Nintendo's ridiculous war on ROMs threatens gaming history- PC World

Alej · Aug 12, 2018

Stop with the preservation bullshits. It is not preservation, it's piracy. Those sites use pirated products in order to make money (ads), not to preserve anything.

Collectors don't distribute their ROMs and make money with them, that's not legal nor ethical.

People worked to make them.

And what do you do with emulation of modern platforms ? Ah ok, you just possess all the game you copy/try on those fancy emulators... That's LEGAL ! My ass, hypocrisy at his finest here.

PrimeBeef · Aug 12, 2018

Halation Ablation said:
Go unpack your gamecube.

In 2018.

lmao ok buddy.

Hey, I have once this year. To play some F-Zero. Currently I have my PS1 and Wii hooked up.

Deleted member 1413 · Aug 12, 2018

Nzyme32 said:
This isn't true at all.
Many of their own games, they do preserve only through purchasing the product yet again for a new hardware specific platform.
The vast majority of games that Nintnedo did not make but were on other Nintendo systems, have never been preserved in any way at all - essentially the "abandonware" you talk about

That's what I mean by "their" games.
Also selling their games is still preserving them, preservation doesn't mean it needs to be free.

And yeah, games Nintendo doesnt own and that the companies don't care about likely fall under abandonware at times.

DeuceGamer · Aug 12, 2018

SG-17 said:
While abandonware isn't a legal term there are still hundreds and hundreds of games whose rights have been lost in a tangle of closures and sales, to whom which the source code is long lost, to which there isn't a market for rereleases because frankly they are bad games (but that doesn't preclude the need to preserve them).

Look at how many pre-1940 films have been lost forever. I don't ever want that to happen to games.

I'm not sure many people on here are arguing against preservation. I know I'm not as i'm all for preservation. I'm just not convinced we need commercial websites hosting millions of ROMS so millions of people can freely download them whenever they like.

This isn't going to stop game preservation. It will continue even if there aren't huge sites hosting millions of ROMS available for everyone to download for free.

Deleted member 6573 · Aug 12, 2018

BlueManifest · Aug 12, 2018

TyrantGuardian said:
Yep, I completely agree with you there. As I've said before ITT, I don't think the loss of these sites matters at all aside from kids perhaps being less exposed to the history of video games? I mean you could make the case that journalists and communities can pick up the slack there but there's also no replacing learning by actually playing the games. A 12 year old kid who barely knows English and has no money for games sure as heck can't access those hubs, but they sure knew how to click their way through emuparadise. Whether or not you think it's morally right for those kids to have easy and free access to these games to cultivate their interests in the history of this medium, the fact is that there will likely be a drop-off in terms of that because of these sites disappearing. For anyone else, yeah – I feel like these sites were pretty much pointless.

How did you hear about Terranigma in the first place?

Again, I don't care. Corporations have no rights and whatever property they own is based on stealing money from their workers in order to profit the shareholders and the CEOs. Now, I do care to the extent that I personally follow (and am trying to change) the law – but I am making a philosophical standpoint here.

I looked up the company Enix to see what games they made to see if there were any I had never played, saw terranigma then looked for a used one to buy

Tetra-Grammaton-Cleric · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
The point is hosting them now vs when they're defunct.
Just because Disney will (?) go bankrupt eventually doesn't mean pirating and distributing Infinity War now is ok or necessary.

Infinity Wars was released a few months ago.

Most of these game are more than 20-30 years old and many of them haven't seen a legitimate retail re-release in decades.

I agree that ROM sites should endeavor to avoid hosting anything that is readily available for sale by the IP owner but in reality, much of what Nintendo has made and released over the decades isn't available to consumers.

If it was, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Fiel · Aug 12, 2018

What if the rom site just remove Nintendo game only and put the rest online because no other company waste time to sue anyway.

fourfourfun · Aug 12, 2018

Burai said:
To paraphrase a tweet from last week.

