22 ms·
every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past, 100 people discover emulation. the barrier to entry
by konfusinomicon 5y ago
every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past, 100 people discover emulation. the barrier to entry as far as technological know how to procure and operate said emulators has gotten easier and easier as the years go by. they in turn tell more people, who keep the news flowing to more and more and more. the losses by nintendo, and the publishers of games added up over all that time must be astronomical. imagine the emulation capabilities of launchbox combined with a library of roms the size that most the target demographic could pirate online with a negligable amount of effort, on a non jailbroken ps5 or xbox or switch. these companies are missing out on so much cash flow from what are essentially dead revenue streams. and customer satisfaction would be through the damn roof..
- lostgame 5y ago>> every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past Due to licensing, this isn’t possible. So there‘a going to be an infinite amount more days like this.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y agoEven just supporting first-party titles would go a long way. In the particular case of Nintendo, many, if not most, of the most universally acclaimed classics are first-party games.
- mattl 5y agoWhat first party NES and SNES games are you missing from NSO?
- mathgeek 5y agoThe games in question are for handheld systems (Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, specifically).
- mattl 5y agoSeems like the sentiment is that Nintendo should have all their first party titles available.
- initplus 5y agoWhy would any sane consumer purchase those games when Nintendo has no track record of honoring purchases? Nintendo aggressively cuts off access to consumers past purchases in the hopes that they buy the same retro games again on the new system. Not just by not sharing retro game purchases between systems, but also not even letting consumers still download their purchases on older systems. It's like buying a book that's set to self-destruct a decade from now - no sane consumer would buy such a product.
- mattl 5y agoI bought a couple of Virtual Console games on the Wii. Those same games were transferred to my Wii U system with an SD card. The same games are now included on the Nintendo Switch Online service and many others too.
- maybeOneDay 5y agoWhich is to say: you had to wait for years for them to come out on Switch, and then pay again. Forever.
- mattl 5y agoNo, I’m pretty sure they were available very early after I bought the Switch console. Maybe within a year? Late 2006 I bought the Wii and then the Wii U in 2014 and now I pay the family plan at maybe $70 a year? Doesn’t seem different to buying songs on iTunes in 2006 and now paying for Apple Music every month now.
- maybeOneDay 5y agoIt was 18 months between launch of the Switch and of NSO, so we can split the difference :) I disagree. You should as far as I'm aware be able to still use those songs
- mattl 5y ago
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoOkay, sure, there are plenty of great old games that Nintendo doesn't own, but there are also many properties that Nintendo has complete ownership of and can easily make more available. They can definitely lower the wall on those.
- bduerst 5y agoIsn't this what Nintendo is already doing with hundreds of games? https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/the-classic-game-library-reaches-100-games-for-nintendo-switch-online-members/ https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/the-classic-ga...
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoSure. But you can't buy them. You can only get them if you sign up for their monthly service, "Nintendo Switch Online." And you can't have all of them. You can only get the N64 games if you sign up for the separately monthly. "Expansion Pack" service. And you can't play them on multiple profiles. Your son can only play Mario 64 on his profile if you sign up for the "Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack + Family Pack" subscription, which is about $80 per year. It's so expensive because they bundled it with a bunch of other stuff (hooray now I can also play Switch games online and I have access to the latest patch for Animal Crossing and some extra tracks for Mario Kart). But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.
- bduerst 5y agoPricing is a different complaint from hoarding copyrighted classics though. Sure, Nintendo isn't pricing their franchises at the price point you want, but in context to the discussion they're at least re-releasing what they can and making them accessible. (And if it was really about letting your son play Super Mario World, you can pay $8 and he can play it for three months)
- deadbeeves 5y ago
- konfusinomicon 5y agoan unfortunate reality indeed. and the worst part is, that the ones who hold the license are the ones really missing out. And us peons are banished back to launchbox land, to so many games that even just the act of nostalgically scrolling through them is enough entertainment for an evening
- matheusmoreira 5y agoThey can't do it. Most of the games in their console libraries aren't theirs, they belong to third parties. They can't even offer it for purchase. I've been wanting to buy the older Ace Combat games on PlayStation for years but they never come due to idiotic licensing issues nobody cares about. Copyright industry will always defeat itself. Anything short of everything humanity ever created in one place fails to compete with copyright infringement.
- sb057 5y agoAce Combat doesn't have any licensing issues. They rereleased AC5 and AC6 as preorder bonuses for AC7 just a couple of years ago. The stated reason the series producer has for not rereleasing them is that they wouldn't want to sell the games as-is, and they don't have enough resources to remaster them.
- postingposts 5y agoHey you know, it’s a good thing! This helps you not be attached to the past, and let’s be honest here… people make things for money, not love or art. Otherwise they wouldn’t copyright it.
- tsol 5y agoI'd argue people make things for money AND love. It's just the money you need to survive, and the love is just nice and fulfilling-- so you can guess what people end up hyperfocusing on
- postingposts 5y agoUh, it’s not love if you’re doing it for money. It’s work. You might enjoy the feeling of getting paid but that’s not love.
- colejohnson66 5y agoIt’s possible to enjoy doing something, and realizing you can make money on it after
- giraffe_lady 5y agoThe only platform I'd be interested in emulating old consoles on is my smartphone. Where it is also not available, for similarly artificial and annoying reasons. Yes yes I know the workarounds I'm not willing to switch phone OS or substantially modify my current one though.
- konfusinomicon 5y agothe controls on smartphone emulation just isn't the same but that may be because I don't really play games on my smartphone
- nomel 5y agoThere are bluetooth controllers, although they all seem to have latency problems.
- easrng 5y agoWhat OS does your phone run and what emulators do you want?
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoAdd to this a bunch of very cheap (even ~35eur) hardware devices with a bunch of emulators and games already preinstalled, and available on sites like aliexpress and even amazon.
- ranger_danger 5y agoThe percentage of their customer base that regularly uses emulation is so insignificant you should be happy they offer it at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoYou're looking at nintendo customers and not old game players... What percentage of eg Super Mario bros players, play the game on original hardware and how many emulate it? Or legend of zelda, link to the past? Wario land? If you want to play these old games, emulation is currently the best and cheapest option for most people.
- ranger_danger 5y agoThe only losses Nintendo makes wrt emulation is doing it at all in the first place... it does not make them money and only appeases the "smallest minority of noisy internet nerds" according to this former employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436
- jimjimjimjim 5y agoI was sick of this so I made an online emulation platform https://afterplay.io https://afterplay.io. It's the easiest way to play your retro games.
- ricardolopes 5y agoThis looks amazing! But if it's streaming copyrighted material, how will it survive legal action?
- jimjimjimjim 5y agoThank you :) Users have to upload their own games. You can only play games that you upload. It's like backing up your music to google drive and not sharing it with anyone :)