Microsoft bans emulators from the xbox store front citing Nintendo as a reason.

[Salv8 (sam)]

Summary

no more snes emulation for your xbox! Microsoft has decided to ban any and all emulators from the xbox store front. while i haven't been able to confirm that this also extends to other emulators that aren't related to Nintendo themselves, i'd say this also would include them as well. UPDATE: other emulators non-Nintendo are affected as well

as for why Nintendo is included, a friend of  Alyanna McKenna's over at the Xbox QA team named Nintendo as a legal issue:

 

Quotes

Quote

Thanks for getting in touch with us about the recent ban on emulators on the Xbox store front. We appreciate your interest and concerns.

To answer your questions, the primary reason for the ban is related to legal issues with Nintendo. While emulating itself is not illegal, it can be used to play games from consoles that are still under copyright protection without permission, which can create issues with Nintendo and its affiliates.

(no-a emulation for-a you!)

 

My thoughts

i'd say Nintendo is trying to crack down on easier ways to emulate their games by any "legal" means necessary. while they can't outright go after emulators themselves (thanks Bleem!), this would probably be the closest they can get. (i'd say Nintendo may try again with the play store next but I'm speculating)

 

Potential WAN show questions (for the mr techtips man and lukie luu)

1. do you think that this might be a new strategy that companies will use to try and stop emulation for the average joe?

2. do you personally think this could be effective to try and stop people from using emulators? (if so please do explain why you think so)

 

Sources

https://www.msn.com/en-au/entertainment/other/microsoft-bans-emulators-on-xbox-consoles/ar-AA19ywDR

https://twitter.com/AlyannaMcKenna/status/1644033000219332613

https://kotaku.com/xbox-series-x-s-emulation-ps2-wii-gamecube-piracy-1850309874

 

edit:

MVG has uploaded a video explaining the problems with this, how Microsoft has banned emulators from launching even from your own Xbox, and how this could be a problem in the future:

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by Salv8 (sam)
fixed incorrect information and added newer sources explaining in detail.

[leadeater]

Thanks Nintendo, we all wanted this.  Putting the gaming community first as always.

[BiotechBen]

My message to Nintendo about going full Apple alternative app store panik on being anti consumer and expecting everyone to just shrug and go "it be like that, oh well"

 

[Dabombinable]

Once again, another incident where my first thoughts are "well, fuck you too Nintendo".

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

Once again, another incident where my first thoughts are "well, fuck you too Nintendo".

But why are you annoyed at Nintendo? It's not like they arbitrarily stop selling hardware, take down services, remove games from sale and don't leave any official first party way to use their products.

[suicidalfranco]

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

By why are you annoyed at Nintendo? It's not like the arbitrarily stop selling hardware, take down services, remove games from sale and don't leave any official first party way to use their products.

exactly, my 3DS is perfectly usable and can still access all of his online serv... oh wait

well at least the my Wii is in better shape on that fro... oh...

I'm more than positive it won't happen with the Switch and can invest every penny i own in it

 

 

Jokes aside, Nintendo is the reason why i ignored the Switch and went hail Mary with the Deck, at least on the deck i can legally buy and play games i used to enjoy in the 90s.

[Dabombinable]

21 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

exactly, my 3DS is perfectly usable and can still access all of his online serv... oh wait

well at least the my Wii is in better shape on that fro... oh...

I'm more than positive it won't happen with the Switch and can invest every penny i own in it

 

 

Jokes aside, Nintendo is the reason why i ignored the Switch and went hail Mary with the Deck, at least on the deck i can legally buy and play games i used to enjoy in the 90s.

Emulators are the only use for my old Asus Transformer tablets - they actually emulate old DOS games and some old consoles better than they can display ebooks.

[jagdtigger]

Guess the modding community will show the middle finger by going medieval on the xbox and crack it open like a nut......  (If it hasnt happened already...)

[Holmes108]

Go after the roms, but leave emulators alone. It's like people who want to make android boxes illegal. They just don't get it.

[jagdtigger]

34 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

Go after the roms, but leave emulators alone. It's like people who want to make android boxes illegal. They just don't get it.