Me: "I want to play Super Mario Sunshine but my GameCube is packed away. I'll just download this ISO and play it on my PC."

Nintendo: "No. ROM sites are costing us millions of dollars in lost revenue."

Me: "Fine, I'll pay for it on the eShop and play it on my Switch instead."

Nintendo: "Also no."

Nintendo: "unpack your GameCube"

MattWilsonCSS · Aug 12, 2018

Velocity:Design:Comfort said:
All this argument is is that really says that right holders should not decide the fate of the rights they hold, but tries to shame people who think that is true. It is an ethical and legal principle to do with owning what one created.

Copyright law is ethically corrupt and has been since 1976.

Toxi · Aug 12, 2018

If your response to criticism of Nintendo not making many of their old games commercially available is "but they make a few other games commercially available!", your priority is not actually addressing that concern so much as finding some way to defend Nintendo. Which is not a good look.

TyrantGuardian · Aug 12, 2018

Alej said:
Stop with the preservation bullshits. It is not preservation, it's piracy. Those sites use pirated products in order to make money (ads), not to preserve anything.

Collectors don't distribute their ROMs and make money with them, that's not legal nor ethical.

People worked to make them.

And what do you do with emulation of modern platforms ? Ah ok, you just possess all the game you copy/try on those fancy emulators... That's LEGAL ! My ass, hypocrisy at his finest here.

Excuse me? I literally play all of my PS2 games that I physically own by popping them right into my PC and emulating them. That is indeed 100% legal, so what the fuck are you on about?

BlueManifest said:
I looked up the company Enix to see what games they made to see if there were any I had never played, saw terranigma then looked for a used one to buy

Fair enough. Most other people discover games by having them recommended by others who have played them. The more people who have played a game, via piracy or legitimate means, the higher the chance of someone hearing about that game and it not being forgotten to the sands of time. Corporations will only bother to re-release games they assume will be worth spending time and money re-releasing. Does that mean games they don't bother with are useless to society in the future? Of course not, that's preposterous. Terranigma might as well have been one of those games. There are thousands of SNES games that you've never heard of that sure as hell won't be re-released.

What if it turns out 100+ years from now that one of those games slipped under the radar and is the most important game ever released in terms of some metrics and thus incredibly important to experience and learn from to have a full understanding of this medium? Well, without the unconditional preservation of ROMs, you and everyone else in society would be shit out of luck and you'd have to rely on second/third-hand impressions from people who were lucky enough to play it or best case scenario on video recordings of that game being played. Hardly a replacement for the actual experience of playing a game, I'm sure you'll agree.

That is the point of preservation, no matter how outlandish or theoretical this sounds to you. It doesn't matter – there's no downside to keeping these games around just in case.

Deleted member 274 · Aug 12, 2018

Alej said:
Collectors don't distribute their ROMs and make money with them, that's not legal nor ethical.

Lol funny you say that, Collectors may not but Nintendo has certainly distributed ROMS and made money with them in the past

Anoxida · Aug 12, 2018

Why people defend a billion dollar company on something like this will always be outside my comprehension. Nintendo dont and will never give a shit about you they're not your friend. If they can't provide a legal alternative then fuck ém.

Deleted member 249 · Aug 12, 2018

Fiel said:
What if the rom site just remove Nintendo game only and put the rest online because no other company waste time to sue anyway.

The problem is, Nintendo sets a legal precedent. No company has to proceed with an actual lawsuit in most of these cases, simply the threat is enough. A lot of these ROM sites are just ru by hobbyists.

Worldshaker · Aug 12, 2018

Nintendo needs to bring back the VC in a meaningful way if this is the road they want to travel own.

The balls in their court.

Anoxida said:
Why people defend a billion dollar company on something like this will always be outside my comprehension. Nintendo dont and will never give a shit about you they're not your friend. If they can't provide a legal alternative then fuck ém.

This is how I feel.

