of the accused, is there a store that sells those games there, is it possible to buy it online, etc.). If there are no reasonable legal ways to obtain the material, then you cannot claim lost profit and the "pirate" cannot get fined/sued for infringement.
That simply ruins the copyright system for everyone that isn't making money. Which is pretty bad given that copyright is also what stops people from say, simply stealing someone's art drawn and shared as a hobby or even drawn and shared as part of a portfolio (and thus indirectly being a potential source of profit for them).
Seems unlikely that it’s a particularly hard problem to solve, given that trademark law works in a similar way, where if you stop actively using the mark in the market, you can lose it.
But if someone takes your land, you lose it. If someone looks at a bootleg photo of your land you still have your land, if you ever choose to monetize it again.
Downloading roms is certainly not illegal, sharing them is.
From my experience most older Nintendo games are not available for purchase. I would gladly pay to play classic Pokémon for example games on the switch (or on Steam).
And nintendo will later rerelease those classic pokémon games in some form and rake in money off people like you (and me). Waiting is part of their market strategy. The NES and SNES classic editions sold out quickly iirc; when the time is right, a gameboy classic might do the same.
This seems like a solution, but who judges what "availability" is? If Nintendo say they'll reproduce any NES cart you want anywhere in the world for the low low cost of a hundred thousand dollars per unit, and all requests must be made in writing, please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery, is that "available"?
> but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictional losses for the copyright holder. What losses? If you're not selling the game anymore, how can you have losses from it?
That is because there are statutory damages to copyright violations. By definition, any violation causes a fixed amount of damage.
> We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
I too have many gripples with copyright but this is simply wrong. Copyright is designed to protect the rightsholder. Whether it is a person or a company is irrelevant. This isn't a conspiracy or cynical-type explanation, this is by design
Why is it that Nintendo still has the rights to works they released over 20 years ago even though they've already turned a profit several times over? Why do they get to sell them to people over and over again?
They're supposed to be public domain. Websites hosting copies of these 40 year old games is supposed to be completely legal. Nintendo should not be able to DMCA anything out of existence.
That sounds right, and the Constitution does seem to say that, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, which extended the copyright protections for old, already-existing works, was found to be constitutional, and so I must conclude that you are somehow mistaken.
"Mistaken" is a weird word here, probably because we do this thing where we think of law as being etched in stone. It's not. It's 100% fluid all the time, but it's hard to see because it's slow.
Disney and Sonny Bono hired some lawyers to ramrod some dumb crap through. It happens. Let's see if we can fix it.
We did see. It was the famed Eldred v. Ashcroft case. Lead counsel before the Supreme Court was Lawrence Lessig, darling of the Open Source movement. In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that, so long as the time limit for copyright was in some way limited, the length of time, even if lengthened after the fact, was permissible. Justice Stephens wrote an excellent dissent, but being only one of two, was official Wrong.
Ironically, that case might, at the same time, be the one who brings down the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
The standard set by SCOTUS was, apart from what you've already said, that a time extension was permissible as long as the "traditional contours of copyright" were not altered. One of them was explicitly called out, fair use.
The Court also explicitly mentioned that for a regulation to survive constitutional scrutiny in regards to copyright, it must not supersede, nullify, or even "disturb" the exercise of fair use.
This set the precedent that fair use is constitutionally required, not only a generous grant by Congress.
I'm not an author or artist, but you only need to search for tweets about copyright on Twitter to see it benefits the rightsholders a bit too much. If the term was shorter, maybe it would be different. Of course the reason the term is longer is because of rightsholders.
I made a YouTube video a long time ago in 2013. It's wild to think about the fact that somebody could be in trouble with copyright infringement over that video in the year 2141.
I expect to live at least another 50 years. In a large amount of countries copyright is granted for the lifetime of the author and an additional 70 years.
We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
An advocate for the devil would claim that those creators were compensated upfront rather than over the lifetime of the product. Therefore, the company is rightfully collecting the revenue that the creator left to them that they already paid for.
You’re both essentially saying the same thing: this copyright dynamic is a vehicle for investment capitalism. And I’m not pointing this out to be glib, just recognizing that this particular line of advocacy is somewhere along the spectrum between “the thing you observe is working as designed” and “that’s good, actually”.
Which is a view you’re welcome to hold, but I’d certainly prefer a system designed for people who engage in creative work to have a greater share of what they create, and for the economics of creative work to not be so deeply entrenched in wealth consolidation for its own sake.
Disclaimer: the sum total I’ve been paid for purely creative work is approximately $11 from my share of ticket sales and a couple of drinks on the house. Which is $11 dollars more than I ever sought out, because I realized making a living as an artist had dim prospects before I even got a chance to try.
Wouldn't such an argument strongly favour the company (Nintendo's) copyright expiring early--as they were compensated up front by the first raft of sales--and so suggest we, the public, should limit their copyright as that won't inhibit new development and will enrich the public domain.
