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

[Kisai]

12 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

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.......

Nah, the problem is that if you sell an easily duplicated product, with no DRM, one of two things happens:

1) Customers who know how much it costs to duplicate that product, don't value it at the price you want for it, so they make copies of it for their friends.

2) Customers who hate you, buy one of your copies, make 100 copies and then go sell it for 10 cents on the dollar down the street.

 

So a company like EA or Nintendo, which has greedy, out-of-touch business priorities, you get a lot of people who will spitefully pirate the game if they can find a way to do so.

 

The DRM doesn't necessarily increase the sales, it just increases the lead time that people who actually want it will actually pay for it. Video Streaming has actually done a lot to pull people back to buying games legitimately because they can't play it on day 1 and profit from people watching you play it if you don't buy it digitally the moment it's released. You want to make all the youtube content of it before anyone else does.

 

BUT...

 

DRM should always be lightweight, the minute we started having stores like Steam and EGS marry purchases to a payment currency and country, we created a situation where if you MOVE, you lose all your purchases. How is that different from Nintendo doing the same, AND ALSO shutting down the eShop? So now if you move, not only have you lost access to your games, you can't even buy them again.

 

[ouroesa]

17 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

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

Sure, buddy.

[mr moose]

16 hours ago, Kisai said:

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. 

 

 

 

You know that quote was from like the 1960's,  when IBM really didn't want to bother with DRM let alone piss off their legit consumers who spent a LOT of money on their products.  Most of the DRM stuff you mention was late 70's and 80's.  By that stage IBM (like nearly every other software Maker) realized that if they don't do something about piracy themselves no one else was going to fix it for them.

 

 

 

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

On 4/12/2023 at 9:47 PM, jagdtigger said:

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.......

Both things can be true at once. I'm not a fan of DRM in the slightest, for a multitude of reasons. But to ignore the fact that some form of copy protection is desirable simply due to the ease of piracy in its absence is not illogical. Yes, DRM has been used due to greed, to hurt legitimate customers whenever the license holder was tired of spending money to keep up their servers, etc. But I'm sorry, if you seriously want to claim that piracy in itself is not also a contributing factor to DRM existing at all, then you have to suffer from severe selective blindness.

 

I mean, if you really want to have some type of comparison to illustrate the point, take patents. A patent grants you the exclusive right to manufacture something for a certain time, so you can profit off of it either through your own manufacture or through licensing before it eventually goes into the public domain and becomes fair game for everybody (at least, that's the idealized version of how patents are supposed to work). You can make the claim that this is to keep competition fair, since under traditional capitalist doctrine, there's little incentive to invent new things and cover all the R&D cost when someone else can just come along and copy your invention for far less upfront cost, since they only have to recoup material and manhours, not the aforementioned R&D costs. On the other hand, patent trolls exist, whose only motivation is to rake in money by abusing the spirit of patents for their own gain.

 

Now apply that to DRM. On the one hand, it's there to keep things fair so that people who want a digital product have to pay for it, they (in principle) have no means of illicit procurement. On the other hand, DRM can lock you out of your legal purchases and in some cases it can even force you to buy the same thing again, like, say, Nintendo forcing you to buy the same games on multiple consoles even if you already own a digital copy of it for the previous generation console. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

 

And even if the entire greed aspect ceased tomorrow, if Nintendo suddenly had no problem with emulators at all and offered their entire back catalog for a reasonable price as a simple one-time purchase that allows you to download the ROMs and console specific firmware or BIOS, DRM would still exist and seem rational to combat piracy. Because even a reasonable price is sometimes not enough to keep people from just getting it for free. Remember how Humble Bundle had their first offer over a decade ago where you could get games for literally a cent and people still pirated the games on it.

[Spindel]

22 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

*snip*...On the other hand, DRM can lock you out of your legal purchases and in some cases it can even force you to buy the same thing again, like, say, Nintendo forcing you to buy the same games on multiple consoles even if you already own a digital copy of it for the previous generation console...*snip*

Sorry this is factually wrong from a legal standpoint. Read the EULA. 

 

You don't buy a copy of the game, you buy the rights to play the game on the hardware you buy it for.

Claiming Nintendo (or any other company for that matter) is forcing you to buy it again just reeks of entitlement. YOU agreed to the conditions. This would be much more nefarious if we were talking about stuff that are a necessity for life, but video games, movies and music are not, they are a luxury.  

