it's nintendo's lawyers' jobs to know about this shit. the only way they don't know is if it's some obscure usenet group or a torrent that only you and your friends use.
vimm.net baby
It is their job, but, sometimes (I'm speaking in general terms, not specifically about Nintendo), it's better to pretend it doesn't exist, especially because of the Streisand Effect. But, if someone from outside tells them something exists, they might be legally obligated to take action in order to maintain certain legal protections on their properties in the future.
From what I understand this happened to Yuzu recently (and that's probably what this post is referring to), where, supposedly, some angry person found a bunch of Nintendo email addresses and emailed them all about Yuzu.
I've also seen it happen at least one other time, too. Cartoon Network used to have an old MMO called FusionFall (not FusionFall Heroes). It was shutdown several years ago, but a community of devs decided to remake the game, and they were even working on upgrading the graphics. They were making some really significant progress on it. Some guy apparently got banned from it, though. (It was in a public beta.) And they emailed Cartoon Network about it. Cartoon Network sent a Cease & Desist, and it disappeared immediately.
For further context the phrase was largely leveraged to stop the spread of bad news on the war front. They were fairly confident that a German spy network didn't exist within American society at the time of the campaign, but didn't want negative press to circulate about the war effort.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good policy and a catchy phrase (propaganda isn't automatically evil), I'm saying we're not in WWII (and hopefully not in the sequel either.)
Back then was not the time for civil disobedience, but a lot of men and women fought and gave their lives for us to be able to do it when it is suitable.
Which it now is. With piracy and weed, for instance.
This is such a load of shit, companies always know about hacked products long before they become popular.
If devs really wanted this to not happen they'd be doing it how every successful cracker does, by operating in a C.I.S. state and keeping themselves safe, not by clutching their pearls about people pirating games and being assholes to their only real users.
They may or may not know about them, but when someone higher up gets embarrassed, such as TOTK being streamed before launch, that creates a lot of pressure to act
Companies aren't people either. Did someone at Nintendo know about this? Undoubtedly. I'm sure plenty of them did, they're a big company and emulators for their old content are like the #1 gaming emulators.
Their lawyers and leadership may have known in a vague sense, but they're probably not technical. Something got them in a room together to see if they could do something about this... It wasn't because they lost money (I doubt they did), it was because they looked bad in front of shareholders
I'll preface this by saying fuck Nintendo, this is really bad precedent and I'm so pissed this went through. The judgement against them was seriously insane... They built a tool that was legal (at least before now), and were fined $1.6 million, had to give up everything with the name yuzu, had to give up all of their personal Nintendo products, and there were a few other things... It's truly insane IP is being protected to this extent.
But conversely, people were way too public with the TOTK leak. Teach your friends and family how to sail the high seas, talk about it in niche corners, drop theoretical knowledge on strangers in quiet corners of the web.
The high seas are an open secret... It's fine if most everyone uses it, especially when companies make their own products uncompetitive with the hassle of alternative means. But, we have to pretend in public, at least a little
If it's out in the open, someone is going to push IP law even further. Not for moral or profit reasons, purely because a win will make them look strong and an embarrassment makes them look weak.
I think the fundamental problem here is that we're trying to point fingers at each other or situations instead of acknowledging that it's not feasible to keep doing this in their domain no matter how much we try to make them happy. Instead of just going "oh we should've kept it secret" or "those users shouldn't have done that" or "it was the NFTs!!1!!1!" and thinking that there was a way we could've gotten away with it, we should be encouraging doing this stuff in places where it's harder if not impossible for them to win.
Do what the crackers already did to become successful and free, and not pretend that there's a way to get away with it in the western country that kisses up to companies.
Can we instead encourage people to post receipts with real game boxes and cartridges to enforce the idea that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to use emulators?
Pokemon in particular is the most emulatable series out there, between romhacks, randomizers, and upscalers on the 3D games.
There are definitely pirates, of course, but I feel like the public at large isn't aware enough of the fact that emulation is often a good thing.
Fair question.id image there's a certain draw towards the server hosting that's outside of the law. any number of profitable businesses would benefit from such hosting.
In my experience, practically none of the people who care about Nintendo suing Yuzu were buying Nintendo games anyways.
So they're not losing any sales if those people boycott buying their games. But on the other side, they probably weren't losing any significant percentage of sales to Yuzu either.