In terms of moneymaking, copyright's long term is more relevant for video games in that it includes the right to make derivative works (i.e.: sequels). Certainly there are franchises that have lived longer than 20 years.
Ports, remasters, official emulation, and subscriptions have given a longer "tail" for at least a handful of classics but even without that it's "the IP" that would be most jealously guarded.
I think it'd be a stretch to say sequels are covered by derivative works. Trademark would be the primary protection and would function for sequels with no copyright protection at all.
Sequels that share or build on characters, plot, and so on with their predecessors are definitely derivative works. (Let's ignore the literal sharing of assets and bits of code that's also common for sequels since that's obviously more straightforward, and not strictly necessary.)
Trademark definitely comes into play, and is probably the more important form of IP here in practice (and for some series may be the only really effective protection). But you still couldn't go out and make a game with Master Chief or Nathan Drake even if you called it something other than Halo or Uncharted.
Trademarks are also interesting and somewhat unique for video games: the typical rule is that the title of a book or movie, etc. is not eligible for a trademark. You need a name that's being used for a series to get a trademark. But video games are excluded from this rule and can (and almost always do) get trademarks for their titles even when they're standalones.
Does humble bundle have "products"? I thought it was just a dumping ground for when sales slowed elsewhere, not the main place to try and sell something. So financially successful would just be any money
There's a scant few products that launched first on HB, but yes, it does seem like a hail Mary dumping ground for previously-failed products, and a cheap marketing platform to drive interest in existing IP.
> We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
I can almost guarantee that this isn't Nintendo's primary motivation for the behavior. There is much more money to be made with xplat games, and almost all (if not strictly all) consoles are loss-leaders.
Nintendo is ruled by dogma, nothing more, nothing less. Nintendo is much like Larry Ellison[1], don't try to make sense of them. If it wasn't for a core set of IP that their designers/developers routinely ace, they would be dead in the water.
I believe the specific reason why copyright is in such an awful state for rewarding creation is tied to the ease of copying.
When copying was extremely hard(back in antiquity) everyone who was an artisan was producing 1 art per 1 unit. So you didn't even need a state-level enforcement of copyright; either it was good work or it wasn't.
During the run-up to industrialization more possibilities to make units without making art came about. But the means of production were still capital and labor-intensive - there were only so many printing presses in town. Therefore, copyright built a social contract: the state enforces what the presses can do to copy your work. As soon as you exited the borders of that state, piracy was prolific.
This regime continued all the way through the 20th century and only started cracking when homemade copies became good enough, which, within media industries now fully enmeshed with state interests, the obvious response was "don't tape at home, don't copy that floppy, you wouldn't download a car."
Nowadays there is no scarcity of copies, only scarcity of attention. "Likes" are effectively a currency, but likes aren't state money, they're an awkward mediation of platform algorithms. Instead we have a two-class media system where, in each form of media, there's "the industry", which deploys all the mechanisms of the state(corporate investment, IP laws, marketing campaigns) to encourage consumers to give up their state bucks, and then the "gig workers", who have assembled a patchwork of social media mechanisms to get eyeballs to their work and pick up commissions, crowdfunding, and other forms of fundraising that allow indirect exits to state bucks. Because you mostly can't get paid for what you already did without utilizing the full might of the state, everyone is inclined to push monetization further towards promises of future work: the stretch goal, DLC, etc. Buying the rumor and selling the news.
In this framework, we have to discuss NFTs. They aren't "ready for use" in the current state of things, but they present an alternative mode of exit: discard the unit production mindset and define the art as a financial asset. It already has some analogue in the gallery system, but digitization makes it a cheap, low-friction process. With "all my apes are gone" comes some demonstration of effectiveness: You can, in fact, just put a price to art, let traders make risky gambles with it, and rely on a non-state, independently operated system to give you a cut of the resulting carnage.
What we don't have yet is strong coordination between likes and trading. What made NFTs a bubble was the degree of misrepresentation on display; far too many works were being inflated through traditional boiler-room schemes, and many more were stolen works scraped from unwilling or unaware sources. Everyone pounced on proof-of-concept tech with an angle for a rug pull. But this is the kind of thing that tech has seen many waves of: snake oil salesmen turning some genuine breakthrough into fools' gold, followed by a gradual address of each specific problem that made it foolish.
So I think of the possibilities for art as a thing society can fund and reward going forward as a thing that will look both more social-media-like and asset-like; maybe not in the specific mode NFTs took, or in the specific form that engagement on TikTok takes, but drawing on some aspects of both and building a greater-than-the-sum result.
To the people saying "it's completely legal, what can Nintendo do" it might be worth considering that not everything is about legal / not legal. Companies and people have relationships and it's not always about if something is technically allowed, it's about how it's being understood by the other party and in this case it's pretty clear that Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators.
Nintendo has no relationship with Valve or really PC gaming as a whole at all. They are pretty much as hostile as it gets towards any platform that isn't their own, to the point that a planned collaboration with Fortnite fell through because they were simply not willing to allow any of their characters to be visible on other platforms.
