> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.
Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
It's not a multi-billion-dollar-business, but official retro-gaming is still thriving.
>> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles.
> Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
Those handheld-consoles are kinda infamous for being sold with thousands and ten of thousands copies of old games from all kind of consoles and countries. Maybe he advertised such deals. The joke here is that in my country, you can even buy them directly on Amazon, and there never seem to be a problem with it. Not sure if it's the same in Italy, but I would think the same EU-regulations apply there.
> Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them, often with unasked for changes.
And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games. Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.
> No, they re-release a couple of them, as it conveniences them,
It's significant more than a couple these days. But the number doesn't really matter, it's an ongoing process, and nobody knows which are released at which point. So nobody can claim any more that it's dead content.
> And the handheld consoles aren't competing with nintendo for people interested in playing retro games.
That doesn't matter, it's still not legal. If people want to play old games, OK, then do it, but let it stay with the fans, uncommercial. Don't the f** make money with it, and the h** don't make public advertisement for it. It's illegal, and owners are going after you for it if it's too obvious, because they have the right.
I'm more interested in ethics than I am in law. Sit down in a court room for a day if you want to see how the infallible law fucks person after person who committed a vitcimless crime of ignorance, or being too poor to get a good lawyer. Or don't, if you don't want to lose faith in "due process."
So, ethically, I don't think it's ok for companies to dangle a 30 year old videogame around saying "you can't play this because we might want to sell it to you again someday. And by the way the version we sell to you may not be the version you treasured from your childhood, we might fuck up the aspect ratio, or cut content, just because we don't give a shit. Neener neener."
Foolish nonsense. I want to play old videogames. If they sold it to me, I'd buy it off them. I'm not ok that I need to re buy the same game ten times. You used to be able to play old games on new systems by just sticking the disk in. Now you don't even get a disk.
The games industry is rotting. I don't care if companies lose money from emulation (they're not, because they aren't selling what we're buying). Enshittify away, I will continue to rip roms and play them on the device I please, and if that device is sold to me with a garbage SD card full of 10,000 bunk roms, so be it.
> Someone that picks up a miyoo to play SNES games on the go has no official nintendo option for this, the switch doesn't have all the SNES games and isn't the same formfactor.
Arguably this is a flaw in copyright laws. If a copyright owner refuses to make their copyrighted work available to the public, there should be some kind of "use it or lose it" exception - after all, this is all supposed to be in the public interest, in the end. (Haha yeah I know.)
But, that raises the issue of a company's older work competing with their newer work. They use copyright as a tool to withhold their own work, to increase the market for newer works. And companies like Disney use a "vault" model to artificially create demand for older works.
The question is, should companies be allowed to do this?
I don't think they should, and just because I'm a filthy commie. I disagree that older works are competing in a meaningful way - the market has demonstrated it's happy to pay again and again for the same game on new platforms, especially if it comes with upgrades or QOL improvements. Nintendo could easily make money selling a new version of Mario 2 with new levels by og Nintendo level designers. I'd buy it and I have that game on like five different systems.
Not to mention, it's not like I'm not gonna buy tears of the kingdom even though I like to occasionally replay ocarina of time or whatever.
The vast majority of decades-old games will never see the light of sun again. The companies are either dead, or the license is fucked to hell and back and split between too many parties.
And, even if you think it might be re-released, you could end up waiting forever. Not to mention a remaster is not the same game, it's not the same experience. A lot of people play retro games specifically because they like the retro experience.
Actually, they do, and even significant older games. Retro-games are regularly updated and newly released. Sometimes they are even remastered into new games. Old Consoles are also sometimes resold as special time limited offers, and kinda popular.
It's not a multi-billion-dollar-business, but official retro-gaming is still thriving.
>> Agents accused the creator of promoting pirated copyrighted materials stemming from his coverage of Anbernic handheld game consoles. > Seems hardly something worthy of arresting, let alone jailing someone.
Those handheld-consoles are kinda infamous for being sold with thousands and ten of thousands copies of old games from all kind of consoles and countries. Maybe he advertised such deals. The joke here is that in my country, you can even buy them directly on Amazon, and there never seem to be a problem with it. Not sure if it's the same in Italy, but I would think the same EU-regulations apply there.