Nintendo: “Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development & stifles innovation”

One thing that Nintendo has become very infamous for is their very strict measures on fan content, as well as emulation. There are many examples of this from the company over the years, but Nintendo has been very quiet in regards to why they actually do this in the first place.

Well, that has somewhat changed. Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for a response about the Gamecube/Wii emulator Dolphin being removed from Steam. Nintendo responded by saying that “Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers. This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo’s protection measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same”.

So, it seems that Nintendo thinks that emulation and ROMs hurts development and innovation. It doesn’t explain why the company has also targeted things like fan games, YouTube videos and game mods, but this is the first time Nintendo has provided some insight on why they’re so strict with it.

28 thoughts on “Nintendo: “Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development & stifles innovation””

It does hurt their sales cuz some of these pirates don’t care to support by “sticking it to the man”. Emulators are only illegal if you’ve obtained keys illegally, if you dump your own keys (which is why the pirate community doesn’t wanna do) then it’s legal but it’s still a grey area. It is illegal to download ROMs and the like if you have no intention to support companies, if you own legal copies it’s legal to own ROMs though iirc you have to dump the game for it to be legal, owning an illegal ROM while owning a legal copy is a grey area but should be considered legal. Piracy can be good if a game that no longer is available to purchase and hard to obtain a legal copy. Pirating for the sake of pirating is bad news bears and even Monkey D. Luffy will call you out on that. In short, it’s legal in some cases and it does hurt sales for current games. If you are gonna pirate then be a good pirate not a bad pirate.

There is not good pirate and bad pirate. There is only thievery. It is not legal to download illegal ROMS even for the sake of back up or if a game is not available to purchase.

It is morally correct to “pirate” games that are not accessible to the public, like half of the GameCube games that Nintendo have locked behind a vault. The embargo on things before they enter the public domain is ridiculously high, and honestly things should enter it automatically if it hits the 30 year mark and has had no use on the market, but the law favors corporations so much it’s not even funny. The NES was 21 years old before the Wii launched with its virtual console, and there were ports even before then for people who wanted to play those games. The GameCube on the other hand has been around for 22 years and plenty of its library never saw a re-release. This is not even mentioning the games that companies refuse to localize and fans can only play it by translating it themselves and “pirating” it.

Common sense clearly is not common. It is theft down right. Nintendo owns those games and the rights to those games. They can do whatever they want with them. Just because you can’t get them anymore is not an excuse to oh hey I can steal this now and not feel bad.

Look at WB and Disney following and removing shows off their streaming service that you can never see again in any form as they were only on the streaming service. Does that mean you have the right to steal their show?

If the law was just, yes. We’re not talking about busting into their offices and taking their things, that’d be theft. If you’re able to reproduce something, sell it, and the supposed owner refuses to make it accessible, then there should be an opportunity for someone to step in and make it accessible in their place. Nintendo has had an ample amount of time to port over Chibi Robo, and each copy costing around $350 is nothing short of absolute greed.

Piracy is theft. It really shouldn’t be this hard to understand. When a company makes a game or a movie or any product in general they have no responsibility at all to always make that available to the consumer. They own the product they can do as they see fit. Just cause they don’t rerelease it or it becomes hard to find doesn’t mean oh yeah it’s okay to steal it now cause I don’t want to pay $350 for it.

Too bad. I ain’t paying $350 to a second hand dealer for an NES game. Nintendo isn’t getting that money either, and the only way they’re getting money is if they sell it. Don’t play the morality card in terms of consumer products when the reality is that they aren’t providing the product for the consumer in the first place.

If I didn’t pirate Mother 3, I’d have never played it. A game that legitimately changed my life for the better. And you’re saying that I shouldn’t have done that because “it’s Nintendo’s right to not sell me that game”. That’s bullshit and you know it. Screw off with your small brain consumer ethics if you don’t know jack shit about the human condition, asshole.

Lol Nintendo owns the product moron they can do what they want. And you say I’m the one with the small brain yet i can grasp a simple concept you seem to not be able to understand. Stop being such an entitled a$$hole. Good for you, you stole a game and to justify it it changed my life for the better.

