a game I made in 1995
a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio
FTFY
RIP Bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper etc.)
And Maxis (Sims, Spore) 😥
Westwood 😭
deleted by creator
Kane Lives!
True, but he plays for Bayern Munich now.
Or Nintendo:
“Stop pirating our old games!!!”
Okay, then sell me one of your old games.
“No.”
More like: Nintendo, “here is an HD remake of that old game you wanted.”
Fans, “We don’t want to pay for old games!”
Actually more like: “Here’s an HD remaster of an old game that we ported previously but instead of giving you the same price as that lets just charge $60 instead.”
Fans:
Fan: “I’ve been feeling like playing Super Mario Sunshine again lately. Do you happen to have this game?”
Nintendo: “Yes indeed, it is part of the Super Mario 3D Collection, which also contains Super Mario 64 with HD graphics and Super Mario Galaxy, also in HD and with added button controls.”
Fan: “Nice! I’d like a copy of Super Mario 3D Collection.”
Nintendo: “We only sold this for a short time after the 35th anniversary of Super Mario. So i guess you should’ve asked sooner.”
Fan: “Well then. Now excuse me while i get an RCM-”
Nintendo: (cocks gun) “No you don’t!”
Fan: ok, so let me just install EmuDe-
Nintendo: *shoots*
Leaving this here:
https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us
Nintendo has also committed piracy of their own software, by downloading a rom that a piracy group extracted and uploaded to the internet, so that Nintendo could then can re-sell the game back to us.
If Nintendo will sell me the old games I love, I’ll happily rebuy them so long as there’s no installed killswitch (sorry, “DRM”) that will take it away from me one day.
It’s impossible to pirate your own game tho. Why find an old cartridge and dump the ROM yourself if somebody already did it. The actual source code is probably somewhere in the shadowrealm, so nothing they can do.
More like: Nintendo, “here is a collection of old games that you have to pay for a monthly subscription in order to access.”
Me: “that’s really stupid, no thanks”
PS: it is possible to be a fan of Nintendo’s and also think they are dicks about emulation and piracy and don’t offer reasonable alternatives…many things in life are multi-faceted as such, and it’s perfectly OK (and healthy ackshually) to acknowledge the bad in those we admire.
Does that boot taste good? What would you do if you wanted to play, for example, The legend of zelda: four swords?
I just wanna play Wind Waker on the Switch. They already made a HD version! It will port across so easily… damn them.
Nintendo: “Emulators are piracy”
Nintendo, 15 years later: “Anybody want to buy our emulated games on new consoles?”
… so in your mind their attitude has nothing to do with IP, just the technology used to deploy it? Your statement makes no sense whatsoever
To add to what Skull giver said, the current retro market only exists because of the emulators that Nintendo has been fighting for over 25 years. There would be no SNES Mini console without snes9x or zsnes. Neither would there be a Nintendo e-shop for their old games on new consoles. The knowledge base to even make that work would not exist. Archiving old copies of games may not even exist.
Nintendo’s position is highly hypocritical. They have benefited from emulation far more than they’ve been harmed.
Nintendos’s (wrong) opinion is that all emulators are piracy. Current emulators are likely violating at least a few piracy laws by including DRM busting keys and such in the software, but this could be resolved quite easily (for some reason everyone is dumping encrypted ROMs so emulators need the keys to decrypt them, but that’s just out of convenience for existing emulators).
Maybe in Japan, with its draconian copyright law, they’re not even wrong. In the USA they’re definitely wrong, emulators are perfectly legal. I don’t know about any emulation cases outside the USA, but I believe the result of any emulator lawsuit should end up the same, or even worse.
The “current emulators are illegal because of keys” problem is made even more complicated by the fact that in countries like France the inclusion of keys isn’t necessarily a violation. The reason the world can play and rip DVDs is that there’s a French guy legally maintaining a DVD decoding library that nearly everyone else reuses.
As for IP laws: this depends per country. In some places, dumping your own games is completely legal, in others you can even legally dump borrowed games, but there are countries where games simply aren’t allowed to be ripped or copied even if you bought them with your own money.
Downloading games off the internet is piracy, obviously. It’s illegal and everyone knows it. Nobody cares about someone downloading a copy of Wii Sports, though. I don’t think anyone thinks the prices Nintendo asks for basic ROMs are remotely fair, but the law is on Nintendo’s side here. Buy a game, dump it, resell it, that’s the only way to build an affordable collection of old games.
Ethically, I don’t think piracy of Nintendo’s shit is wrong. They knowingly abuse copyright law to infringe other people’s rights (illegal DMCA takedowns on videos showing someone playing a emulated game, for example) so I don’t see why anyone should care about their rights.
Luckily, Nintendo’s piracy prevention system is generally quite incompetent, so pirating their stuff is quite easy to do.