A greater flex to pirating Nintendo games is not pirating Nintendo games. There are some pretty decent alternatives to most genres. Indie alternatives, even.
We all have beloved IPs. It was soul crushing to see Star Wars fall to Disney and EA. But we can and do move on.
Let Nintendo know they do not own consummership. At least not yours.
The Switch library sucks anyway. Besides Mario Kart and Smash Bros, I've been disappointed with every single 1st party title released on this underpowered POS. Especially Tears of the Kingdom. The game is just a repeat of BotW, which is just a watered down Minecraft clone with the Zelda logo slapped on top. It's an insult to Zelda fans.
Arguing that BotW is a clone of Minecraft fundamentally misunderstands the distinctive design philosophies, gameplay mechanics, narrative structures, and overall objectives that separate these two games. At their core, Minecraft is a sandbox game focused on creativity, building, and exploration within a procedurally generated world, emphasizing player freedom and creativity without predefined goals. In stark contrast, BotW is a meticulously crafted action-adventure game set in a fixed, hand-designed world that prioritizes exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat within a rich narrative framework. Unlike Minecraft's open-ended gameplay, BotW unfolds within the established Legend of Zelda universe, featuring a deep narrative, complex characters, and a clear objective: to defeat Ganon and save Princess Zelda.
BotW's sophisticated combat mechanics, strategic use of weapons and abilities, and environmental puzzles offer a gameplay experience vastly different from Minecraft's straightforward combat and focus on building. The exploration in BotW is guided, enriched with side quests and story-driven objectives, contrasting with Minecraft’s emphasis on randomness and player creativity. Additionally, BotW's unique, cel-shaded art style and its innovations in game design, such as physics-based puzzle solving and dynamic weather, showcase Nintendo's commitment to revitalizing the open-world genre, setting it apart from Minecraft’s blocky, pixelated aesthetic.
While there are superficial similarities in open-world exploration and resource gathering, BotW and Minecraft cater to vastly different gaming experiences. BotW is not a Minecraft clone but a standout title in the action-adventure genre, leveraging the Zelda franchise's rich history to introduce innovative gameplay mechanics that distinguish it from not only Minecraft but other games within its genre.
Nintendo doesn't care. They stay in their lane and they are strategic about each move.
I remember hearing about pretty terrible corporate culture as they demand obedience and swear you to secrecy. I think I remember some guy mentioned he worked at Nintendo on a podcast and they instantly fired him to make a point.
What Nintendo does care about is knockoffs. At their core they are toymakers who make collectibles. What is a knockoff? Anything that Nintendo deems so.
Sorry, do you think multibillion dollar game corporations don't employ people who enjoy playing games? People who pursue it as a hobby and run across the same fuckin piracy tools you run across?
This biggest game launch in years got leaked online, and the discord for yuzu got 50k new users at the same time all asking for the game pre release.
Yuzu even got featured on the steam deck promotional material briefly.
I don't think Nintendo would just sit back on that. The horse was out of the barn and between steam deck and totk Nintendo was never going to sit idly by.
I mean they were doomed when they started asking for money in addition to pointing people how to break encryption and stuff so you can play those definitely your copies of TotK that was leaked
Well, Bleem went down under the weight of Sony's lawsuits, just like Yuzu did with Nintendo's. Sony didn't even win any of their lawsuites against Bleem in the end, but constant legal trouble is usually too much for small startups to handle. The US's legal system essentially allows any company to duel any other, with legal funds as the weapon of choice, and the bigger weapon wins every time. Legality doesn't matter unless both companies can truly afford to fight the battle to the end, and emulators will likely never have that power. So all we can do as consumers looking for options is to try not to talk about the little guys so much that one of the big guys feels it's necessary to bury them to death with lawsuits.
Not just that, but their website included instructions on how to dump encryption keys. Reverse engineering a console is perfectly legal and Nintendo has historically left emulators alone, but all the other emulator developers were smart enough to advertise that their emulator was for homebrew purposes only and remove any talk of privacy from their forums. All that information is easily supplemented by the community so including it on your official site is just plain stupid. Emulator development needs to be centralized so you need to play dumb. The illegal stuff can go to side communities where they have to play whack a mole. Yuzu folded without putting up a fight because they know they fucked up.