It’s not theft to download a product that isn’t for sale, has not been for sale in a long, long time, and has no plans to be sold.

Don’t be surprised when games like sonic heroes, watch dogs and splinter cell blacklist are pirated. Those games haven’t been on Nintendo platforms in years.

Pirating new stuff is bad.

But Gamecube and Wii games? There is no digital marketplace to buy them. The only way to buy them is to buy them second-hand in which case the money doesn’t even go to Nintendo.

Unless they rerelease a game, it literally can’t hurt people to download a Gamecube or Wii game.

Uh-oh, playing Nintendo’s games stifles innovation. I better bury my Switch in the attic so I don’t stifle innovation.
Thanks for the warning Nintendo!

Lol Nintendo just doesn’t want you to play any games without them making their profit off of it. Just a basic corporate response which is to be expected. Emulation is fine for older games, newer games not so much unless you know how to pull the actual games off of the legally purchased game cart which 90 percent don’t. Emulation will never die and I’m glad for that

Nintendo’s just straight-up lying here. The consumer’s right to make and use backups of software they’ve legally purchased (and to modify the experience however they please, which almost certainly includes running said software on any arbitrary device of their choosing) is well-established in US courts. This actual right automatically supercedes Nintendo’s imagined “right” to prevent you from doing so.

Of course it’s all the more insulting considering that Nintendo’s own games run so much better when emulated on relatively low-end gaming PCs, than they run on Nintendo’s own platforms. Tears of the Kingdom is great, but its performance and visuals are tragically anchored to last-last gen hardware. What a joke.

Try reading the small print. Especially when it comes to digital. You bought the license for that product you don’t own that product. I haven’t read the small print on Nintendo’s stuff but it’s that way for all of the stuff you buy on ITunes so it only makes sense it’s that way on other digital store fronts.

The more I think about it I remember reading stuff that says it’s the same for physical. You don’t own it even though you technically do it’s all licensed when you buy it.

Sorta yeah. In the case of buying a cartridge, you own the physical copy of the software and I suppose a de facto transferable license to use it. Since you have that legal license to the software, the courts have determined that you also have the right to make backups of that software for your own personal use, and to modify the software or the manner or environment in which it is to be used (tools like GameShark being the classic precedent).

I was mainly referring to physical media purchases, where the law is much more plainly settled. However, the underlying principle applies equally to digital licensing. The fact that these companies have had the ability to restrict consumers from making and using legally-sanctioned backups of their digital purchases is a deeply unfortunate legal aberration, and makes it all the more morally reasonable (if not legal) for consumers to re-download their legally-purchased software from ROM-sharing sites.

What they fail to realise is that most of the pirates wouldn’t even buy the game in the first place. So they’re not really stealing anything

Are you secretly Trump? The amount of stupidity in this comment is off the charts. If they pirate a game they are stealing said game. It’s not rocket science although it might be for you. It’s just insane how people justify or that it is so okay to steal someones hard work.

The good thing is that neither Nintendo nor any of their shills can stop anyone from using Dolphin. The idea that it’s okay for a company to withhold products from their consumers and for people to be forced to not play expensive out-of-print games is patently absurd and bootlicking at its finest, so it’s great that I don’t have to submit to that belief.

Clearly this is a lie for the weak minded corpo worshipping bots. Piracy doesn’t hurt anything, which has been proven with studies, and it actually is believed to help sell games. Nintendo is doing very well despite all their consoles being easy to hack and their big games leaking weeks early.

Also, emulators aren’t illegal.

If only Nintendo would put as much effort into letting their customers buy their older games as they do for putting the effort into cracking down on people pirating.

If you’re gonna do one or the other, at least do the one that’ll get you money Big N.

Why not allow us to purchase old games legally, instead of forcing us to pay again and again for games we’ve already bought in the past.

It does hurt there sales and there reception. Truth be told that Nintendo has been taking down fan games for years best on there IPs and want to make sure fans didn’t used them to make a bigger budget out of them. SEGA is ok with fan games but not for people who makes money out of it.