 

There is much to be said and discussed about how copyright law is written and if it should be like this, but that it is a different discussion.

 

I'm not defending Nintendo (while it might read like it) because this is not unique to them. But (sadly) they are legally in the right on this and this goes for a whole lot of things outside Nintendo products.  

 

 

[mr moose]

5 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Sorry this is factually wrong from a legal standpoint. Read the EULA. 

 

You don't buy a copy of the game, you buy the rights to play the game on the hardware you buy it for.

Claiming Nintendo (or any other company for that matter) is forcing you to buy it again just reeks of entitlement. YOU agreed to the conditions. This would be much more nefarious if we were talking about stuff that are a necessity for life, but video games, movies and music are not, they are a luxury.  

 

There is much to be said and discussed about how copyright law is written and if it should be like this, but that it is a different discussion.

 

I'm not defending Nintendo (while it might read like it) because this is not unique to them. But (sadly) they are legally in the right on this and this goes for a whole lot of things outside Nintendo products.  

 

 

I didn't know we could apply different rules for consumer goods depending on if they are a luxury or life support.  Either it is ethical or it isn't.

 

[Holmes108]

8 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I didn't know we could apply different rules for consumer goods depending on if they are a luxury or life support.  Either it is ethical or it isn't.

 

I don't think ethics are really part of it. It's just a different transaction, almost like renting a game from somewhere vs buying (but not quite the same obviously). 

 

Like Spindel, I'm not suggesting this is the ideal situation... it just is what it is.

 

 

 

[Spindel]

20 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I didn't know we could apply different rules for consumer goods depending on if they are a luxury or life support.  Either it is ethical or it isn't.

 

If you want to put it like that: Then what Nintendo (and a whole lot of other companies) is doing is etichal and they have the law on their side, you agreed to the contract willingly. The ethical thing is to live up to your side of the bargain. 

 

Case closed, we don't need to change the rules. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

40 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Sorry this is factually wrong from a legal standpoint. Read the EULA. 

 

You don't buy a copy of the game, you buy the rights to play the game on the hardware you buy it for.

Claiming Nintendo (or any other company for that matter) is forcing you to buy it again just reeks of entitlement. YOU agreed to the conditions. This would be much more nefarious if we were talking about stuff that are a necessity for life, but video games, movies and music are not, they are a luxury.  

 

There is much to be said and discussed about how copyright law is written and if it should be like this, but that it is a different discussion.

 

I'm not defending Nintendo (while it might read like it) because this is not unique to them. But (sadly) they are legally in the right on this and this goes for a whole lot of things outside Nintendo products.  

 

8 minutes ago, Spindel said:

If you want to put it like that: Then what Nintendo (and a whole lot of other companies) is doing is etichal and they have the law on their side, you agreed to the contract willingly. The ethical thing is to live up to your side of the bargain. 

 

Case closed, we don't need to change the rules. 

 

I don't much care about the factual reality. This is always a copout argument when people have no real argument for what they're defending, "well the law says and therefore it's ethical". Never mind that this mindset is totally antithetical to democracy built on laws and their ability to change based on popular consensus. This stance desperately tries to paint the status quo as eternal and unchangeable. 

 

Also, I didn't agree to the conditions. After all, I didn't buy their games, I pirated every single Nintendo game on all obsolete consoles that are no longer in production and whose titles aren't being sold to me anymore on those platforms. That's perfectly ethical to do. Those are my terms and the universe agreed to them by giving me the option of doing so.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, Spindel said:

If you want to put it like that: Then what Nintendo (and a whole lot of other companies) is doing is etichal and they have the law on their side, you agreed to the contract willingly. The ethical thing is to live up to your side of the bargain. 

 

Case closed, we don't need to change the rules. 

Maybe were you live, but where i live such contracts and EULA's are illegal, a game is a product and a product cannot be made to be different after purchase.  Aussie laws are why you in the US can enjoy a refund.  So even though you think that the case is closed,  If you don't need any laws changed at all I am sure you won't mind going back to the days when you couldn't get a refund on software that didn't work.

 

18 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

I don't think ethics are really part of it. It's just a different transaction, almost like renting a game from somewhere vs buying (but not quite the same obviously). 

 

Like Spindel, I'm not suggesting this is the ideal situation... it just is what it is.

 

 

 

Ethics are a huge part of it.