You wrote so much about nothing. You’re obviously just being weirdly pedantic
I don’t mind the HD remakes, but I do mind the constant obsession with releasing them over making a new game or, ye gods forbid, coming up with a new IP. That, and it’d be nice if they wouldn’t leave several of them locked to dead on arrival systems (like the WiiU) which just creates the same problem all over again.
But what really gets my goat is locking all the Virtual Console releases onto the shop of whatever console they’re on, so when that service inevitably goes defunct they’re all lost again. Those old 16 bit games aren’t changing, having content updates, or getting patched. And they’re just emulating them anyway, so just put a whole bunch of titles on a Switch cartridge or something and let me play them in perpetuity as long as my Switch still functions. I will not pay $60 for Mario 1 again. I probably would pay $60 for the entirety of the first party library from the NES on a cartridge.
All my old NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube games still work just fine, decades later. But there’s stuff that was on the DSi and WiiWare shops that’s just gone forever, and you can never get them back.
deleted by creator
I’m fine spending money for a quality product.
Quality product. Not DRM-laden, always-online, unoptimized garbage that pushes microtransactions in my face. It’s not a price problem; it’s a service problem. If I’m going to get a shittier experience as a legitimate customer, piracy is the smart thing to do.
If you’re concerned about DRM, just use GOG or Itch. If you’re concerned about shitty games, do research before you buy something and just avoid studios like EA.
Don’t underestimate the FOMO factor.
Avoiding a title is simply not a consideration for a lot of people—especially if it’s shitty. They’re important context for meme and conversation material.
I genuinely wish this was a joke.
Did “all digital” kill renting? Back in my day we had Blockbuster and gamefly, and we could buy used disks from gamestop and play 'em for a bit and return them within 7 days to “rent” them as well. I’m glad I’m all ROMs and flashcarts these days.
I’m pretty picky about what I get, so that idea didn’t really come to me…
It won’t change anything until people stop preordering games and actually wait for them to come out before shelling out a hundred bucks.
Pre-order and dlc is what has made gaming so awful lately. Game companies realized they can make a half-assed game and fill it with microtransactions and still make shit loads of money
The biggest issue with pre-ordering is the gaming community itself tbh. Even if an individual knows better intellectually, companies have people specialized to make advertising as engaging as possible. Most of us (I used to be one of them) simply do not have the tools, nor the idea, of how to mentally combat “hype trains” and thus get our expectations up praying that the game will come out good and satisfy us for a bit.
Pre-ordering makes zero sense for a digitally downloadable product, since it isn’t scarce like physical products can be. Unless the company invents advantages that didn’t need to be there, there’s no benefit of being in the front of the queue, since eventually everybody can get a copy. Consumers are dumb…
Pre-ordering has the illusion of value. When you pre-order chances are it gets you into the game before others and with extra stuff to boot. That could be an advantage that could snowball. Or atleast that is one of the rationalizations that can be made. Saldy, even assuming that is true, it wouldn’t matter since the game tends to be shit/unplayable at launch.
The pre-orders that technically are worth anything are those that give physical baubles/items that could contain value to some individuals. But right now? yeah pre-orders are scams.
But speaking personally now, the feelings can be so damn strong that you create “logical” reasons to pre-order and then end up lamenting at the idiocy or full commit to sunk cost fallacy.
Good old inability to delay gratification (google it, it’s an actual behavioural trait) in the face of the pretty clear logic that almost all games (except some multiplayer ones) are actually better a year later than at launch day.
Mind you, the world around us pretty much tries to train us every single day to be like that: it makes for wonderful profit-maximizing mindless consumers.
You can look up delayed gratification all you want but the majority of American consumers will never actually understand it.
In all fairness, graphing that only makes sense in inflation-adjusted dollars, which judging by the legend isn’t the case (the seasonal adjustment only smooths the differences between quarters).
Mind you, I still expect it will keep it’s shape in the last few years, but it might show the current point as below the 2009 peak (not that it makes it any better).
Sorry, I used to work in Finance and am a bit of stickler for clearity in Financial and Economic figures :/
I’m not an economist but anecdotal evidence that I’ve picked up from a number of different sources in the last couple of years lends me to believe that consumer debt is pretty darn high. This is from the Federal Reserve and what else is an average schmuck supposed to look at?
Exactly. Companies know how to manipulate our dopamine high and keep on repeating the cycle of pre-orders and post-launch disappointment; while the game developers are laughing their way to the banks.
do research before you buy something
So instead of playing, I now have to do work to figure how to spend my miniscule available time on what to play to get the most out of said time.
I’m not mocking what you said. I’m just lamenting the state of gaming.
I’d rather invest my time figuring a smart purchase, than spend my minuscule available money padding some rich fuck wallet. I don’t have much money or time, so I’d rather spend it on quality products and services than waste it on moneygrubbers.