Nacho · Aug 12, 2018

Velocity:Design:Comfort said:
Don't talk down to people you don't know, for one.

For two, I have been involved in literally preserving arcade machines and have invested a ton into understanding and exploring retro gaming for a long time. It is irrelevant - you are still just justifying getting the data copies for free. Nintendo does sell many of their SNES and NES games to this day, the switch is not their only device they sell.

Lol what are you talking about... Im responding to something you said specifically, not to you as a person. It doesn't really matter what you've done personally when your perspective of preservation is that as long as it exists somewhere physically then that's fine. (At least that's what I get from you).

In this day and age that's insane. It's like saying out of print books can't be scanned for preservation. Or if book publishers regularly just lost books, that it would still eb improper for people who care about their preservation to take up the mantle and scan them.

It's not a 1:1 analogy, as the video game industry is pretty unique. Maybe a better anology would be like harmys special editions, that's very clearly pirating by the strictest standards but it's necessary due to how Lucas fucked up preservation.

Windrunner · Aug 12, 2018

Sebastopa said:
I've said this once and will say it again.
If these emulation websites actually want to make a case for "Software preservation" then stop including games that Nintendo is actively trying to sell in the current day. You ain't doing a service to the yourself at all by including "Super Mario World" or "The Legend of Zelda". You're basically competing with the company using their own software against them.

As for the Emulator apologists in this very thread:

1. The 3DS and Wii U VC are still active services.
2. The NES and SNES classics are still popular products that include a sizeable amount of games.
3. In literally 1 month, the Switch itself will begin to release classic titles to increase the appeal of their online service.

Nintendo is very clearly pushing their classic titles in the modern landscape.

I bought many games on the Wii and 3DS VCs (Wii U VC was useless) and I own both the NES and SNES Classics. I have a SNES collection (no loose carts, all boxed and complete) that could fetch over $1000 but I also have complete ROM set and a SD2SNES.

Calling people "emulator apologists" is inflammatory and unhelpful.

CthulhuSars · Aug 12, 2018

SG-17 said:
While abandonware isn't a legal term there are still hundreds and hundreds of games whose rights have been lost in a tangle of closures and sales, to whom which the source code is long lost, to which there isn't a market for rereleases because frankly they are bad games (but that doesn't preclude the need to preserve them).

Look at how many pre-1940 films have been lost forever. I don't ever want that to happen to games.

The sad part about this situation is that we have the ability to go and save these games. It might not be easy and it definitely will take space but it is there. Those films are gone forever and saving them via preservation even if they existed would cost multiple times more what it would cost to preserve what is floating around in gaming.

Deleted member 1413 · Aug 12, 2018

Pikma said:
Lol funny you say that, Collectors may not but Nintendo has certainly distributed ROMS and made money with them in the past

Selling their own games is unethical?

Deleted member 20471 · Aug 12, 2018

Pirating roms is morally right, idgaf if a megacorp loses revenues on a 20 years old game.

Instro · Aug 12, 2018

SG-17 said:
While abandonware isn't a legal term there are still hundreds and hundreds of games whose rights have been lost in a tangle of closures and sales, to whom which the source code is long lost, to which there isn't a market for rereleases because frankly they are bad games (but that doesn't preclude the need to preserve them).

Look at how many pre-1940 films have been lost forever. I don't ever want that to happen to games.

Pretty much. This isn't even about popular shit that gets re-released all the time, or is pretty readily available. There are hundreds/thousands of games that will never see a re-releases across many platforms due to closures, rights issues, lack of interest, etc. That doesn't even get into stuff that was never released, and other historical artifacts.

Nintendo's extreme measures on this subject are heavily impacting well beyond their own software. Emuparadise had removed most/all Nintendo software some time ago, and were still spooked enough to get rid of everything. On the plus side they appear to be keeping the actual game listings, at least for now, which is somewhat useful.