[Spindel]

Just now, mr moose said:

Maybe were you live, but where i live such contracts and EULA's are illegal, a game is a product and a product cannot be made to be different after purchase.  Aussie laws are why you in the US can enjoy a refund.  So even though you think that the case is closed,  If you don't need any laws changed at all I am sure you won't mind going back to the days when you couldn't get a refund on software that didn't work.

 

Ethics are a huge part of it.

I'm not american, our laws also give more consumer power in a lot of cases than americans have. But copy right law here still boils down to you agreeing to the conditions in the EULA to use the product in the case of software. You never own the software, you own the right to use it within what's stipulated in the EULA.

 

Hell I'm wishing the EU that does a lot of crap that is applauded by this forum, but so far EU has not "forbidden" having licensing conditions for software. 

[mr moose]

12 hours ago, Spindel said:

I'm not american, our laws also give more consumer power in a lot of cases than americans have. But copy right law here still boils down to you agreeing to the conditions in the EULA to use the product in the case of software. You never own the software, you own the right to use it within what's stipulated in the EULA.

 

Hell I'm wishing the EU that does a lot of crap that is applauded by this forum, but so far EU has not "forbidden" having licensing conditions for software. 

I don't think it is copyright law that gives them that power in the US.   Also when people say they own a copy, they nearly always mean they own the right to use that software because they paid for it.  Hardly anyone believes they own the IP of the software.

[Kisai]

19 hours ago, mr moose said:

I don't think it is copyright law that gives them that power in the US.   Also when people say they own a copy, they nearly always mean they own the right to use that software because they paid for it.  Hardly anyone believes they own the IP of the software.

Some people pretend they do, otherwise "mods" for games would not be a thing. It always violates the license of the software, but people are going to do it anyway if the effort is worth it.

eg: 

BOTW Linkle mod. That mod is rather extensive, even more so than multiplayer mods.

 

Most translation mods are extensive, but can be distributed without violating a license, because the original developer didn't release it in that language, though they can claim the right to the text of the game. This is why you can generally get away with a fan-translation that patches the legally-obtained-but-most-people-just-use-a-pirate-copy-because-they-are-not-that-tech-savvy-to-do-so-even-though-they-may-own-the-game version. BOTW in particular is not actually an "old game" by console standards as Nintendo is still selling it in cartridge form. But if you wanted to play this mod, you need a pirate copy of the game, even if you own the physical game, because you can't patch the physical cartridge, and you need a specific version of the game if you digitally downloaded it from the eShop. Impossible to do for pretty much anyone, regardless if they have it legally. People playing it, are unlikely even playing it on the Switch, because they don't want their Switch to get banned, so they're playing it on an emulator. 

 

Which brings us back to the topic at hand. Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping a relationship with Nintendo, and it's likely that people have been sideloading emulators for ever and just a few ambitious people actually got the emulators onto the store itself, which gives the illusion that these are approved emulators from Nintendo, when they in fact only play pirate copies of games. If you are tech savvy enough to dump a game from a console, getting an emulator on another console should be a cinch and not require it appearing on the official Microsoft store.

 

[XNOR]

On 4/7/2023 at 7:29 AM, leadeater said:

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

I hate growing up and slowly finding out that all the entities that gave you joy during your youth, like Nintendo and Disney, are actually dystopian megacorporations who are actively adversarial towards their customers.

 

Nintendo is working so hard to be evil, for so little gain, and very likely a significant negative gain. It's not as if blocking emulation on the Xbox is going to stop or slow anyone even slightly interested in emulating one of their games. In all reality, Nintendo couldn't make a dent even if they went fully nuclear on anything and everything even tangentially related to emulation.

[Eaglerino]

2 hours ago, XNOR said:

I hate growing up and slowly finding out that all the entities that gave you joy during your youth, like Nintendo and Disney, are actually dystopian megacorporations who are actively adversarial towards their customers.

 

Nintendo is working so hard to be evil, for so little gain, and very likely a significant negative gain. It's not as if blocking emulation on the Xbox is going to stop or slow anyone even slightly interested in emulating one of their games. In all reality, Nintendo couldn't make a dent even if they went fully nuclear on anything and everything even tangentially related to emulation.

sorry man, not allowing people to freely pirate your games isn't evil. you'd do the exact same thing in Nintendo's position, the difference here is you don't have a long list of IP worth a truck load of money worth protecting

 

Should Nintendo release these games on their own platform? Sure, they already do on the Switch for a lot of old, popular titles. I wish they would do more. But seriously on what planet do you deserve to play Nintendo games on a competitor console? Nintendo wants money. They by and large deserve it with how high quality their games are compared to most competitors. They want you buying their games on their platform, not pirating them on a competitor platform. Truthfully I'm astounded these Xbox emulators survived this long

[XNOR]

50 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

sorry man, not allowing people to freely pirate your games isn't evil.