No one’s disputing that. The discussion is about how awful it is that we have to do that. It sucks that our miniscule time is even smaller because we have to now sift through the garbage first.
Imma get downvoted for that but even Epic has loads of DRM free games… there’s plenty of choice to buy DRM free games these days…
i really want to use gog but they don’t offer regional pricing.
like for example factorio is 8$ for me on steam but 36$ on gog. Skyrim is 40$ on gog and 17$ on steam.
I don’t pirate those either. I just don’t waste my time with them.
It’s probably not even made by EA but some company that made good game before being acquired by EA
I don’t pirate indie games, small-budget movies, or music from unknown bands. I hurt major corporations specifically.
For some older indie games, piracy is the only way to play them. But otherwise, I agree with this.
This is literally the genesis of GOG.
True, but GOG doesn’t have everything 🤷
You misunderstood. I meant that piracy is literally how many of games were saved. GOG started because some guys stockpiled pirated copies of games, then cracked and/or reversed engineered them to work on modern PCs. Eventually, they got the rights to sell some legally and GOG.com was born.
My point was that piracy isn’t always bad because companies have no incentive to preserve their products after they’ve stopped selling. (See vintage ROMs)
GOG started because some guys stockpiled pirated copies of games, then cracked and/or reversed engineered them to work on modern PCs. Eventually, they got the rights to sell some legally and GOG.com was born.
Nice! Didn’t know that!
My point was that piracy isn’t always bad because companies have no incentive to preserve their products after they’ve stopped selling. (See vintage ROMs)
True.
Good exception.
Exactly.
They steal more than we can dream.
They just used their influence to legalize their grift.
Legality ≠ Morality
Especially in a horrendously unjust nation such as ours.
The phrase “Legality ≠ Morality” comes to mind several times a week. Too many people let themselves ignore ethics because they don’t think (or care) about the difference.
deleted by creator
Indie games are better these days anyways. I just use AAA games as performance benchmarks lmao.
I mean, I wouldn’t set the bar that low.
Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
Then why don’t illegal obtained keys just become banned? As long as they don’t, You can’t expect customers to see any problem with them.
They would if they were easily identifiable. IIRC Steam might revoke them if the key is bought with stolen cards and their owners perform a chargeback.
Thing is for copyright law those keys are 100% legal.
EDIT: I explicitly said for copyright law. It’s how users justify that “they are not pirating”, except it’s much worse because game developers need to deal with fees anyway after chargeback.
Obligatory “but does piracy count as lost revenue?”
Piracy probably generates more revenue than it destroys.
Fuck me what an insanely stupid comment.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Should be Nintendo, not EA. Fuck EA and all, but at least they don’t kick up a big fuss when someone aquires games they don’t sell anymore.
Or steal code from the community they’re busy suing…
EA are definitely the bigger problem as far as I’m concerned though.
Oh for sure but for this meme about pirating old games, no one else is worse than nintendo imo
True.
Is it really a victimless crime to go to archive.org and download yourself a copy of the never before released yet still fully completed Thrill Kill for PlayStation? Of course not, you need to think twice about the company that canceled the game and any bonuses the developers were promised, and didn’t even tell them about it, with the developers themselves having to learn about it from IGN.
looking back i’m definitely guilty of pirating some indie games
Indie dev here. Do whatever you want
I used to make small games too for a little bit. Same.
You wouldn’t pirate a car?!
I would if I could!
Speak for yourself
Image Transcription:
A four-panel comic by mygumsarebleeding.
The first panel shows a person with short, black hair, wearing a black shirt with the EA logo on it. They are talking to a person with long, black hair who is wearing a red shirt and facing away, arms folded. The first person is saying “I’m so sorry honey”.
The second panel shows the first person from the first panel speaking to two smaller people, both wearing red and sitting at a table with their heads in their hands and empty plates in front of them. The person is saying “I’m sorry my children…”.
The third panel shows a close-up of the person saying “There will be no food tonight”.
The fourth panel shows an even closer view of the person’s face, lines under his eyes indicating distress as he says “Somebody pirated a game I made in 1995”.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Good human
Thank you, fellow human 🤖
I just spent the night on my first emulator playing F-Zero Gx. I’m so sorry children :(
That should have been the lead racing series for Nintendo.
Mariokart is just an arcade game with a racing theme.
They’re going to go hungry now
More like Nintendo
This is my fault. I haven’t downloaded any premium content for my 1984 Summer Olympics game on my Apple ][c.
(Which for its time, was an amazing game)
Isn’t that one of those games that’s near impossible to find a hard copy of? I might be thinking of another one.
One of the games I grew up playing was Silent Service. For years it disappeared, then one day GOG brought it back from the dead because they secured the rights to publish the hacked pirated copy they had been sitting on since the cold war. Without piracy, the game would have just disappeared.
If it’s EA then “skimmed profits off the top of” is probably more accurate than “made”.
