A lot of people here seem to think Nintendo would not claim it illegal without the circumvention code or wouldn't write a letter saying that.
This is totally wrong and shows a complete lack of historical understanding of Nintendo and their legal threats and lawsuits going back decades. Nintendo has repeatedly sued even when they lose. Nintendo has even sued companies for making unlicensed games. Not homebrew, but commercially successful games.
Others seem to believe valve would suddenly be okay with it without circumvention code. This seems naive at best, delusional at worst.
That letter includes a threat to valve on distribution. As above, Nintendo isn't going to say "it's fine now I guess". They would happily sue valve with or without the code. Valve may want to partner with them someday.
Valve may be better than most but it seems very unlikely for them to want to die on this hill. The good will does not seem worth the trouble.
This aspect is totally lost on so many people. Even apple partnered with them for games on their own platform.
It’s fiscally irresponsible for company directors to close that door in preference over a hobby emulator, while pretending that it isn’t intended to infringe on copyright.
> It’s fiscally irresponsible for company directors to close that door in preference over a hobby emulator, while pretending that it isn’t intended to infringe on copyright.
I'm not sure if this applies in Valve's case, as I understand it, Valve is privately owned and held by Gabe Newell and what he says goes, so really the question is does he want to do this or not?
I know it's semantics, But I dont think 'financially irresponsible' is the right semantics to use the context.
Gaben could put a video out tomorrow of him burning piles of Nintendo merchandise and swearing that Steam will never do business with Nintendo and both Gaben and Valve would be fine.
It's hard to conceive of how much money an entity like Valve has and how fast it continues to accumulate.
Steve Jobs was notorious for shit listing companies like AMD or Nvidia and it doesn't seem to have been detrimental to Apple whatsoever.
Give me a single reason why nintendo would even begin to consider partnering with valve.
Nintendo is famous for its closed and closely controlled ecosystem.
Partnering with apple to release a mobile game is a bad (outlier) example as nintendo has no capabilities to release their own phone.
Why would Nintendo invite/open competition with steam deck? Why would they make it easier to pirate their games and give steam cut on the sales via steam store. All the while nintendo has their own console their own store.
Its like apple allowed android store on iOS. Sure they could do it but why would they?
You could have asked this question about Sega in the 90s. Why would Sega ever consider partnering with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony?? And then the Dreamcast tanked and they pivoted to software only. Other platforms were there for them to port all their games. If Sega had done something more boneheaded than "Sega does what Nintendon't" then Nintendo could have told them to pound sand and they wouldn't have a successful platform on which to save their business.
Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely. The Switch is doing great, the successor will probably do great. But then again, so did the Sega Genesis. There's no need to burn bridges.
> Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely.
In next you suggest not to discount something "Highly unlikely".
That's basically a Pascal Wager territory.
Building closed off ecosystem is Nintendo's whole business, you making business decisions based on idea Nintendo might upend their whole business is... wasteful?
The odds are low, but we're kinda skirting the real question here: What does Valve have to gain by allowing an emulator on the store anyway? It's free so no platform cut, it's open source so it's unlikely to ever be monetizable, and it's legally dubious on top of all that. If this was some billion dollar piece of software like COD I'm sure Valve would fall on the sword like Sony did. But there's literally nothing to gain here except headaches.
Nintendo historically has enormous leverage on multiple Japanese publishers and developers.
Speaking for previous experience in the music industry, It wasn't uncommon for some A&R or label to become "persona non grata" for personal or "political" (rocking the boat too much with some untouchable manager or artist) reasons and getting the boot from most if not all big publishers and distributors.
I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on in the gaming industry.
> Nintendo has repeatedly sued even when they lose.
Why don't we have laws to punish companies like Nintendo for this kind of harassment? What if we had one like "if a copyright lawsuit is found to be frivolous or filed in bad faith, the copyright for all of the plaintiff's works involved in the case is forfeit to the defendant"?
SLAPP laws would not help since they are about public participation - like for example, you oppose a permit for someone down the street, and they sue you for doing so.
Or you express an opinion on facebook about a political figure, and they sue you for defamation.
What we are talking about here would not be considered a SLAPP in most states.
>if a copyright lawsuit is found to be frivolous or filed in bad faith, the copyright for all of the plaintiff's works involved in the case is forfeit to the defendant
That sounds like grounds for trolling in the other direction. Can you imagine some new IP taking off but then being grabbed by some asset flipping company that can outspend the creator?
A lot of people here seem to think Nintendo would not claim it illegal without the circumvention code or wouldn't write a letter saying that. This is totally wrong and shows a complete lack of historical understanding of Nintendo and their legal threats and lawsuits going back decades. Nintendo has repeatedly sued even when they lose. Nintendo has even sued companies for making unlicensed games. Not homebrew, but commercially successful games.
Others seem to believe valve would suddenly be okay with it without circumvention code. This seems naive at best, delusional at worst. That letter includes a threat to valve on distribution. As above, Nintendo isn't going to say "it's fine now I guess". They would happily sue valve with or without the code. Valve may want to partner with them someday.
Valve may be better than most but it seems very unlikely for them to want to die on this hill. The good will does not seem worth the trouble.