I'm going to stop you right there. Allowing emulation in general does not equal pirating Nintendo games, freely or otherwise. Even allowing or using Nintendo emulators does not equal pirating Nintendo games. That's exactly the kind of overreaching fallacy Nintendo uses to justify its militant behavior. Nintendo not liking something does not make it illegal, and in various cases and jurisdictions, the things they try to prevent are explicitly legal.

 

53 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Nintendo wants money.

You'd never know, looking at the absence of options to buy their classic games.

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, XNOR said:

I'm going to stop you right there. Allowing emulation in general does not equal pirating Nintendo games, freely or otherwise.

 

Nope. Rephrase that. Emulation of hardware that requires some technological skill to dump the software from, is ALWAYS about pirating. People go "but muh homebrew" all the time, but the amount of people with the technical skill to produce a game for that console WITHOUT any of the tools the actual developers would have had, is pretty much counted one hand.

 

Releasing an emulator that runs without needing an operating system or BIOS, yes, technically all it is doing is emulating the hardware, and trying to claim it as a piracy tool is a pretty hard stretch, especially since most 8-bit and 16-bit consoles do not have a BIOS, and their security lockout was something that didn't actually interface with the software (Eg physical cartridge sizes, pinouts and lock-out chips that cause boot-loops when mis-matched)

 

Bleem was the first actual test for "are emulators legit" and the consequences of that was that the displaying of the Sony logo (which was forced when the software was launched correctly) allowed Sony to claim a copyright or trademark infringement. Bypass the need for the BIOS (as Bleem did) and suddenly that's not a thing anymore.

 

But most emulators don't do that, they're simply too complex to re-implement. Case in point, Amiga and Macintosh 68K emulators ALWAYS required the BIOS and OS to run. However Apple, had entire copies of System 6 thru 8 on their website way back in the day these emulators were around, and thus that was not a stumbling block to running MacOS on a PC. It was always the acquiring of the BIOS. Amiga's fared a bit different as a company actually was able to sell firmware with their own emulator and all you had to do was yoink the firmware off that and use it to with any other emulator you had.

 

So overall it looks like this:

6502 (Apple 2, NES, C64) - Fully accurate emulation, BIOS required for C64/AppleII

Z80 (GB, MSX, SC1000/SC3000/Sega Master System/PC-88/ZX Spectrum/TRS-80) - Fully accurate other than BASIC ROM's needed for BASIC software

68K (Mega Drive, Amiga (all versions), Some Atari's, All pre-OSX Mac's) - Firmware required for all the devices marketed as computers, no firmware for Mega Drive, firmware for SegaCD

65C816 (SNES, Apple IIgs), firmware for the Apple IIgs, and also various expansion chips for the SNES.

 

Pretty much everything with an Intel x86, PPC or ARM chip requires firmware to even boot, and if you want accuracy from the emulator, you need a dump of that exact machine's firmware.

16 hours ago, XNOR said:

Even allowing or using Nintendo emulators does not equal pirating Nintendo games. That's exactly the kind of overreaching fallacy Nintendo uses to justify its militant behavior. Nintendo not liking something does not make it illegal, and in various cases and jurisdictions, the things they try to prevent are explicitly legal.

 

You'd never know, looking at the absence of options to buy their classic games.

There's a saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Nintendo can be legally in the right, while being ethically in the wrong. It's these kinds of "legally they are correct" arguments is why people keep giving away their privacy to big corporations, because the end user has no means of pushing back, they can only refuse to purchase the product, and when that product is something they need to live, you end up in a situation of agreeing to something under duress.

 

Nobody needs a video game to live, so as long as our politicians are not the ones playing video games, they will continue to not address the clearly anti-consumer, greedy behavior and just go "nobody needs a video game to live"

 

True, but nobody needs gambling to live either, and we found reason to regulate that because it preys upon people's lack of self-control, and unchecked gambling becomes a means for criminals to launder money. So do video games with microtransactions and subscription services.