Damien · Aug 12, 2018

That's maybe the first time I don't agree with one of your posts Phantom thief. I think it's important to distinguish "preservation" from making money with ads or sales by use of these roms.

Deleted member 31873 · Aug 12, 2018

I was going to buy a Switch this month. I don't think I will now. I'm not supporting a company that does this.

Sebastopa · Aug 12, 2018

Aquamarine said:
"Emulator apologists"...wat?

You do realize that Nintendo won't be around forever, right? Some day they will die, and when they do emulators will be the only thing that allow gaming history to live on. They are fundamentally necessary to preserve our history. Why are you so beholden to the whims of corporations that you can't recognize that art is a public good, not a corporate asset that can be destroyed at will?

And? I'm talking about in present terms. I don't know If I'll even be alive in the next 5 years so I don't care what corporation do with their IPs. But to try to make what if? Scenarios as excuses to justify piracy in present terms is straight up arguing in bad faith. What I'm saying is: Nintendo is promoting their classic games right now, so these sites are actively competing against the company for their profit, which has every right to shut them down, even if other games also get burned in the process.

Walnut · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
That's what I mean by "their" games.
Also selling their games is still preserving them, preservation doesn't mean it needs to be free.

And yeah, games Nintendo doesnt own and that the companies don't care about likely fall under abandonware at times.

Preservation doesn't mean it needs to be free, preservation just means it needs to be playable in some analog to its original format

I would argue the collection of games on the SNES Classic make that cut at a bare minimum, but the games on the NES Classic do not because of jarring emulation issues. Preservation entails more than "can you reach the ending" for a game, that's where I'm coming from

Deleted member 1120 · Aug 12, 2018

Aquamarine said:
I don't think they're the correct avenue for casual access to these games for a variety of reasons. For example:

1) Many ROM sites contain malware in their downloads and infect unsuspecting computers with viruses
2) Many ROM sites host aggressive ads that hijack computers
3) Many ROM sites limit access behind subscriptions or an extensive amount of ads / sponsored links that benefit no one but the administrators who get rich off of copyrighted content
4) Public ROM sites do limit the revenue for popular retro games still on sale like Super Mario Bros 3...millions of people will download it instead of paying for it on the eShop...and shutting down easy, casual access to piracy will boost revenue

I'm not going to vouch for their existence when they're pretty rotten by their nature. In general I think it's not the end of the world if it becomes more difficult for people to casually pirate games. If people really want to pirate they can always make it happen with some thought and research.

And in the future I want all retro games to be easily playable at your local public library...the goal is to register them through legal sources and go from there.

That was a very well thought out and reasonable response. I agree with pretty much everything you just said.

Brerlappin · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
Nintendo preserves their games more than most companies.
Rom sites are piracy so it's a bit weird to see people going all out defending it.

Hopefully in a few years sites take the hint and just focus on abandonware and leave commercially available games out of their listings

Nintendo got a site shut down that hosted ROMS for everything from Atari 2600 to defunct Arcade games to 3DO to Atari Jaguar and all points inbetween. So yeah, its not surprising to see people pissed off that Nintendo just fucked us out of one of the only ways to access these games that are for all intents and purposes abandonware and impossible to find via legal methods, or, methods that would actually reimburse the license holders. Fuck Nintendo.

Pancracio17 · Aug 12, 2018

I wish more gaming companies followed MS with BC. Its not perfect but its much better than anything Nintendo is doing currently.

Also:
https://www.amazon.com/Snatcher-Sega-Cd/dp/B000PQ2FE8

Deleted member 249 · Aug 12, 2018

Pancracio17 said:
I wish more gaming companies followed MS with BC. Its not perfect but its much better than anything Nintendo is doing currently.

Also:
https://www.amazon.com/Snatcher-Sega-Cd/dp/B000PQ2FE8

Jesus wept

ClickyCal' · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
Forgot the VC retroactive doesn't exist and Nintendo has never rereleased their back catalog.
My mistake.