Valve isn't burning any bridges here because there were no bridges to begin with.
Only because Lightspeed Studios ported them to their parent company's hardware (Nvidia Shield) and the Switch happens to use almost the same SoC. Valve's relationship with Nintendo here has been incidental.
As someone else already pointed out, this was likely done through Nvidia, they had already done an ARM port of Portal for the Shield which is basically the same hardware as the Switch so they probably just asked Valve and they said "sure, why not"
Valve include access to Flathub on the Deck by default, a repository that distributes Yuzu. The degree of separation is a little larger than outright distributing on Steam, though must be said, Valve already distribute Nintendo emulators on the store including Wii/Gamecube via RetroArch. Switch is more recent, but Nintendo are still selling games that released on those platforms.
The only thing I can see this threatening is native JoyCon/Pro Controller support on Steam (more specifically use of their controller glyphs) if Nintendo want to get real vindictive. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much of an existing relationship to be threatened.
I mean, Deck is literally a Linux machine and getting to desktop mode is one click away, and opening a browser is just one more click, then you have access to literally anything your heart desires. Still, including something in promotional material is very different.
It's not like a web browser where it's up to the user to find the services who host the content they want. Yuzu is accessible as directly as anything on Steam is, using systems and services (Discover and Flathub) Valve made a conscious choice to implement. They aren't hosting Yuzu on their own servers, but they are providing direct access to it.
Putting Yuzu into marketing materials was definitely a bit of a faux pas, but it's also one of those occasions that highlights the absurd pageantry of pushing the narrative that emulation is taboo. It's in the video because there are those at Valve use Yuzu on Steam Deck themselves and normalizing that is a net good.
Nintendo also isn't a big fan of people playing Super Smash Bros competitively. They're allowed to have their opinions but I don't see why anyone needs to respect such silly opinions.
There’s a difference between a random consumer respecting their opinions and businesses working in the same industry not trying to put them in a weird position.
Nintendo is notoriously as hostile as they come, especially to the PC gaming market. Since Valve is all-in on PC I don't see why they should be the ones to play nice.
The stock OS comes with some weird stuff preconfigured (no encryption, weird partition layout, etc.) so it depends on how you use it. For example, you'll need to mount the system partition r/w for things like kernel updates and I wouldn't dare enable AUR on an OS explicitly designed to be updated through a third party update system without having a recovery disk handy at all times. This limitation has some impact (i.e. installing DisplayLink drivers can be a challenge) but it's still Arch but fancy.
Hook it up to a dock and it should work and perform like a laptop. With a decent CPU, quick SSD and 16GB of RAM you should be able to do certain types of dev work quite comfortably if you hook up a display or two, a mouse and a keyboard.
The thing just runs Flatpak so stuff like VS Code and Jetbrains products will run perfectly fine.
There aren't a lot of serious use cases, but if you're a casual / indie game developer, it's great as sort of a complete Linux dev kit that's also a fun toy.
This is a neat idea. Would make for a good overview video or blog post if you do end up pursuing it.
The Linux desktop seems to tweak some things in the UI to be friendlier toward users coming from Windows. Not sure if that's a valve thing or not, can't say I'm a distro guru.
It's not super performant for me on a 4k display, docked. But, it should all work with a nice usb-c monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a dock off Amazon.
Guaranteed there will be something funky in the distro that gets in your way at some point though.
Not exactly, but I ssh'ed into my mine, because my sausage fingers couldn't handle messing around with correcting corrupted emudeck profile. It is basically a PC. It ran Kingdom Come and CP77 well with heatwave being the only apparent notable side effect. I am sure people will soon be posting all sorts of weird deck setups:>
I think it's not very well suited for that due to their root filesystem being immutable by default. You'd need to turn that off and that's not their recommended configuration. But it's not that hard to do.
Their official way to configure the system file is creating a overlay image that contains all necessary change to root file system and load that into system. This way may be more complex for a developer to do, but is much safer to end users. Because you aren't changing anything, you only add. And fxxk up only means you need to unload the newly added image.
It'd be easier to use if it can automatically do it for you though. Something like, enter a special env, install packages, leave and it automatically pop up an image for you would be nice.
I think this is quite similar to docker image layers except it is composable
I think it's just trade off you need to make if you need to make a system that is safe for random user to use. Most linux distro (except Android) just isn't safe enough for a random user to operate at full system privilege. (And sometimes even advanced user screws up, like kernel panic during install something and unable to return to last known good status)
But this situation may change after they finished dual boot support though. At then, you could probably just boot into another linux distro for serious work instead.
Cheaper than a laptop? You could get a cheaper laptop with better or equal specs if you buy used or get something from a previous year. A lot less hassle than trying to get something on custom hardware to run with no real upside.
Emulation or not, the Deck has really eaten into the 'AAA gaming in your hand' market the switch has established, considering most non-Nintendo titles are available on the Deck as well.