You dont get it either it would seem. Many think piracy itself is the problem, well they are wrong. (And im not going down the infinite rabbit-thole if its wrong or not, so dont even bother making such posts.) Piracy is (mostly) a symptom. Its either rises because of out of touch pricing or lack of availability (including the useless restrictions that only frustrate paying customers) or both. Then companies citing rising piracy the reason for making more BS restrictions which creates a feedback-loop. Piracy arent killing anything, but the out of touch or straight up incompetent leadership at a business.....

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

You dont get it either it would seem. Many think piracy itself is the problem, well they are wrong.

Nintendo has always been on the wrong side of consumer rights when it comes to fan-media. Emulators are no exception.

 

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

(And im not going down the infinite rabbit-thole if its wrong or not, so dont even bother making such posts.) Piracy is (mostly) a symptom. Its either rises because of out of touch pricing or lack of availability (including the useless restrictions that only frustrate paying customers) or both. Then companies citing rising piracy the reason for making more BS restrictions which creates a feedback-loop. Piracy arent killing anything, but the out of touch or straight up incompetent leadership at a business.....

 

The gaming industry is not going out of business because J-random-nitwit decides to play a 30 year old Nintendo game on an emulator because the hardware hasn't been available for 30 years. That has never been the problem and Nintendo knows it. The problem is companies like Nintendo and Disney, decide to just "stop making available" products and then seemingly are surprised that there is demand for it. Sitting on IP is stupid, and if you are not making it available to watch or play. Then people who want to play or watch it are going to do by so by any means. That is why emulators exist. That is why CD and DVD rips exist. That's why ROM sites exist.

 

There are 716 official licensed NES games. How many does switch online have? about 60. That's LESS than 10%. How are you supposed to play the rest legitimately? Time machines are fiction. Repro carts on eBay are ALSO pirated copies. Analogue FPGA consoles are the only way to play original NES carts as intended. Good luck getting a vintage NES. The Analogue FPGA consoles can also be jailbroken to play all 716 licensed games without owning them, but that's not what it's marketed as. So why doesn't Nintendo just have an official emulator on the Switch or on Mac/Win/PS5/Xbox/iPhone that just downloads the ROM as a one-time-purchase from Nintendo itself to play it? That would solve the problem. But Nintendo won't do that. The closest we got to that was the Wii/WiiU virtual console. The NES classic? They could have loaded every single game on it and sold it, and just unlocked the games with e-shop codes.

 

Repeat that for the SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, GB, GBC, GBA, DS, and 3DS. Why Nintendo won't is baffling, it's leaving money on the table, that the pirates are more than willing to create repro carts and consoles for, and then Nintendo has to constantly hire people to send VERO notices to eBay to take these down by the thousands every week.

 

Those pirate carts are only ending up on eBay in the first place because Nintendo is not selling any legit way of buying the game in the first place. Yes many of those pirate carts (such as pokemon carts) were competing directly with legitimate carts for consoles that people can play (such as GBA carts in DS units), but they wouldn't be such a problem if you could buy the game in some form.

 

99% of the NES/SNES/GB/GBC/GBA carts you find on eBay are pirate copies. They are designed to deceive people looking for "brand new" vintage copy. A real vintage copy is likely going to look like a dog chewed on it and have no box. Every game I bought off eBay, I took apart to check, because if it comes with the box, but not the manual, it's likely counterfeit. Only one wound up being counterfeit, because all the others were bought without a box. Sure enough the one time I tried to get one with a box, it was a flash Repro cart.

 

In all seriousness, a NES/SNES/N64/GC+GB/GBC/GBA classic television "console" that just works with the Switch bluetooth controllers, is something that is needed.  

 

https://ausretrogamer.com/how-much-storage-would-it-take-to-store-every-nintendo-video-game-that-can-be-emulated/

 

It doesn't even require that much storage.

Quote

• NES – 237 MB
• SNES – 1.7GB
• N64 – 5.5GB
• GB/GBC – 568MB
• GBA – 8.4GB
• NDS – 83.2GB
• GameCube – 867GB
• Wii – 6.56TB

1TB of flash storage would cover everything but the Wii. A 1TB SD card costs you between $35 to $150. Now consider that the Switch hardware is basically Tegra X1 Nvidia shield, and costs $200, you could reasonably, at retail prices, sell a Nintendo console for $350 that plays everything Nintendo ever made before the Wii. All the hardware and software to do so, already exists. It's just Nintendo's unwillingness to have a product out there that "competes" with it's current offering, despite the life of "current offering" never, EVER, includes legacy games. There were more virtual console games on the Wii and WiiU than there has ever been on the Switch.