I mean the 3ds never even got gba VC, so if you don't have a wii u, you can't play zero mission/fusion, golden sun, sacred stones, minish cap, etc.

Deleted member 1413 · Aug 12, 2018

Brerlappin said:
Nintendo got a site shut down that hosted ROMS for everything from Atari 2600 to defunct Arcade games to 3DO to Atari Jaguar and all points inbetween. So yeah, its not surprising to see people pissed off that Nintendo just fucked us out of one of the only ways to access these games that are for all intents and purposes abandonware and impossible to find via legal methods, or, methods that would actually reimburse the license holders. Fuck Nintendo.

That's not the only site that hosts those games.
Just because a site hosts games some may consider andonware/ok to download does not excuse distributing currently sold games

angelgrievous · Aug 12, 2018

Pancracio17 said:
I wish more gaming companies followed MS with BC. Its not perfect but its much better than anything Nintendo is doing currently.

Also:
https://www.amazon.com/Snatcher-Sega-Cd/dp/B000PQ2FE8

good god that's an expensive game. I've never played it but would love to some day.

BlueManifest · Aug 12, 2018

Wonder if this will increase the value of nes and snes games

Tetra-Grammaton-Cleric · Aug 12, 2018

Sebastopa said:
And? I'm talking about in present terms. I don't know If I'll even be alive in the next 5 years so I don't care what corporation do with their IPs. But to try to make what if? Scenarios as excuses to justify piracy in present terms is straight up arguing in bad faith. What I'm saying is: Nintendo is promoting their classic games right now, so these sites are actively competing against the company for their profit, which has every right to shut them down, even if other games also get burned in the process.

We'll see how many of these classic games actually show up on their much-vaunted new service because if history is any indicator, it'll be a trickle of games with much of their backlog forever ignored and unreleased.

I hope I'm wrong.

Deleted member 1413 · Aug 12, 2018

yuoke said:
I mean the 3ds never even got gba VC, so if you don't have a wii u, you can't play zero mission/fusion, golden sun, sacred stones, minish cap, etc.

They are still selling those, likely blocked on 3DS via technical limitations.

Sebastopa · Aug 12, 2018

Windrunner said:
I bought many games on the Wii and 3DS VCs (Wii U VC was useless) and I own both the NES and SNES Classics. I have a SNES collection (no loose carts, all boxed and complete) that could fetch over $1000 but I also have complete ROM set and a SD2SNES.

Calling people "emulator apologists" is inflammatory and unhelpful.

Well congratulations, you are playing the games by legal means, but that doesn't excuse the active support of emulation as a source of piracy. Which at the current time compete with the company for their profit in the case of select games.

Wowfunhappy · Aug 12, 2018

The games aren't gone. You can find them on the internet if you have a reason to look, it's just slightly harder.

I'm going to quite myself from the other topic. I feel a bit conflicted on this, but I'm ultimately on Nintendo's side.

Wowfunhappy said:
So I've been very much on the side of "good riddance Emuparadise", but I've been thinking about some of the arguments people made in this thread, and I am bit conflicted:

So here's my biggest question for Emuparadise "fans": What is your cutoff? When is a game old enough to be considered "okay" to download, and how much can you really expect the average person to adhere to those guidelines?

Persona 3 FES is 12 years old, and like most PS2 games, it was easily available on Emuparadise. However, you can still buy brand new, sealed copies of FES on Amazon for $15. This is not some reseller—the seller is listed at Atlus, and the game is shipped and sold by Amazon.com. You could slot this game into any computer with a DVD drive (internal or external) and load it up in PCSX2 just like that—no complicated ripping required.

(This should all be separate from any discussions of copyright law, because I suspect nearly everyone here will agree that copyright should last longer than 12 years.)

