On the one hand game preservation is a wonderful thing, a gift to humanity. It's the reason why I can play Eternal Sonata today on my computer in 4K instead of never again probably.

On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.

What's the answer here?

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haunter 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.

Yet most of those are not lost sales. They never even want to buy the game to begin with (most of them doesn't even have a Switch 2). Also as easy emulation gets nowadays it's still a "technical hurdle" for most people.

The game sold 5.2m copies in 4 days https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/261111....

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mahboi 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It's all guessing. My guess is that about half of those are lost sales. The kind of person who does this is obviously interested in the game. Emulating Switch 2 isn't a hacker task but isn't easy, so they were determined to play it. I think they'd buy it if there were no other choice. This emulation also requires a powerful PC, so they have money.

An opposite example would be emulating random NES games, probably only trying them out. And those are still sold on Nintendo's virtual consoles.

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t-3 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's an easy way for Nintendo to shut down most piracy from people who just don't want to buy a switch 2 and pay an arm and a leg for the super-fast cutting edge microSD only compatible (at this time at least) with the switch 2 - just make the games available digitally on every platform. I don't want a bunch of locked-down consoles with different stores when I have fully owned-by-me PCs and handheld systems capable of playing everything already.

	▲	mahboi 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They don't want this though, and they're the ones who make it. It'd also cut down on piracy if they made the games very cheap. Like how the music industry cut down on piracy by going from $12 albums (in 1990s money) to pennies per album, because they had no other choice.

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totallygeeky 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just absolutely unfounded guessing here. You're literally just spitballing based on vibes and nothing else.

	▲	mahboi 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I said so myself. So is the parent.

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Ohentis 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really think it's fucked up. It's not something I participate in for various reasons, but you are never going to catch me feeling bad for any business as large as nintendo. I don't hate them or anything, but they're big enough that they don't need defenders.

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RetroTechie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1) Reasonable copyright duration. Long enough to give creators a chance to recoup their investment. Short enough to not get in the way of enriching the public domain. For games, something like 5..10 years should do. Books? Maybe a bit longer.

2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault.

Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc.

Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.

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joquarky 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Copyright has overstepped its boundaries when we have to break it to preserve works that their own creators don't even care about until someone else starts to do their work for them.

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drngdds 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's actually insanely based that people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch. It's Nintendo, they don't need the money

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shepherdjerred 8 hours ago | parent [-]

They don't need the money, but they certainly deserve it

	▲	cowlevel 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		for what
	▲	skeaker 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		By definition they do not. Some poor family out there NEEDS money, as in money to live, and Nintendo does not. If a kid in that family decides to play Zelda for free, Nintendo does not suddenly deserve claim over that family's money, because Nintendo doesn't need it and that family does. Money is a tool to exchange one commodity for another and not some divine arbiter of goodness, where the more you have the more good you are. To say some corporation deserves money when they have all the money they could ever use is so ridiculous to me. "Yes, we have made hundreds of millions, but poor little old us deserved billions!"

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maxrecursion 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm glad another person has common sense. I love retro games so use emulators a lot. Even owning and collecting old games, the hardware breaks, so like you said, game preservation is amazing.

However, pirating brand new games sucks. The game industry itself and people's jobs rely on companies making a profit from the games they create.

Yes, Nintendo has a lot of money and is a huge company, they also have shitty legal practices, but they make great games and deserve to continue to make a profit on the huge investments they make in games.

Games are cheap compared to how expensive everything else has gotten. Just buy the damn games. There are so many other shitty companies you can pirate from, but most game companies aren't it.

	▲	fl4regun 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>However, pirating brand new games sucks. You should consider who it is, that is pirating these games. It's basically entirely one of 2 categories of people 1. people who don't have the money to buy the game. And consider this too: maybe they had to make the choice between this game or another game. Either way, they only buy one game, and not both. There's no sale lost. 2. people who just decided that nintendo doesn't deserve their money for some moral reason and if they didn't have an emulator, they just wouldn't by the game anyways. Again, there's no sale lost. OoT is still selling like hot cakes.
	▲	viraptor 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Can we start worrying about the money for Nintendo when it's actually a problem? They made a remake of an existing title they already got money from and already owned the story/assets and sold extra 5.2M copies in 4 days, for at least $60 each... They'll be fine and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.