their zealous protection of their IP is indeed very annoying, I'm almost right there with you. it boggles my mind because they essentially get free advertising from dedicated fans. Sega's embrace of fan works is pretty much the only reason they are still alive. personally, nintendo at least still produce some good games so I'm still happy to see them live.
Hopefully when younger individuals started taking those leadership positions at Nintendo, those overzealous and self-sabotoging copyright policies can be phased out.
It's a shame because Nintendo's games themselves are top-tier for me.
Without even realizing it, you just gave the reason why Nintendo is so hard on emulators. They intend to stop competition from using their own game to make money. Meanwhile the Mother3 translation has been available for decades.
Yuzu was a Switch emulator developement group that was openly monetized and talked about which new N. Switch games they could get to run for their users, who were invited to patronize their work. They gave a tutorial on how to extract and install de-encryption keys, which was a key argument of the lawsuit.
Yuzu gave ''access to pre-released updates'' to patreons, an argument for Nintendo's claim that they were monetizing being able to play new torrented games.
The lawsuit, however, including several dubious or false claims ( ''One million Tear of the Kingdom leaked copies downloaded illegally before the official release!' ( trust me bro no source ).
Blaming Yuzu for this... except Yuzu emulator crashed if you tried to boot Zelda Tear of the Kingom before release. You couldn't play that game on Yuzu at that time.
Financially profiting off unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is a big no-no, and there is actual money sitting on the table for the copyright owner to go and grab. Which Nintendo did.
They got sued by Nintendo and settled for 2.4m along with ceasing development and distribution.
Ryujinx, another emulator which can run over 80% ( but probably 40% - 50% bug-free ) of Switch games, is still going and not getting sued. Compatible on Windows, Mac and Linux. They have a Patreon though, so they might eventually get sued for profiting.
Emulating a console and extracting+using your own keys to play games you have a physical copy of is unambiguously legal. Other uses vary in legality depending on jurisdiction, but profiting off distribution is universally illegal.
Had Yuzu refused to settle and cease, they might have won, as they didn't distribute any game. But their lucrative ''buisness model'' was obviously based on their patreons filesharing copyrighted material, so they might have lost there.
Anyway the Yuzu code was open-source and got forked. But Ryujinx is still doing it best for now as far as I know.
Oh and all of this would apply with USA copyright law. Cue Russian and Chinese national anthem not giving a fuck.
their zealous protection of their IP is indeed very annoying, I'm almost right there with you. it boggles my mind because they essentially get free advertising from dedicated fans. Sega's embrace of fan works is pretty much the only reason they are still alive. personally, nintendo at least still produce some good games so I'm still happy to see them live.
Hopefully when younger individuals started taking those leadership positions at Nintendo, those overzealous and self-sabotoging copyright policies can be phased out.
It's a shame because Nintendo's games themselves are top-tier for me.
The CAD$80 games aren't doing Nintendo favors vs independant competition.
You can also torrent Zelda Breath of the Wild bundeled with a Switch emulator for $0.
Without even realizing it, you just gave the reason why Nintendo is so hard on emulators. They intend to stop competition from using their own game to make money. Meanwhile the Mother3 translation has been available for decades.
Yuzu was a Switch emulator developement group that was openly monetized and talked about which new N. Switch games they could get to run for their users, who were invited to patronize their work. They gave a tutorial on how to extract and install de-encryption keys, which was a key argument of the lawsuit.
Yuzu gave ''access to pre-released updates'' to patreons, an argument for Nintendo's claim that they were monetizing being able to play new torrented games.
The lawsuit, however, including several dubious or false claims ( ''One million Tear of the Kingdom leaked copies downloaded illegally before the official release!' ( trust me bro no source ).
Blaming Yuzu for this... except Yuzu emulator crashed if you tried to boot Zelda Tear of the Kingom before release. You couldn't play that game on Yuzu at that time.
Financially profiting off unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is a big no-no, and there is actual money sitting on the table for the copyright owner to go and grab. Which Nintendo did.
They got sued by Nintendo and settled for 2.4m along with ceasing development and distribution.
Ryujinx, another emulator which can run over 80% ( but probably 40% - 50% bug-free ) of Switch games, is still going and not getting sued. Compatible on Windows, Mac and Linux. They have a Patreon though, so they might eventually get sued for profiting.
Emulating a console and extracting+using your own keys to play games you have a physical copy of is unambiguously legal. Other uses vary in legality depending on jurisdiction, but profiting off distribution is universally illegal.
Had Yuzu refused to settle and cease, they might have won, as they didn't distribute any game. But their lucrative ''buisness model'' was obviously based on their patreons filesharing copyrighted material, so they might have lost there.
Anyway the Yuzu code was open-source and got forked. But Ryujinx is still doing it best for now as far as I know.
Oh and all of this would apply with USA copyright law. Cue Russian and Chinese national anthem not giving a fuck.
BotW is available for purchase on hardware that is still sold. Just buy the game if you want it.
Emulation is for out-of-print and unavailable games.