How many PCSX2 users do you think played FES this way, versus just downloading the game for free off a site like Emuparadise? Can you really expect people to remember to check whether a game can be purchased legitimately before they use a rom site? I suspect that once someone knows Emuparadise exists, and is used to downloading games from there, they will always choose Emuparadise without a second thought as to whether or not a game can be legitimately purchased.

I reject the notion that piracy can never lead to lost sales. While it's true that not every download represents a lost sale, it also stands to reason that a percentage of users who'd be willing to pay $X for a game would rather hold onto their money, particularly if the game in question can be easily downloaded for free from an easy-to-find location.

This is why I am mostly happy to see Emuparadise gone. The roms themselves are still out there if you really can't acquire them in any other way—they'll just be more difficult to find and more annoying to download. If that leads to more people purchasing games legitimately, it's a win in my book.

If Emuparadise only hosted legitimate abandonware, my opinion would be completely different. But that's not the case. If you want to see a website that's actually doing this properly, take a look through the Internet Archive's gaming collection. If that got shut down, I would legitimately mourn its loss.

MattWilsonCSS · Aug 12, 2018

I guess something I'd like to know is, could a digital library be recognized as an official library? Like, could archive.org ever get protections for being essentially a massive digital public library?

The idea that libraries have to be in a physical space is kind of antiquated, though I do like to go to public libraries. And I feel like gaming has a responsibility to share its history with libraries, for public access. Nintendo would never agree but certainly other companies would.

It just comes down to whether a site could ever get those kinds of protections so that there'd not be a worry of copyright trolling from lawyers.

JonnyDBrit · Aug 12, 2018

Aquamarine said:
"Emulator apologists"...wat?

You do realize that Nintendo won't be around forever, right? Some day they will die, and when they do emulators will be the only thing that allow gaming history to live on. They are fundamentally necessary to preserve our history. Why are you so beholden to the whims of corporations that you can't recognize that art is a public good, not a corporate asset that can be destroyed at will?

Also what they're releasing and probably will release is going to a relatively small selection of their back-catalogue. As touched on here:

SilentRob said:
Just wanted to insert the voice of at least one person who actually knows a few things about the subject:

The gaming industry does a generally terrible job of actively preserving its material. Source code especially can go walkabouts in relatively quick fashion, even though that's most practically useful for ports and re-releases, but also if one wanted to pursue an eventual investigation into the development of a game by that route.

Of course, part of the problem is the nature - and sheer length - of current copyright law, vs the nature of the medium. Yeah, you can say 'oh but the cartridges are still there', but I do not expect those things to hold up well by the time Super Mario Bros might, maybe slip into the public domain. A game that Nintendo either has stored very deep in its archives and couldn't be bothered to dig up, or they did not have their own in-house copy of, when they put it onto the Virtual Console.

This does not mean we should necessarily legitimise piracy - especially given, as addressed by Aquamarine, the often questionable nature of such sites - but one should not argue for implicitly trusting game companies to be doing a good job of this - they should, yes, but that they are now, currently? No. People like byuu are doing good work, sure, covering titles that Nintendo and other parties likely will never re-release due to lack of financial incentive, but that work is not going to be legally or widely accessible to the public for the better part of a century, and that assumes it makes it through god knows how many decades of software updates and changes in coding without issues, and is otherwise kept safe in that time, as well as copyright law not getting any wonkier than it already is.

Deleted member 274 · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
Selling their own games is unethical?

When it involves downloading pirated ROMS and putting them for sale? Of course it is?

Unless you think only mighty corporates are morally exempt from commiting such a sin.

ClickyCal' · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
They are still selling those, likely blocked on 3DS via technical limitations.

Yea, but those are considered some pretty classic games...and sorry, but the wii u peaked at 13 mill sales which doesn't count people that got rid of their wii u at some point and the switch is the hot ticket now.