 

People have died from playing video games, people have also let their children die, neglecting them to play video games, and people have committed crimes to feed their video game addiction. There is a point where you have to look at what damage is caused by the Video Game developer being too greedy and anti-consumer and go "Hmm Maybe Nintendo and Sony shouldn't be allowed to steal video games from people who already purchased them. Hmm maybe MMO's and Gacha/Lootbox games should be required to refund all purchases in order to shut them down, or open-source the server code and let someone else take over."

 

But hey, maybe cure Cancer first. Nintendo and Disney will be requiring you to sign-over your first born in order to enjoy their content in the future if they continue down this road.

[XNOR]

On 4/16/2023 at 10:35 PM, Kisai said:

 

Nope. Rephrase that. Emulation of hardware that requires some technological skill to dump the software from, is ALWAYS about pirating. People go "but muh homebrew" all the time, but the amount of people with the technical skill to produce a game for that console WITHOUT any of the tools the actual developers would have had, is pretty much counted one hand.

People are allowed to dump the content of a game they own to a ROM. That's not pirating. And before anyone goes nuh-uh, the world is bigger than the US. If an emulator does use proprietary firmware or software to achieve its goal, then sure, but that's something to address specifically.

[Kisai]

26 minutes ago, XNOR said:

People are allowing to dump the content of a game they own to a ROM. That's not pirating. And before anyone goes nuh-uh, the world is bigger than the US. If an emulator does use proprietary firmware or software to achieve its goal, then sure, but that's something to address specifically.

When you play a backup, you're supposed to play it on the same device it was dumped from. We KNOW that doesn't happen. Back when PC's that booted from floppy disks were still a thing, you made backups of EVERYTHING, and that was only possible to do if you had a computer with two drives. Why would you ever buy a computer with two drives at the time? Only a small handful of games let you make backups because the way they worked was self-modifying (Ultima and Starflight did this back in the day.) They were self-modifying for two reasons, one was because of the lack of memory in the device, so the game was modified on disk, and saved every time you switched from one mode to another in the game, and the other was to prevent people from just hacking the game's copy protection. The copy protection was the fact that if you could not write to the original disk (the original disks shipped without notches in the disks to write to them.) Writing to your "original" backup, destroys the backup.

 

We've long past moved since that. You have never needed to make a backup of a game that was on a mask-ROM cart. The cartridge will never be written to. Switch, 3DS, and DS games are NAND flash. You SHOULD be backing up those games. But Nintendo does not want you to. Nintendo wants you to just throw your old games in a paper shredder when they release a new console.

 

[mr moose]

On 4/16/2023 at 10:05 AM, XNOR said:

I hate growing up and slowly finding out that all the entities that gave you joy during your youth, like Nintendo and Disney, are actually dystopian megacorporations who are actively adversarial towards their customers.

 

 

It was commodore and 3dfx when I was growing up,  thanks to their demise I have an innocent childhood that remains perpetually intact.

 

[linkboy]

On 4/16/2023 at 1:47 PM, XNOR said:

People are allowing to dump the content of a game they own to a ROM. That's not pirating. And before anyone goes nuh-uh, the world is bigger than the US. If an emulator does use proprietary firmware or software to achieve its goal, then sure, but that's something to address specifically.

 

Not quite, that's only partially correct (at least according to the DMCA here in the US, I'm not sure about Canada).

 

You're allowed to make a backup of software, but you can't break the encryption of said software an order to make said backup. 

 

In order to dump Wii U games, either to play them via an emulator or on an actual console, you have to bypass both the console's encryption and the encryption on the disc.

[XNOR]

21 hours ago, HomicidalPingu said:

Most people do not own a hard copy therefore are committing a crime.

That's the problem with discussions like these. The companies involved love painting with broad strokes and making general assumptions like these, even though statements like those are questionable at best and intentionally false at worst.

 

What complicates the discussion further is that even if we assume what you say is true, Nintendo does not sell hard copies or virtual copies of many of their games. That doesn't make it legal or right to copy or distribute them, but it does undercut the argument that Nintendo would be losing sales or revenue. Without trying to justify the behavior of actual pirates, in streaming services we've seen that making the legal route more convenient than the illegal one is a great way of combating piracy. Gabe Newell famously said "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates." Nintendo really isn't helping itself in that regard. Popular titles are sometimes available, regularly they're not for extended periods of time, and if they are often only on one specific platform and/or through a convoluted store. It's absolutely baffling how ineffective Nintendo is at exploiting its well-loved catalog of games. It'd be too easy to be a fan favorite company, but instead they seem to be putting all their effort in being actively consumer hostile.