3 ms·

Well, I've misplaced my receipt for The Legend of Zelda that I bought 30 years ago. Ideally they'd have had an infrastructure in 1986 to manage my ownership of

by gdulli 10y ago

Well, I've misplaced my receipt for The Legend of Zelda that I bought 30 years ago. Ideally they'd have had an infrastructure in 1986 to manage my ownership of the product in perpetuity across media and distribution channels. But they didn't, so I can either hold on to my feeling of entitlement that Nintendo owes me the virtual console version for free or I can pay $5 to play it on there.

jnky 10y ago
Or you can download an emulator and a rar with all 721 SNES games for free.
- gdulli 10y ago
  I could also sneak into movie theaters to see all my movies for free. It's not stealing, right? I haven't deprived them of a physical product? There's no marginal cost to them to show the movie to one extra person, right? They lose no revenue because I wasn't going to pay to see the movie anyway, right? And movies are terrible right now, aren't they? Everything's a sequel or reboot, there are no more original ideas, right? And the way they show ads before movies now, they have no right to do that after I've already paid for a ticket, do they? And people are always talking in theaters and they never do anything about it, right? And they turn up the air conditioning too high... I'd really have to be a sucker to pay for movie tickets given all those reasons not to, right? I think I'll still do it, though.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    If you want to pirate movies that are 20+ years old I'm not going to judge you for it. It's not that I disrespect copyright as a whole, it's that I think the length has gotten way too long. And piracy is not the same thing is downloading something you already have a license to.
  - Raknarg 10y ago
    idk dude. It's the same argument as pirating Game of Thrones. Most people when offered a convenient and safer channel would probably just pay for Game of Thrones, but many have no simple recourse other than paying out the ass for cable. e.g. I live in Canada. Pretty sure HBO Go doesn't support Canada, and I'm sure as hell not wasting my money on cable TV just to see Game of Thrones. I'd rather pirate it. But if I can watch something on Netflix, obviously I'd rather just do that and pay for the service.
mattdotc 10y ago
I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space. Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions. So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles. To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is. All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.

by gdulli 10y ago

jnky 10y ago

Or you can download an emulator and a rar with all 721 SNES games for free.

gdulli 10y ago
I could also sneak into movie theaters to see all my movies for free. It's not stealing, right? I haven't deprived them of a physical product? There's no marginal cost to them to show the movie to one extra person, right? They lose no revenue because I wasn't going to pay to see the movie anyway, right? And movies are terrible right now, aren't they? Everything's a sequel or reboot, there are no more original ideas, right? And the way they show ads before movies now, they have no right to do that after I've already paid for a ticket, do they? And people are always talking in theaters and they never do anything about it, right? And they turn up the air conditioning too high... I'd really have to be a sucker to pay for movie tickets given all those reasons not to, right? I think I'll still do it, though.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  If you want to pirate movies that are 20+ years old I'm not going to judge you for it. It's not that I disrespect copyright as a whole, it's that I think the length has gotten way too long. And piracy is not the same thing is downloading something you already have a license to.
- Raknarg 10y ago
  idk dude. It's the same argument as pirating Game of Thrones. Most people when offered a convenient and safer channel would probably just pay for Game of Thrones, but many have no simple recourse other than paying out the ass for cable. e.g. I live in Canada. Pretty sure HBO Go doesn't support Canada, and I'm sure as hell not wasting my money on cable TV just to see Game of Thrones. I'd rather pirate it. But if I can watch something on Netflix, obviously I'd rather just do that and pay for the service.

mattdotc 10y ago

I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space. Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions. So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles. To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is. All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.