thebowlingfantods:

unassumingvenusaur:

Today in “Nintendo is a bunch of sweaty corporatist goons who want to be Disney so fucking badly but never will be”:

Nintendo creates artificial scarcity of its products, and the medium of digital games is especially susceptible to this. They make no effort to make any significant portion of their massive catalog of previous-generation games available and accessible to the public, at best only selecting piecemeal titles here and there restarting every console generation but now seems to have abandoned even that. And they release products like the NES and SNES Classic because they know this, they know their games are in such high demand because they don’t make them available on a wide scale. And when they do make these products, guess what? They’re sold in extraordinarily limited quantities and if you don’t act fast you can only buy them from scalpers. 

To think Nintendo is doing this any of this unintentionally is just closing your eyes to the facts. It’s obvious Nintendo tries to create a mystique around their products by holding them back, just like Disney used to do with its “Disney Vault” scheme of making old movies limited time purchases. 

Is it really strange people turn to ROMs and emulators for these games? If they’re not available, what else are people supposed to do if they want to play these games? Pay exorbitant multi-hundred dollar prices to get the original versions of the game used and scrape up money to try to find a functioning old console to play them? The money isn’t even going to Nintendo at that point. This holds especially pertinent for games on systems near the middle of Nintendo’s history like the N64 and Gamecube which have seen the least distribution since their original releases. Nintendo’s paltry system of remaking a handful of titles like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess and then selling them at or near current gen full price absolutely is not enough and is more abuse of the fact they hold such a tight control over the games in their catalog. 

And even putting aside games people want to play for fun, there’s the entirely separate issue of historical preservation! Taking down massive ROM sites and forcing the people running them to pay millions of dollars they can’t afford means less and less places old games are cataloged and preserved. Not just the big titles, but every little game that came out during that time period, disposable or high quality, popular or obscure–how will we ever study our own cultural history if we do not know it? There’s a much wider discussion to be had about digital preservation in general in the internet age but Nintendo is just obliterating huge swaths of their own history for short term financial gain. 

Twelve million dollars is just a tiny drop in the bucket for the multibillion dollar multinational corporation Nintendo but will almost certainly ruin the lives of this couple who engaged in defying shortsighted capitalist greed. Please stop thinking of this company as anything other than another than another soulless ball of wealth generation for a particular elite. Nintendo clearly employs many talented and creative artists who aren’t to blame for stuff like this but that shouldn’t distract from the complete lack of morality underpinning the institution as a whole. Fuck Nintendo.

This is bullshit and Nintendo needs to stop. Unless you make your games–all of them–available on modern consoles, it’s basically abandonware, and there’s a strong legal argument to be made that this is fair use. Of course, Nintendo’s going after fans, not anybody who could go up against their lawyers. Bullshit.

Everybody, create an ark of old games. Download them while you still can.

Husband and wife ordered to pay $12m to Nintendo for running ROM sites