[james_castrello]

Not gunna lie I didn't even know they had storefront emulators

[starsmine]

Kinda wild to begin with that there were ever console emulator on a console just on the official store front. That is something for people who do homebrew, not the general public. That little bit of gatekeeping drastically cuts down casual, not necessarily intentional piracy. 

The type of people doing homebrew, the whole process of putting an emulator on is not significant friction. 

[Holmes108]

5 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

You dont get it either it would seem. Many think piracy itself is the problem, well they are wrong. (And im not going down the infinite rabbit-thole if its wrong or not, so dont even bother making such posts.) Piracy is (mostly) a symptom. Its either rises because of out of touch pricing or lack of availability (including the useless restrictions that only frustrate paying customers) or both. Then companies citing rising piracy the reason for making more BS restrictions which creates a feedback-loop. Piracy arent killing anything, but the out of touch or straight up incompetent leadership at a business.....

 

All that is completely separate from any point I was making, so I do indeed get it. Going after perfectly legal software makes no sense, whether or not you think piracy is warranted.

 

Edit: Also, games could be readily available, and all cost $5 and some people would still pirate, and a company like Nintendo especially, would still fight it. So while it's not that I think your points are without merit, it's hardly the be all and end all of the issue.

[starsmine]

45 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

 

All that is completely separate from any point I was making, so I do indeed get it. Going after perfectly legal software makes no sense, whether or not you think piracy is warranted.

 

Edit: Also, games could be readily available, and all cost $5 and some people would still pirate, and a company like Nintendo especially, would still fight it. So while it's not that I think your points are without merit, it's hardly the be all and end all of the issue.

Emulators might be legal software, but what are you doing with them on a console. 

Either publishing homebrew without a license to publish on a console
Pirating games.

Homebrew people doing homebrew things don't care about a restriction like this as far as I understand.

Consoles are not PCs

[linkboy]

Microsoft also issued a statement on this.

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-addresses-xbox-emulator-ban-says-its-based-on-long-standing-policy

 

 

[Alyanna]

It’s a lot more complicated than it seems, the MS statement is regarding the long standing policy. The email to the best of my knowledge (I’m the one who Tweeted it) was based of this (given it was made prior to the latest crackdown, and it’s not just Nintendo. There is security concerns as well regarding certain permissions. 
 

source: myself

[mr moose]

I suspect we will a see small rise in PC sales as people find another way to play the old games they already bought once legitimately.

 

EDIT: and before anyone quotes me just to say it won't change anything noticeably, I fucking know, I'm just pointing out that people will find another way to do it because you can;t deny people a product they have already paid for.

[linkboy]

7 hours ago, Alyanna said:

It’s a lot more complicated than it seems, the MS statement is regarding the long standing policy. The email to the best of my knowledge (I’m the one who Tweeted it) was based of this (given it was made prior to the latest crackdown, and it’s not just Nintendo. There is security concerns as well regarding certain permissions. 
 

source: myself

 

I also wonder how much Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) being ported to retail mode on the Series S and X played into this as well.

 

I'd wager it's not a good look on Microsoft for people to play 360 games on consoles where said games are still being sold.

[ouroesa]

Why are people still buying anything from Nintendon't beats me. They havn't produced any games that I would classify as 'good' since the early 2000's with an exception here and there. 

[ouroesa]

On 4/7/2023 at 11:29 PM, jagdtigger said:

You dont get it either it would seem. Many think piracy itself is the problem, well they are wrong. (And im not going down the infinite rabbit-thole if its wrong or not, so dont even bother making such posts.) Piracy is (mostly) a symptom. Its either rises because of out of touch pricing or lack of availability (including the useless restrictions that only frustrate paying customers) or both. Then companies citing rising piracy the reason for making more BS restrictions which creates a feedback-loop. Piracy arent killing anything, but the out of touch or straight up incompetent leadership at a business.....

No, this is your personal opinion. Saying others dont get it, is not quite correct, especially on speculitive topics. I suggest you broaden your views and take time to see other's views. Unless you are talking hard facts.

[jagdtigger]

5 hours ago, ouroesa said:

No, this is your personal opinion. Saying others dont get it, is not quite correct, especially on speculitive topics. I suggest you broaden your views and take time to see other's views. Unless you are talking hard facts.