Quacktion · Aug 12, 2018

SilentRob said:
Just wanted to insert the voice of at least one person who actually knows a few things about the subject:

This rings so fucking true. For instance I tried to find the DS Castlevanias the other day but all local retailers and online shops in my country have nothing, WiiU VC doesnt have any of them and 3DS has no ability to buy DS games digitally like Vita can with PSP titles so I was shit out of luck unless I wanted to import a 999$ sealed US copy on Ebay that wouldnt even work on my DS thanks to Nintendo's ass-backwards region locking. Hell Nintendo didnt even put Kirby Ultra on VC, what the hell was that about, the DS VC selection on the WiiU was utter trash. And then theres the GameCube games.... you know, I kind of admire MS for trying to make as many classic games available on their newest one as possible. Every platform needs a Steam equivalent that just stores all games forever and makes sure you can play them on your newest whatever. It's gonna be hard to do, and sink a lot of cash, but the alternative is piracy so pick your poison.

Bird · Aug 12, 2018

PepsimanVsJoe said:
Without these illegal sites, you probably never would have even known Terranigma existed.

The lack of self-reflection is astounding

TyrantGuardian · Aug 12, 2018

Worldshaker said:
Nintendo needs to bring back the VC in a meaningful way if this is the road they want to travel own.

The balls in their court.

It doesn't matter if they do. Unless they provide every single version of every single game with the ROM itself being accessible for removal off their hardware an into better emulators than they could ever dream of coding – games preservation the way it's being done now would be objectively better (for preservation itself) no matter how you slice it. There are reasons to play games beyond enjoying the consensus' accepted cream of the crop picks and there are reasons to want to enjoy or even study and analyze differing versions of the same game.

Cartridge Games said:
Selling their own games is unethical?

Via sub-par emulation that no one should ever be exposed to, ethically speaking? Sure, I'll argue in favor of that point if you really want me to.

Deleted member 249 · Aug 12, 2018

Quacktion said:
This rings so fucking true. For instance I tried to find the DS Castlevanias the other day but all local retailers and online shops in my country have nothing, WiiU VC doesnt have any of them and 3DS has no ability to buy DS games digitally like Vita can with PSP titles so I was shit out of luck unless I wanted to import a 999$ sealed US copy on Ebay that wouldnt even work on my DS thanks to Nintendo's ass-backwards region locking. Hell Nintendo didnt even put Kirby Ultra on VC, what the hell was that about, the DS VC selection on the WiiU was utter trash. And then theres the GameCube games.... you know, I kind of admire MS for trying to make as many classic games available on their newest one as possible. Every platform needs a Steam equivalent that just stores all games forever and makes sure you can play them on your newest whatever. It's gonna be hard to do, and sink a lot of cash, but the alternative is piracy so pick your poison.

Just a heads up, DS games are not region locked, and it would have worked on your system just fine.
Of course, it was $999...

Deleted member 1413 · Aug 12, 2018

yuoke said:
Yea, but those are considered some pretty classic games...and sorry, but the wii u peaked at 13 mill sales which doesn't count people that got rid of their wii u at some point and the switch is the hot ticket now.

Just because it's not on your system of choice doesn't mean they're not preserved.
They'll likely get around selling it on other non-Wii u platforms eventually

Deleted member 249 · Aug 12, 2018

Cartridge Games said:
Just because it's not on your system of choice doesn't mean they're not preserved.
They'll likely get around selling it on other non-Wii u platforms eventually

The official word from Nintendo right now is that, no, they won't.

PancakeFlip · Aug 12, 2018

TimPV3 said:
The fact that they had to use a publicly available ROM from one of these places absolutely contradicts what you said, because if they did have their own games preserved, they would use their own ROM.

EDIT: For some reason I thought it was the release of Mario All Stars that had the ROM in question, my mistake.

Not that I don't believe this but how did people find out thry just downloaded a ROM to use?

Yarbskoo · Aug 12, 2018

If only copyright laws in this country weren't such a goddam mess.

Thanks Disney.

Nintendo's ridiculous war on ROMs threatens gaming history- PC World

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