Nintendo Was Right. Yuzu Was Wrong.

Playstation Xbox and PC gaming each have their own distinct brand identities and cultures but they also kind of blend together into a single category of we make serious adventure games for adults games on these platforms are really really fun but they're not always happy fun sometimes they're frustrating fun when you're playing rank doubles in rocket league and your partner acts like they just bought the game or possibly disturbing fun if you aren't used to the jump scares in a horror game like Resident Evil now think about Nintendo's published titles that are full of cartoonish Graphics innocent looking characters and easy to learn but difficult to master gameplay mechanics Nintendo is literally and figuratively on its own little gaming Island creating wildly successful Adventure titles for both children and adults and I think that's the secret sauce for happiness it's a product that's marketed to a younger demographic that's also perfectly inclusive to adults playing Nintendo games is like watching a great animated kid show that allows viewers to suspend disbelief it's silly and maybe a little over the top at times but always manages to sneak in mature theme for adults so the final product is enjoyable for everyone Nintendo's mission is to create Smiles through unique entertainment experiences and I think their games absolutely nail that goal but it's exactly their ability to consistently deliver happiness that makes their copyright protection Behavior so disappointing if Nintendo had their way no one would be allowed to make gaming focused YouTube or twitch content despite how effective streaming is as a marketing strategy the entire rental market of Blockbuster and smaller local stores would have never existed even though many people ultimately bought their own game copies because the rentals served as demos and pretty much anything else fan created that isn't officially sanctioned would be viewed as a disgusting perversion of Nintendo's original work I'd guess that the mission statement for Nintendo's lawyers is something like you're going to have fun on our terms or no fun at all this anti-fun Behavior continued last week when Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze and its open- source switch emulator Yuzu Nintendo claimed that the Yuzu emulator allowed users to bypass encryption on both the switch console and games which facilitated piracy at a colossal scale for example a leaked copy of Tears of the kingdom was downloaded roughly 1 million times the week before the game was officially released and Nintendo's lawyers argued that that was largely due to Yuzu but this past Monday morning Tropic Hayes agreed to pay $2.4 million in Damages and destroy all copies of their emulator to settle the lawsuit out of court so once again Nintendo is the big mean bully that crush the dreams of an innocent little content creator right uh not this time many of you will probably disagree with me but I'm actually on Nintendo's side here I think the Yuzu emulator was bad for gaming as a whole and if you look at this case objectively it's pretty difficult to argue that Tropic haes was right the most obvious and damning mistake Tropic haes made was they built a current generation emulator the switch is Nintendo's Flagship product and biggest source of Gaming revenue by creating an emulator that that allows millions of users to steal the games that Nintendo is actively trying to sell Tropic hay painted a giant Target on its back even though Tropic specifically stated that the emulator was made for legal purposes and technically it wasn't the developer's fault if certain users decided to break the law if we're being honest about how people actually acquired ROMs the overwhelming majority of them were stolen team yuzu's next dumb overreach was to operate as a legitimate for-profit business while using the Nintendo's copyrighted content to Market their very public attention-seeking product Yuzu wasn't just a simple passion project created by a group of friends in their free time the team formed an LLC and their patreon perks were valuable enough for them to bring in $30,000 a month this makes me think they may have gotten a little too high smelling their own farts and forgot about the legality of their entire organization because a business model that's centered around ripping off the richest and possibly most litigious company in Japan is definitely going to end poorly Tropic ha might still be around today if they had just been a little more discreet with their online presence even though I think Nintendo is right in this specific case I'm okay with emulation of hardto find retro games on discontinued systems downloading a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 substance to play on a PS2 emulator is technically still illegal but it feels way more ethical because you can't purchase that game directly from the developer anymore but the Yuzu emulator promoted the exact opposite of this example hypothetically let's say that out of the 1 million pirated copies of Tears of the Kingdom only 25% of those downloads actually cause lost Hardware Revenue that's still $80 million in theft when you combine the console and game totals if you care about gaming and want to play great games you can't also participate in behavior that directly Hurts The Hobby you claim to love but it's not just Nintendo's lost Revenue that's a problem for gaming as a whole Nintendo's Behavior regarding copyright protection appears to be motivated more by paranoia than by standard legal practices when you steal from a company that's obsessed with preventing theft it confirms their worst fears and will likely cause them to double down in their anti-consumer practices I'm sure Nintendo's executive saw the total downloads for Yuzu and felt like a hypochondriac receiving a cancer diagnosis earlier this year on the Xbox podcast Bill Spencer talked about how exclusives may become a thing of the past and that's an exciting idea I think collaboration in crossplay is what's made the last few years of gaming so great hell divers 2 is proof that if you make a great product that's simultaneously released on both console and PC amazing things can happen I don't think it's completely far-fetched to hope for a future where new Zelda titles are available on PC but that's never going to happen as long as Nintendo views PC players as the enemy software that promotes piracy will push Nintendo further and further away from mainstream gaming and they'll isolate themselves even more within their own ecosystem regardless of how I feel about emulators their legal status is not a new conversation in court in 1999 Sony Computer Entertainment sued the connectic corporation over their virtual game station which was a Playstation 1 emulator developed for Macintosh computers Sony argued that connectic had copied the ps1's BIOS information during the development of the virtual game station and this infringed on Sony's copyright ultimately a court sided with connectic and ruled that Sony's property had been used in a transformative way resulting in the creation of a new product normally a case like this would set a precedent regarding the legality of emulators for future developers but it's unfortunately not that simple there's just too much variation among emulators for a single ruling to settle the issue for all of them and court cases from the 9s that focused on dis based media aren't really that relevant today when gigabit internet speeds can download full games in minutes Tropic settled with Nintendo out of court so emulators aren't legally dead just yet but it may have ultimately been better if the case had gone to trial so we could get a modern ruling on them once and for all Nintendo can't just sit by and allow others to profit from their stolen IP but they're surrounded by far too many copyright controversies for a company that's so focused on delivering Smiles I totally agree that it's important for companies to pursue copyright protection measures when they're needed but it's just as important for these same companies to occasionally bend the rules a little to ensure that their customers feel respected and valued Nintendo seems to have wildly idealized IC expectations regarding human behavior and the sooner they can come back to reality to work with not against their player base the better

Channel: Sam T Stephens

Views: 5,448

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Id: V6nM1AeCxFA

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024