5 ms·

Its always amazed me that Nintendo hasn't cashed in yet on creating an official emulator for iPhone/Andriod and releasing thier huge collection of old games in

Its always amazed me that Nintendo hasn't cashed in yet on creating an official emulator for iPhone/Andriod and releasing thier huge collection of old games in an official marketplace for people to download.... there is no doubt how popular that would be. Everyone would be playing pokemon again.

prawks 13y ago
It would mean more or less an exit to Nintendo's hardware business. Plus, they're sitting on piles of money, so they're not exactly in a hurry.
djent 13y ago
There would probably be legal issues with people who had already bought the games in their original cartridge form who don't feel they should have to pay for the game again. It would also stop at Gameboy Advance games, because it becomes increasingly hard to fit two screens worth of content onto an iPhone screen with the necessary buttons and directional pad.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  The first one isn't a problem for ninty: you aren't perpetually entitled to new releases because you bought one copy on one medium. You don't get a DVD because you blight Snow White on VHS, and you really don't have standing to torrent it either.
  - djent 13y ago
    Most people are of the opinion that they have a right to make a copy for backup purposes - a copy that they could then transfer to an emulator, although I have no citations at the ready to verify the legality of this. If Nintendo were to release many games at once, bundled with the app, I'd agree with you, but if they were to let you download them individually through an in-app purchase, I'd tend towards the latter.
MBCook 13y ago
Ignoring the obvious legal issues of 3rd party games, Nintendo seems to strongly believe that it's back catalog is worth quite a bit of money and seems to steadfastly against doing anything that may devalue it. They seem to prefer to sell 5k copies of an old game at $5-10 each than 200k copies at $2 on a platform they don't control. It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.
- GuiA 13y ago
  >It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms. This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms. So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)
  - deelowe 13y ago
    I guess you haven't heard about what happened to bitgamer have you? So far, a suitable replacement hasn't surfaced and it's going to take many years to build up a library again, if it happens at all. Don't kid yourself, they are winning. It's getting harder and harder to find good clean hosts for roms.
frozenport 13y ago
I also have trouble understanding this, perhaps they fear market cannibalism? For example old Pokemon taking money from new Pokemon?
- glhaynes 13y ago
  Most likely they're afraid of old Pokemon keeping people from buying new Pokemon on a new 3DS, a new 3DS that would have led to other 3DS game sales.

prawks 13y ago

It would mean more or less an exit to Nintendo's hardware business. Plus, they're sitting on piles of money, so they're not exactly in a hurry.

djent 13y ago

There would probably be legal issues with people who had already bought the games in their original cartridge form who don't feel they should have to pay for the game again. It would also stop at Gameboy Advance games, because it becomes increasingly hard to fit two screens worth of content onto an iPhone screen with the necessary buttons and directional pad.

alanctgardner2 13y ago
The first one isn't a problem for ninty: you aren't perpetually entitled to new releases because you bought one copy on one medium. You don't get a DVD because you blight Snow White on VHS, and you really don't have standing to torrent it either.
- djent 13y ago
  Most people are of the opinion that they have a right to make a copy for backup purposes - a copy that they could then transfer to an emulator, although I have no citations at the ready to verify the legality of this. If Nintendo were to release many games at once, bundled with the app, I'd agree with you, but if they were to let you download them individually through an in-app purchase, I'd tend towards the latter.

MBCook 13y ago

Ignoring the obvious legal issues of 3rd party games, Nintendo seems to strongly believe that it's back catalog is worth quite a bit of money and seems to steadfastly against doing anything that may devalue it. They seem to prefer to sell 5k copies of an old game at $5-10 each than 200k copies at $2 on a platform they don't control. It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.

GuiA 13y ago
>It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms. This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms. So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)
- deelowe 13y ago
  I guess you haven't heard about what happened to bitgamer have you? So far, a suitable replacement hasn't surfaced and it's going to take many years to build up a library again, if it happens at all. Don't kid yourself, they are winning. It's getting harder and harder to find good clean hosts for roms.

frozenport 13y ago

I also have trouble understanding this, perhaps they fear market cannibalism? For example old Pokemon taking money from new Pokemon?

glhaynes 13y ago
Most likely they're afraid of old Pokemon keeping people from buying new Pokemon on a new 3DS, a new 3DS that would have led to other 3DS game sales.