Opinion? Seems like you dont really follow the piracy topic, id suggest you to head your own advice.

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, ouroesa said:

No, this is your personal opinion. Saying others dont get it, is not quite correct, especially on speculitive topics. I suggest you broaden your views and take time to see other's views. Unless you are talking hard facts.

Here is a hardened fact: This quote from IBM:

 

Quote

"We felt that this would be impractical and inconvenient for users and expensive for IBM. We also concluded that any single-machine locks and keys, or special time-out and self-destruct programs, would be onerous to our best customers and not effective against clever thieves. Because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers. Our hope was that legal protection and criminal prosecution would limit the piracy problem."

is proof they never wanted to make anything harder for genuine paying customers, but piracy got the better of them and in the end they were left with no choice but to get on the DRM train and try to force their product to only work for paying customers.

 

I don't care what anyone's personal opinion on the subject is, just don't pretend piracy is the result of DRM or spruik half arsed political/propaganda "research" as evidence to defend either.

 

 

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, mr moose said:

Here is a hardened fact: This quote from IBM:

 

is proof they never wanted to make anything harder for genuine paying customers, but piracy got the better of them and in the end they were left with no choice but to get on the DRM train and try to force their product to only work for paying customers.

 

I don't care what anyone's personal opinion on the subject is, just don't pretend piracy is the result of DRM or spruik half arsed political/propaganda "research" as evidence to defend either.

 

 

IBM was always fond of hardware DRM. The entire IBM BIOS clone by COMPAQ shows you that. Many devices since (68K Mac's, 68K Amiga's, C64, Apple II, IBM PCJr/Tandy 1000, GBA, GC, DS, PS1, PS2, etc) require a BIOS to boot, and trying to emulate a game or application designed for the computer or console often requires emulating BIOS on top of emulating the hardware. IBM PC's, Tandy's and so forth of the early vintage had ROM BIOS Basic. 

 

There is a reason why many emulators are "legit" but do not come with the BIOS. Re-implenting software that you don't have the source code for is hard, and inaccurate. If you want 100% accuracy you need the BIOS. How many people are capable of dumping a BIOS from a console? ZERO. You can only dump a BIOS from a modified console, and that often means soldering things to the console or the firmware chip to get to it.

 

The newer the console, the further and further away from re-engineering a BIOS is possible. Like "dynamic recompilation" is how everything from the N64 and later has been emulated because it's simply not possible to emulate a game console without dynamic recompilation of the firmware/operating system. But it's that recompilation that makes it possible to get a "native" speed. 

 

At any rate, DRM is about keeping customers honest. It might not be US customers they have to worry about, but I assure you that China and Indonesia pirate things without a second thought. People who go to these countries often bring back pirate/counterfeit media/clothing/jewelry and have to destroy it when they arrive in the US or Canada.

 

When I worked for the auction site, one of the biggest red-flag counterfeit items were "boxed set's" of DVD's, like "D*sn*y 110-in-1 box", nobody in their right mind would believe that's a real product. Yet, people routinely pick them up in Indonesia or China and then try to auction them for pennies on the dollar.

 

The average customer is honest. The ones that are not, are usually motivated by greed, or spite. Greed is typical of the people who won't spend money on anything they can get for free, and spite motivated by a loathing for a specific company (eg Nintendo, Warner, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc) who pirate things because they know that company does not deserve the money, and they feel personally wronged by them.

 

In a way it's similar to the shoplifting arguments. "It's a big company, they can absorb the cost", yeah, but who suffers when you do? Nobody at the top, just people who are directly employed by that store. If that store suffers enough losses, the HQ just goes "oh not profitable enough, time to close it." Hell, some companies will just close a store because the management is incompetent. So people end up having to drive an hour to the next closest store to shop.

 

A video game is not a necessity. Groceries are. When the company is so incompetent that it decides shutting down the store that generates perpetual money is better than leaving it running perpetually, someone didn't get the memo "FREE MONEY"

 

[jagdtigger]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

At any rate, DRM is about keeping customers honest.

Havent had a good laugh like this for a while. DRM is just their greed taking over. They want to make sure if they decide something should disappear its going to disappear regardless of you legally owning said thing. Then there is their unrealistic ideas about how you should consume the content you paid for and so on...............................

In short, its not there to make things honest. Its there to extract more money, its pretty much a milking contest.......