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Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

videogameschronicle.com

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Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#11

Post by zozbot234 »

Hokusai wrote: post #8
gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

> Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? It is illegal, but I do not see it being bad for consumers. If anything it seems that it could be good if it has been done legally from Nintendo instead of being a leak.

This information was actually leaked from a subcontractor, not from Nintendo themselves. It's not clear if Nintendo ever had access to it in its entirety or even knew about it. The subcontractor company is also quite obscure, it's hard to tell how they ended up developing this stuff.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#12

Post by coldpie »

rathel wrote: post #3
gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Co…

> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.

Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#13

Post by sickcodebruh »

> The PC emulation community could also theoretically use the data to improve their software so that it imitates the original systems perfectly. However, since the leaked documentation has been illegally obtained this would put them in murky territory.

I'd love to hear opinions about this whole thing from folks who work on emulators.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#14

Post by EvenThisAcronym »

dubcanada wrote: post #9
School-Cotton wrote: post #6

So... if someone who isn’t me wanted to download this, where would they look?

Actually I am gonna remove this google "download nintendo leak routefree" and you'll find what you need somewhere in the results.

> However I MUST say this is from 4chan so BE CAREFUL about what you download and how you play with stuff.

The only danger in downloading something leaked on 4chan is that you run the risk of learning a little more about dolphins than you might have liked.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#15

Post by paulie_a »

amelius wrote: post #5
gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

It will cannibalize their current business. (At least that's what they will most likely give as an argument)

Just like mp3s cannibalized the music industry. While they did get hard after the lat 90s I would consider routine grwoth year over year to be good. 17 percent in 2017 was considered a bad year

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#16

Post by lidHanteyk »

gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is only bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo hates losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property".

Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.

Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property...

[2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1...

[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-N...

[4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-N...

[5] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-d...

[6] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_ninte...

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#18

Post by dathinab »

vikbytes wrote: post #4
gregjw wrote: post #2

Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding? What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

I guess they can make the argument that it will damage their financial prospects of reselling old games on digital platforms, such as Virtual Console. But emulators are already available with very good accuracy so I don't know if this will actually have any actual impact on their potential sales. I do believe that N64 emulation might benefit from the leaks, as I am under the impression the accuracy of N64 emulators h…

In my experience emulation shouldn't to much affect the selling of a "remastered" version or similar.

And "just" emulation doesn't sell good, even Nintendo just adds it as an additional goody to their online service (NES/SNES).

I believe at least for Nintendo it doesn't really matter much.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#19

Post by toyg »

coldpie wrote: post #12
rathel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Co…

> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes. Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It w…

> emulator and hardware developers [...] now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material.

You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.

Re: Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak

#20

Post by coldpie »

sickcodebruh wrote: post #13

> The PC emulation community could also theoretically use the data to improve their software so that it imitates the original systems perfectly. However, since the leaked documentation has been illegally obtained this would put them in murky territory. I'd love to hear opinions about this whole thing from folks who work on emulators.

I don't work on emulators, but I do work on Wine. We explicitly forbid any contributions from anyone who has seen any Microsoft source code. The risk of introducing work derived from code owned by Microsoft is too high. I don't know how strict emulator authors are about this--they're non-commercial and so have less at stake than we do--but if I were an emulator author, I would cut ties with anyone known to have looked at this material. The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer. Once you start introducing derived work, that all flies out the window, and Nintendo can crack down on the emulators themselves.
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