Nintendo Won’t Win The War Against Piracy
This past week, Nintendo’s lawyers issued a cease and desist to the developers of the Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin. The Big N did this to prevent Dolphin’s development team from releasing their emulator on the popular digital games storefront Steam. In response, the release of Dolphin on Steam was halted indefinitely.
While this might not seem like a big deal, this is only one in a long line of legal threats Nintendo has leveled against the emulation community. Earlier this month, Nintendo issued DMCA takedowns to the program “Lockpick” that allows Switch owners to retrieve game keys from their console for use in emulators.
In April, Nintendo’s legal threats caused Microsoft to remove many of the emulation tools for The Series S and X consoles hidden behind a paywall. While Microsoft claims Nintendo isn’t the reason for this, many insiders in the emulation scene claim Nintendo asked Microsoft to remove popular Switch and Gamecube emulators from their console behind closed doors. In response, Microsoft hid all emulation capabilities behind a $20 developer mode fee.
Although Nintendo’s fight with piracy might seem reasonable, the company has failed to provide consumers a way to access their long and storied backlog consistently. Either through omission, ignorance, or artificial scarcity, Nintendo has made it incredibly difficult to play and find their old games.
The Kings of Artificial Scarcity
Nintendo re released 2002's Super Mario Sunshine in the bundle entitled “Super Mario 3d All Stars” on September 18 2020. Only a year and a half later, the bundle was taken off the eShop on March 31st. Within a year, the product was impossible to find on store shelves, and is now listing for prices upwards of $85 for the English version on eBay.
There is absolutely no reason to stop listing a digital product online that a company has full copyright ownership of, other than to create artificial scarcity. Nintendo is fully aware of the psychological effects of artificial scarcity, and has utilized the tactic for years to insight consumer crazes around their releases.
Nintendo has recently created a subscription service that allows players to revisit N64 and Gameboy Advanced games from a small selection of curated titles, but none of these games can be purchased individually.
This means that Nintendo has, once again, created a situation that generates artificial scarcity. Games that should be available for purchase, and in some cases were even once available on The Wii Shop for purchase to download locally onto your console, can’t be bought in any way shape or form currently. The only way consumers can access these titles is by paying a (fairly high) monthly fee, and even then, with Nintendo’s track record, at any time these games can be pulled off the service. Disempowering consumers from purchasing games makes remasters and the occassional repackaged older title “feel” much more valuable than it actually is, thus driving artificial scarcity even more.
What other options do consumers have to experience these titles other than what Nintendo offers them? Well, they can look for used copies of old titles on eBay (which has only gone up in price recently, as “vintage” game collecting has become much more mainstream in the post pandemic world), or they can turn to emulation and piracy.
Most people can’t afford to repurchase all of their old Nintendo games, and Nintendo knows this. Any company that is willing to use anti consumer methods like artificial scarcity to sell repackaged older titles deserves to have their old and unavailable titles pirated in my book.
Nintendo’s Commitment to Out of Date Hardware
Nintendo has a history of releasing hardware that can’t compete with Sony and Microsoft dating all the way back to the N64. But, unlike the 90’s, we now have such powerful processors that current generation Switch games can be played more smoothly, and with a higher resolution, using the emulator Yuzu and fairly modest hardware. Recently, Nintendo was forced to patch Pokemon Scarlet and Violet to spawn less Pokemon per area in order to prevent the frame-rate from dropping below 15 frames per second. The same game experienced no such problem through Yuzu, and was patched by the community to run at 60 frames per second.
Even at the time of release, The Nintendo Switch was significantly less powerful than The Playstation 4, which was celebrating its fourth birthday in 2017.
There are several videos of Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild running through emulators at higher resolutions with ray tracing, and it looks like an entirely different game compared to how Breath of The Wild runs on The Switch.
Graphics aren’t everything. Some of my favorite games are by all means archaic graphically, but when emulators are running games better than the system they released on launch day, something has clearly gone wrong.
The Nintendo Switch has a four core arm 1.02 Ghz processor that can just barely run some of these newer titles that Nintendo is releasing. It’s embarrassing for Nintendo to charge $300 for a console that can barely run its own titles. On top of this, Nintendo is charging $70 dollars for Tears of The Kingdom just for the frame rate to dip every few seconds.
Nintendo Needs to Get Their Act Together
If Nintendo wants to stop emulation and piracy, they need to address their own anti consumer practices and obsolete hardware. So long as they don’t offer a consistent way to purchase their backlog, emulation and piracy will be and continues to be the only viable way for most consumers to play Nintendo’s older titles.
The next Nintendo console will also have A LOT to answer for. It will need to be backwards compatible, and be able to run Switch games at a respectable resolution to put a dent in some of the very advanced Switch emulators like Skyline and Yuzu.
