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 😭
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Yeah, EA has done more to hurt game devs than pirates have. “Salary means we don’t have to pay overtime!”
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!”
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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.
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“You wouldn’t download a car, would you?” … yes. Yes. I WOULD. Not that we can 3d print cars just yet. but I would in a heart beat if I could.
I don’t trust a 3d printed gun, why would I trust a 3d printed car? But if I could make a car myself, I definitely would, even if I had to pirate the designs.
3d printed firearms have transformed into a whole cottage industry with all sorts of variations. The ones that are safest are essentially just stocks capable of holding the parts of a firearm. The ones that are completely 3d printed are still pretty sketchy and illegal to sell
Any firearm that you, a private citizen, manufacture, is illegal to sell.
You are not a licensed firearm distributor.
But, at least in most of the US, it is perfectly legal to manufacture them for your own use. You just can’t sell them.
You can sell homemade firearms you made for personal use and later decided to get rid of.
You cannot manufacture them for the purpose of sale, however.
That sounds like a pretty massive loophole…
Why? What’s wrong with selling a gun you have made at home? It’s still subject to applicable law on private party transfers just like any other firearm.
IIRC, it depends on state law too. Some states permit local sales, feds would stomp on you if you sold to a non-resident.
Probably best to avoid the selling part altogether. Ruby Ridge and all that.
that’s true. I should have specified that a lot of the purchasable (fully and unquestionably in the right) stuff just sell CAD files for 3d printed parts, or print the parts for you. The more questionable ones sell ghost gun kits
It is illegal for them to print the guns for you (unless they have their FFL; and Manufacturers license; and they NICs check you, and engrave a serial number, company name, and location of manufacture in accordance with ATF rules.) And the “ghost gun kits” are 80% complete lowers, which you have to mill the remaining bits yourself or else it is subject to all the above rules as well.
They can sell the .stl files though, or freely offer them.
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The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.
For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs
The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts
The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.
3d printing has come a long way, both in materials and quality. especially as you step away from FDM or resin printers. I certainly wouldn’t trust a rando facebook marketplace printer who bought a creality to make a quick buck… but I would trust my own prints- mostly because I know what the materials are, and know I’ll check for good print quality. reality is, though, that about the most you can print right now is a half baked golf cart chasis. if you want it to be safe… you’re going to have to add a lot to it, and at that point, you might as well just buy a damn car or something.
Most dashboards in cars are already 3d printed.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
Movies studios now trying to download actors.
Unions stepping up to the at for us all.
“Trying”?
They’re working round the clock to develop CGI “actors”.
Gonna be interesting when actors start being replaced.
Open source cars, let’s go!
Marcin Jakubowski is already doing this with Farming Equipment!
but I would in a heart beat if I could
with your 3-D printed heart
Hey, don’t knock it. My head lays down a sick dun step, some reggae and this weird steel drum Tropicana thing I’m pretty sure they ripped off some 90’s on hold music cover
Borderlands lets you download a car, that’s the second best way of getting a car in the game
If I had a dollar for every car I downloaded for GTA4…
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.
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.
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.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 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.
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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.
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.
Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
Obligatory “but does piracy count as lost revenue?”
Piracy probably generates more revenue than it destroys.
Fuck me what an insanely stupid comment.
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You wouldn’t pirate a car?!
I would if I could!
Speak for yourself
looking back i’m definitely guilty of pirating some indie games
Indie dev here. Do whatever you want
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.
I just downloaded exodos and bankrupted thousands of people
If it’s EA then “skimmed profits off the top of” is probably more accurate than “made”.
I just spent the night on my first emulator playing F-Zero Gx. I’m so sorry children :(
They’re going to go hungry now
More like Nintendo
