I bet they wouldn’t care as much if a significant portion of their modern business model wasn’t reselling old games.
“Here’s a game that came out in 1987, except we’ve added DRM to it and pulled its new price from a hat.”
Piracy has only one real solution, a better market. I don’t pirate PC games anymore because Steam has done plenty to earn the respect it has acquired. Prices are competitive and in general is a very smooth experience.
The Switch 2 has to be equal or better, in terms of power, to the Steam Deck/Ally. It is a shame that the last Pokemon games are no better than an indie game and the current switch can barely handle the latest Zelda
I’ve always wondered why Nintendo doesn’t try to undercut the reproduction and emulation market by coming in and allowing companies to make direct printed reproductions that are official. Imagine if you could just order an actual N64 cartridge from Nintendo for like $15-20.
Heck IDK why Nintendo doesnt sell new FPGA versions of old consoles
Why make money once when you can get people hooked on a subscription and pay many times the value?
They’ve also locked N64 and GBA behind an extra subscription model on the Switch. I’ve paid a month here and there for online support, I don’t want an entire year AND paying double to play one or two retro games.
And the emulators aren’t even particularly good compared to what the community has been cooking, especially the new N64 recompiler that runs the games with interpolation at 240Hz 4K HDR graphics with raytracing in proper 16:9. Meanwhile Nintendo didn’t even get the fog right on launch.
Other than not being able to remap buttons, their emulators on Switch are actually pretty good (except for the N64 one, as you said).
Just out of curiosity regarding the emulator features, why? The assets for N64 games can’t possibly be suitable for that sort of fidelity and I’m sure that all those extra frames are just generated along with the entire ray tracing functionality.
It does away with the emulation entirely, that’s the crazy part. It’s basically a PC port but most of it is generated. Those features have been injected directly into the game itself. It renders at that resolution, no upscaling. It’s still low res textures but the anti aliasing and overall sharpness of it all works out well. The animations are interpolated in-game, no fancy frame predictions or anything.
It would play absolutely fantastic at 720p on the Switch.
Don’t forget Genesis as well! Even though Nintendo certainly has.
I dont mind the subscription for the retro catalogue, but expand the fucking catalogue already. It shouldnt be as limited as it is.
I’d be willing to pay that yearly fee for one game, just to have it on there and play when I want. Meanwhile I’ll be using my PSP, so good for handheld emulation.
Oh dang, I didn’t realize they were also doing subs now. What an absolute sham.
The vast, vast majority of Nintendo’s games are unlikely to ever be on their online store front again. This is them just being litigious dicks.
“Here’s a game that came out in 1987, except we’ve added DRM to it and pulled its new price from a hat.”
If only the execution was similar to the newest Rugrats game…
I’ve been pirating them since 1998. I also loaded them onto my hacked Switch using their own emulators.
A point the video makes is that derivative works (ROM hacks, translations, etc) are made much more difficult to access as well by Nintendo killing the sites entirely. Those hacks are works in progress with many new hacks released even in the present day.
True, although despite Nintendo’s efforts, I’ve never had any trouble finding their roms. It’s certainly easier now than it was 20 years ago!
I didn’t even have issues finding ROMs before the 2000s… Maybe patched/translated ones yeah, but bare ROMs… I don’t think so.
There was just less stuff in general on the internet back then, so it was more a case of less places to find them.
Super rare games or imports were sometimes hard to find that early in the game. It wasn’t even just the age of the internet, but the age of the emu scene too.
Right there with you. Like as soon as I found out about emulators and “warez” I was nabbing all kinds of stuff I read about in Nintendo Power but never saw in a store to even ask my parents to get for me lol
Don’t put your faith in rom sites. Only decentralized protocols like bittorrent and IPFS are long term forms of archiving.
I share every ROM from nes to gamecube, and a few wii and switch roms on soulseek.
