Gadgetory

something that's been going on lately in the gaming world that's kind of a big deal is Nintendo is suing a pair of ROM websites love retro and love roms for posting a lot of their games something's been going on for well quite some time but they are asking for a lot of money specifically they want two million dollars for legal use of their trademark and an additional hundred and fifty thousand dollars for every single game which adds up to an insane amount of money so much that there's not really any way these websites can actually pay that but it's accomplishing another goal of instilling a lot of fear and other websites in fact emu paradise another very old rom website has decided to close down in response to this because they've decided it's just not worth the risk anymore versus dealing with the occasional cease and desist order now a lot of people have been talking about this for a lot of different reasons but what I really want to focus on here is the fact that well look in this situation Nintendo is in the legal right there's nothing great about this there's been a lot of argues before that like Oh emulation is kind of legal because of these reasons shoplifting is a victimless crime it's really not the distribution of a large number of roms like this is just straight-up illegal and there is nothing wrong with a Nintendo pursuing action against it but at the same time while it might be legally fine there's kind of a questioning here of is it actually a good thing to do now look I'm personally not a huge advocate of piracy or you know downloading a lot of games I think that if there is a convenient and legal way to purchase an old-school retro game you should take that course of action instead of any kind of piracy but that's not really the option for a lot of titles that exist out there and it brings up this big question of what's gonna happen to a lot of these old historically significant video games that the major companies really are putting any effort into preserving and if they're not going to do it who is sure there are certain games that are pretty safely being be released often like Super Mario Brothers legends oh the link to the past numerous Mega Man games these are games are gonna get released again and again and again but the number of games that are safe like that are miniscule compared to the full library of NES SNES and other system libraries out there now you could argue that well if the games not being released digitally in any form you just have to go ahead and hunt down physical copies which yeah you can do that but there's a few problems there first off some games are just exceedingly rare and hard to find at the point where just playing a certain game is gonna cost you over $100 because you have to find one in the first place and someone's willing to sell it the other issue that comes up though is that physical copies like that aren't permanent in fact some of them are already starting to die off and is just going to get worse and worse as years go by there are games that if there is no digitally produced version of them they are going to just straight-up disappear copies are going to go bad batteries will die things will get ruined and destroyed until eventually there's no trace of some of these classic titles and this isn't just an issue of preservation it's also accessibility making sure that some of these games that can become really rare and really expensive but are at the same time really really good are something that people can still get the chance to experience a good recent example this would be something like earthbound for the longest time earthbound on SNES was worth a bunch of money and was really hard to get a hold of but now thanks to things like Virtual Console in the 3ds or picking up an SNES classic it's something people can play more easily today and not all the games get that opportunity and beyond that there's also an argument for things that roms can open up like translations there are so many amazing games that are released only in Japan that aren't available in any other language and if you want to experience those titles there's not really another way to and I'll admit that I am you only did a bunch of games when I was younger and a lot of the ones that I really fell in love with were games that were never made available in the US and I would never bet any other way to experience them by the way this isn't a problem that's unique to Nintendo they just got the limelight right now because of the lawsuit and look at other companies like Sony Sony was doing a pretty good job for a while until the ps3 where they had backwards compatibility but then kind of dropped at mid-cycle and then with the ps4 they just dropped it entirely and they kind of brought it back with PlayStation now where you get some ps3 games and a small handful of ps2 greatest hits but there's a lot of games that are missing and some of those are available on ps1 to the PS Vita but then there's a rear generational gap and it's just gotten really confusing and then you've got Sega who don't have their own console anymore but they've kinda had some attempts with doing classic collections and re releasing some Genesis games on iPhones but once again there's a whole lot of titles being left out really the only company that seems you doing anything about preservation is Xbox which to be fair they have the youngest library but there's the heavy push for the Xbox one to support 360 games original Xbox games where you can use the disk but also download them and the library is growing and being optimized which is really cool and I hope it's something they continue to do with future systems and the thing that's really cool about that too is that with Xbox it's all in one platform as to being kind of all over the place which is going on right now with all the other companies made with Nintendo there's the Virtual Console which now isn't on the switch there's classic conditions there's re-releases of stuff it's just all over the place instead of being one convenient solution and here's the thing the lawsuit taking that as web sites and scaring others it's not like your arms are going to permanently disappear they're just gonna be a lot harder it again and it raises the question of why now is Nintendo doing this because roms aren't exactly a brand new problem for them and they've dealt with it for a long time now they are working on a system for the switch or they're gonna have the online service and they've talked a little bit about having retro games on there but the full extent hasn't been talked about and so there is that optimist at me the hopeful part that wishes that the reason they're doing this is because they're getting rid of competition and they are actually going to start doing something where we have full libraries is that what's happening probably not but I could hope