When laws preventing video game piracy make no sense
Back in 2023, there was this survey, that concluded that in the United States of America alone, a whopping 87% of classic video games are critically endangered.
In other words, if their physical copies disappear, then they will disappear. Forever.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, as well as Activision, EA, Ubisoft, you name them, none of these faceless, money-hungry, anti-consumer, litigious, monolithic companies care one lick about the preservation of the products, the video games, that they themselves developed.
This is becoming an even more relevant issue in the digital age, as fewer and fewer games are being released on physical media that can be dumped and preserved. Games are being pulled from digital storefronts left and right, and just vanishing.
Now, you may not care about the loss of video game history, and that's OK. There are a lot of things in this life that I don't give a thought about either. We only have so much time and energy to care about the things that truly matter to us.
This is one of those things for me, so please allow me to tell you a little bit more about something that particularly confuses me with regard to it:
Let's take two of my favorite video games of all time: Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Gamecube, closely followed by The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for the Nintendo 64.
Nintendo has been able to profit off of the latter multiple times since they released the game in the year 2000 (dang). They then made people pay for it again to be able to play it on the Gamecube, via the The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition, which they released in 2003. In 2009 it then became the 300th piece of content to be released on the North American Virtual Console for the Wii. They even decided that the game was popular enough to give it the same remake treatment on the 3DS that they gave to Ocarina of Time. Finally, they completely ditched that remake in favor of making people pay for original through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, so they could play it as part of the Expansion Pack collection of Nintendo 64 games.
Pause.
It is illegal to download ROMs of video games on the Internet, right?
Well, in the case of Majora's Mask, that makes some sense to me. The game is being sold right now. It is available. True, it's being gatekept behind rather half-hearted emulation on a very expensive device. Either way, I wouldn't feel justified to complain to Nintendo about going after me if I downloaded the ROM somewhere.
What about Animal Crossing though?
That game, like millions of others, is out of print. It's not available anywhere. It's not even available on Nintendo Switch Online. There are three Gamecube games on it for now, but Animal Crossing is not one of them.
I do not want to break the law though, not just because I want to act like an upstanding citizen, but because illegally downloading ROMs is increasingly just not safe, even if you somehow know how to completely mask your online activity, which I don't and also don't intend on investing the time and energy to learn.
So, what is someone like me, who really craves to return to Animal Crossing to do?
Well, one option would be to just buy a used copy on Ebay. Some offers that looked legit to me start at around $60. Could be worse. That's probably what the game cost back in the day anyway.
Ah, but I also need a Gamecube to play it. I found some working units around $80. OK. That's less than what the console costed back in the day as well.
Oh, but wait. I still need a controller, and a memory card, and for Animal Crossing specifically, also a Gamecube to Gameboy Advance Link Cable, and a Gameboy Advance, so I can get as close to the full experience as possible (I'm not even going to add the eReader and the cards to that list). The controller is another $80, and so is the memory card. The cable is around $50, and the Gameboy Advance around $100.
Add all of this up and I just dished out close to $400, to play one game.
Animal Crossing might be my favorite game, but no matter how much I love it, I'm not willing to go one month without food to play it.
Nintendo's lawyers would come in and say: "Well, tough luck kid. You're poor and don't get to play our games. Deal with it."
I say this tongue-in-cheek, but I would be very happy, indeed, very content, if Doug Bowser just did a short public statement, where he said something like: "We don't want you to play our games unless we make them available to you on our platforms, and if you're too poor to afford them, then deal with it." I think that a lot of people would get angry if Nintendo made a public statement like that, but I would appreciate the honesty, because then the executives and the lawyers wouldn't be hiding behind this pseudo-righteous attitude of "protecting their copyright", pretending to be on the brink of going bankrupt because a handful of people are downloading ROMs of decades-old games that are out of print.
However, here's what the real issue is:
Nintendo isn't offering the game anywhere, right? I cannot buy it from them. I cannot give them my money in exchange for the game.
Also, if I illegally download the the ROM of Animal Crossing from the Internet, then Nintendo would not get my money either.
Even if I bought the game on Ebay, then although someone would get my money... that still wouldn't be Nintendo.
So, why exactly is it legal for me to buy the game used on Ebay, but not downloading the ROM on the Internet if the outcome is exactly the same for Nintendo?
If this rule doesn't seem arbitrary to you, then I don't know how else to express my opinion that the laws surrounding the download of ROMS of out-of-print video games on the Internet just don't make any logical sense to me.
Everyone has said the following: Nintendo could be swimming in money, and preserve their copyright, all in one fell swoop, if they simply opened up a storefront where people could legally buy the ROMs of their classic games for a reasonable price. They would be more than justified to go after ROM sites and torrents if they did this, not just legally but also morally, and again, they would make endless cash, because there are millions of die-hard sheep like me who will throw money at them no matter how far they go with their anti-consumer practices.
In fact, Nintendo is such an inconceivably wealthy company, that they could, instead of taking down emulators, approach the people developing them, offer them jobs, help them to set up proper companies, and have them, as third parties, continue to develop their emulators for them. Nintendo's in-house emulators are absolutely atrocious. They clearly have no clue what they are doing. They don't have the human expertise to pull it of. They do, however, have the money to pay for it. So why don't they? It would show goodwill. It would incentivize people to go to their platforms for the ultimate experience of playing their classic games. It would give them the control that they crave. As it stands though, it is a motley crew of people who code for a hobby, that releases emulators that vastly outperform Nintendo's, a colossal, multi-national company. It's even more embarrassing if you take into consideration the fact that the Switch emulators that they recently took down, ran their games better than the actual console!
For some reason though, they just don't want to do the obvious thing.
The company culture of Nintendo, is one of investing a lot of money and effort into controlling the experience of those who consume their products in every aspect. If they could get away with having one of their legal ninjas be present every time we play one of their games on one of their consoles, then they 100% would. I just don't understand where this paranoia comes from, because no matter how much their games are pirated, even recently-released ones, it never actually hurts their bottom line. They just imagine that does. In fact, it is because their games, especially their classics, get pirated so much, that the they have this ever-growing fanbase, large enough to make them insanely wealthy as a company, even though they are, in practice, completely detached, isolated, and cut off from the ecosystem of the rest of the video game industry.
By insisting on maintaining the very poorly-designed system that they have now, the NSO, they actually make it harder on themselves to convince the average consumer to pay for the privilege of playing their classics. It's a subpar experience. Any emulator can do better. Indeed, any emulator is more convenient and accessible, even for someone as tech-illiterate as me.
Anyway, all of this to say that, if I was calling the shots, then games older than 10 years, would lose their copyright protection, unless companies kept making them available through reasonably convenient means, such as making them available through re-releases or storefront. Heck, if Nintendo re-released Animal Crossing on NSO today for $60, I would get it. I would pay for that game on every new console they release. However, a game that is out of print, is not making the company any money, so it makes no sense for the company to prevent it from being distributed. I'm not going to download the ROM of Animal Crossing anywhere, but you bet that I'm going to spend almost 90 minutes writing a 1,600-word long complaint about why Nintendo refuses to take my money.