on nintendo
I have a Nintendo Switch OLED. I also used to have a DS lite and a Wii, my favorite console so far, probably. I am admittedly not the target audience for games released on these; I do like a round of Mario Party or Mario Kart, Wii Sports/Party, Nintendogs and Brain Training stuff, or Animal Crossing, but that's mostly it. All other games and genres I am interested in are released more quickly and run better on other platforms, like my PC/Steam Deck or my old PS4 (still mostly doing its job after 11 years!). I'm not an anime game fan and also not a Zelda or Pokemon player1, so a lot of releases fall flat for me.
Obviously, I still invested money into their products at some points and I would maybe be tempted to do so again in the future - if it wasn't for what I think is hardly tolerable for me and goes against my values. It has crossed a line for me personally last year.
I remember when Nintendo tried to take down video game rentals around the 2000s (which didn't just affect Blockbuster back then, would affect libraries even nowadays if it wasn't prevented). The Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln charmingly described video game rentals as "commercial rape".
I also remember when Nintendo was one of the last companies to ease up on taking down streams and Let's Play videos of their content back when these things started to become popular (2010s); and even then, their new terms were really awful at first.
There were all the countless fanmade creations from artwork to T-Shirts and games being slapped with a cease-and-desist even more aggressively than Disney.
Also: the years long clown show where Nintendo pretended joycon drift wasn't real and denied its existence in Support tickets and refused to fix it, until they finally unofficially did.
Over the years, Nintendo took down ROM websites one by one. One egregious case was against RomUniverse, where 2.1 million dollars wasn't enough; because Nintendo went back for extra punishment, the owner was forced to permanently destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games or other unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s intellectual property including movies, books, and music. Instead of just going for punishing the distribution, they got the judge to go for possession as well. Think about what precedent this sets for video game history conservation efforts, video game museums etc.
In general, I remember all the times Nintendo tried and often succeeded to squeeze money out of these opportunities in ways I find gross - seeking up to 150,000 dollars for the infringement of each copyrighted work and up to 2,000,000 dollars for the infringement of each of its trademark. That means many millions of dollars for private people that host thousands of copyrighted works, meant to ruin their life and scare people over silly games that are unavailable elsewhere. Effectively means to me Nintendo is willing to risk driving people into suicide over retro game profits.
Related: The lawsuit between Nintendo and Gary Bowser. He can now allegedly only survive via GoFundMe. I don't think this is justice when we look at what the crime was: Helping to create dongles used to bypass anti-piracy measures on Nintendo Switch and other consoles. For that, he was threatened with rifles during the arrest in the middle of the night, had to serve 40 months prison time and owed $14.5 million in payments. He pays for this by sending Nintendo 20 to 30 percent of any money left over after he pays for necessities such as rent and medical expenses because he is disabled. Amazing feat for a company with such a fun, family friendly, wholesome image.
Then a year or two ago, Nintendo was the reason the Dolphin emulator couldn't be on Steam. They're being careful here, but you can tell they were extremely scared of Nintendo and while they didn't file a DMCA, they threatened it.
Recently, we had Nintendo first taking down emulators Yuzu, then Ryujinx. Even forks and backups weren't safe. After ruining people financially or threatening to do so, their lawyers are now admitting at a panel for IP rights that emulation is legal. Great!
They also took down decades old, massive amounts of Garry's Mod content in the past year. In general, there have been a lot of takedowns that time.2 Even taking down videos of their games being modded.
As of November 2024, Nintendo isn't shying away from subpoena'ing Google, Cloudflare, Github, Discord, Reddit and more to go after pirates, specifically the mod of a piracy subreddit. What seems to repeatedly come up in this is sharing art from a then-unreleased art book. I don't think this warrants these obsessive and privacy-eroding means that want the "identity, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), and e-mail addresses(es)" and don't like the precedent it sets.
They usually argue about the hard work of their developers being disrespected in these lawsuits, but they themselves do not even have the honor of crediting their creators properly.
Is it probably nothing compared to what other companies do? Sure, but I personally have had enough of this giant company bullying everyone and hate to see it. I don't want to have to deal with my money furthering the success of a company I don't want to see succeed when they employ these tactics. I hate overly litigious companies and I hate when companies exert an exceptional level of control over the device you bought.
I have also simply aged out of participating in the console wars and exclusivity craze, so I think this extreme exclusivity to boost your console because it otherwise can't stand on its own (because it lags years behind hardware-wise) is tired and milked dry. I only have become more tired since other platforms and releases have become increasingly open and as the same tired Mario games release with 1 pixel more each time and lose their charm. To me, this is one of a lot of practices to further sales that I find unethical, wasteful, careless, manipulative and coercive.
People being unable to buy your older games because you removed them from shops, but you're also taking down ROMs and emulators so no one can play them? Unacceptable.
People being unable to play the games they paid for because the console or game disc/cartridge is no longer working and now they can't even do that on a different device via emulation? Unacceptable.
Taking down ROMs and emulators just to gatekeep a 30 year old game in the shop for an outrageous price? Unacceptable.
Ruining or threatening to ruin people's livelihoods over silly little games? Unacceptable.
We have solutions for all this that do not put a dent in the profits, but we're once again dealing with greed. Even as a law student, I do not care whether many of these things are well within their rights - that doesn't make it right and doesn't encourage what I'd like to see in society. Copyright law and the DMCA are both in dire need of an overhaul, and I don't have to think they're good or just, and no company needs to aggressively overdo it with IP protection either. Many other companies in the same space, including Capcom, Sega, Bethesda and Valve have nicer relationships with their fandoms and are much less antagonistic towards preservation and archiving efforts.
I don't care about what you do, but no more Nintendo for me.
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Published 17 Jan, 2025