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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Gonna be real interesting how this plays out.
IANAL (and am not a lawyer) but the general takeaway of Sony vs Bleem was "emulation fine so long as you aren't using proprietary code". Hence why it is generally "find your own BIOS" and all that.
The nonsense about yuzu is facilitating piracy is going to be a mess. But I do wonder if Tears of the Kingdom is not going to be a problem. Because it was not at all hidden as to why Yuzu et al suddenly had a bunch of mysterious compatibility updates a day or two after the leaked roms went online.
Even the argument that the devs who worked on that had totally legit copies they got from Uncle Greg's Game Store on 2nd street might get into a mess if nintendo argues those weren't legitimately sold because they broke embargo date. And it is hard to argue those improvements were for people to play their own dumps.
So yeah. Gonna be real interesting (assuming this isn't just an attempt to legal fee yuzu to death). Because if I were to put on my day job hat: Doing ANYTHING based on pre-release material is a huge no no since they only had access to it because people violated contracts with Nintendo's distributors.
And... the more I look at this, the more I think the yuzu devs may have fucked it all up for the rest of us and it really depends on if nintendo's lawyers drill in on that or continue for the broad reaching stuff.
This is a great point and yuzu may get burned for it. Hopefully, it's not lost on developers of future emulators.
The issue is that it is an incredibly dangerous precedent.
There are already a decent number of emulators where the devs have done a good enough job making plausible deniability but it is still VERY obvious they looked at the "leaks". But if it is decided that "used a pre-release leak to develop code/support" is a no-no, then everyone knows to not do a 0-day update. But they start getting wary of doing day 1 updates because... it is still pretty obvious that they had that ready to go.
Which... could even be nintendo's plan. The example I always like to use is Mass Effect PC. For those who were likely born well after that, MEPC was INCREDIBLY anticipated because we were all cool and didn't need Mass Effect because Bioware were traitors who abandoned PC but... motha fugging Mass Effect. It was one of the early activation model Securom games DRM wise. And the warez groups did a bad crack that broke like two hours in (which meant they already "won" the release and fixing it was low priority). Which led to waves of pirates (self included) rushing Best Buy because we needed it NOW.
So if this makes for "okay, we can't add support for this game until a week after launch", that does wonders for sales figures. And, in a uniquely nintendo way, it avoids the ever more popular "So... this runs at like 10 FPS on the switch and 120 FPS on a potato laptop" problem.
I know it's hard to hear because sometimes we are so passionate about these things, but it's okay to have to wait for support on an unsupported platform. Having to wait a week is, in fact, incredibly fortunate. Consider how long it takes to get mac or Linux support on many PC games. A week? We're laughing.
And if the sales figures are bumped in the first week? Let's try to understand why it's bad that developers, publishers, and those other middle-men get paid for their work. Not all games are wildly successful. Most aren't. And evil Nintendo making more money... Well, if they don't make money you don't get any games. And consider that this is a platform which for the most part has avoided sinking into shady and unethical loot box practices. You can fault Nintendo for a lot, but from their perspective, free 0-day access to their games is an existential crisis.
I am all for support of devs. But it has increasingly become clear that playing a nintendo game on a nintendo platform is an objectively worse experience because even nintendo first parties have difficulty utilizing the switch. People love to pretend that "piracy is a service issue" but... it kind of is in this case. Was it Metroid Dread that had significant slowdowns on switch AND lots of qtes and parry windows?
But also? Regardless, I have very serious issues with using lawsuits and the legal system to muscle The Little Guy (even if they were idiots) to protect corporate interests.
I too do anal
Can we just take a second to say what utter bullshit it is that "facilitating piracy" is so allowed to be an argument?
How are we in this wacky world where rights holders get to say "what you built allows piracy, we demand total control over you"
I mean, like it or not, piracy is incredibly dark grey (if not outright black) in the eyes of the law. Its one of the reasons there is such a strong focus on "abandonware" and "oh, this is about digital preservation" in the various circles. It doesn't fool anyone but it is at least a stronger protection than the old "Hey FBI. You aren't allowed to look at my DC++ share" folder that people had back in the day.
You can argue that Nintendo facilitates piracy by making games that people want to pirate.
No way they were that stupid, Ryujinx always waits for the release date to publish those specific updates.
TIL: IANAL