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Seems to me those 3rd parties would want access to that cash flow, even if Nintendo took a percentage for making them available on the latest system. The app st

Seems to me those 3rd parties would want access to that cash flow, even if Nintendo took a percentage for making them available on the latest system. The app store model.

larkost 5y ago
It may well be that either the third parties who created the game are no longer around (making their intellectual property difficult/impossible to license), or that they in turn had licenses for various assets (images/sounds. etc...) or other technologies to parties that are not longer around, and under licensing restrictions that never envisioned this sort of use. Sometimes tracking all of this down to even know what the pieces legal provence is would be more trouble than it would be worth.
- chimeracoder 5y ago
  This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms. Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ThatPlayer 5y ago
But what advantage is there for them to partner with Nintendo for it versus shipping the game with their own emulator (or a FOSS one) in a standalone package. Capcom has done this with their Mega Man X collection for example.
- colordrops 5y ago
  The same advantage as putting your app on Google Play instead of just an APK download link on your website.
  - ThatPlayer 5y ago
    If it's on the Switch, it's on the Nintendo eShop is my point. It's not just the developer's own website, it's the "Google Play" of Switch. So what would a second, smaller, pricier 'emulator store' offer over that?
    - philistine 5y ago
      Nintendo's old game catalogue strategy devolved into the Netflix model: subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online and you get an app with some old games in it. You don't pay per game.
derefr 5y ago
The trouble is that the third-parties have all sorts of aspirations to make a lot more money by 1. doing half-effort "remasters" of their works into some kind of "Collection", that 2. they can then charge full "new small game" price (~$15) for. The fact that these third-party publishers are doing this despite adding basically no value (and often stripping away value, by e.g. not supporting rewind / save-states in their own emulation) is bad enough. But often they don't even actually do this; they just vaguely think about doing this, and the imagined potential upside of the option of doing this, keeps them from going with Nintendo's option.

Seems to me those 3rd parties would want access to that cash flow, even if Nintendo took a percentage for making them available on the latest system. The app store model.

larkost 5y ago

It may well be that either the third parties who created the game are no longer around (making their intellectual property difficult/impossible to license), or that they in turn had licenses for various assets (images/sounds. etc...) or other technologies to parties that are not longer around, and under licensing restrictions that never envisioned this sort of use. Sometimes tracking all of this down to even know what the pieces legal provence is would be more trouble than it would be worth.

chimeracoder 5y ago
This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms. Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.
jimmaswell 5y ago
If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 10000truths 5y ago
  Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
- stormbrew 5y ago
  It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ThatPlayer 5y ago

But what advantage is there for them to partner with Nintendo for it versus shipping the game with their own emulator (or a FOSS one) in a standalone package. Capcom has done this with their Mega Man X collection for example.

colordrops 5y ago
The same advantage as putting your app on Google Play instead of just an APK download link on your website.
- ThatPlayer 5y ago
  If it's on the Switch, it's on the Nintendo eShop is my point. It's not just the developer's own website, it's the "Google Play" of Switch. So what would a second, smaller, pricier 'emulator store' offer over that?
  - philistine 5y ago
    Nintendo's old game catalogue strategy devolved into the Netflix model: subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online and you get an app with some old games in it. You don't pay per game.

derefr 5y ago

The trouble is that the third-parties have all sorts of aspirations to make a lot more money by 1. doing half-effort "remasters" of their works into some kind of "Collection", that 2. they can then charge full "new small game" price (~$15) for. The fact that these third-party publishers are doing this despite adding basically no value (and often stripping away value, by e.g. not supporting rewind / save-states in their own emulation) is bad enough. But often they don't even actually do this; they just vaguely think about doing this, and the imagined potential upside of the option of doing this, keeps them from going with Nintendo's option.