Games - Nintendo Policies

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	Games - Nintendo Policies

Emulation

Nintendo is known for a "no tolerance" stance against emulation of its video games and consoles. It claims that mask work copyright protects its games from the exceptions that United States copyright law otherwise provides for backup copies. Nintendo uses the claim that emulators running on personal computers have no use other than to play pirated video games, contested by some who say these emulators have been used to develop and test independently produced "homebrew" software on Nintendo's platforms, and that Nintendo's efforts fudge the truth about copyright laws, mainly that ROM copiers are illegal (they actually are legal if used to dump unprotected ROM images on to your computer for personal use), and that emulators are illegal (If they do not use copyrighted BIOS, or use other methods to run the game, they are legal). This stance is largely apocryphal, however; Nintendo remains the only modern console manufacturer which has not sued an emulator manufacturer (the most public example being Sony vs. Bleem.)

Nintendo also continues to produce the consoles with the least heavy injection protection hardware; whereas it is difficult to illegally copy a Nintendo game, it is surprisingly easy to generate novel software, which is not true of the major competing consoles. Sony, however, can also be seen as taking an amenable stance to developers, by way of its Net Yaroze console or the PS2 Linux kit; Microsoft's stance with the XBox was very stand-offish, but the XNA development site on MSDN gives the distinct impression that XNA will join its sister technologies in DirectX and MSVS as being freely available or available at low cost to the general public. That all said, the homebrew community for Nintendo consoles has traditionally been far stronger than that for competing consoles; whether that's due to the difficulty of startup cost on a new console chain compared to the strong and established Nintendo community, more suitable hardware, or simple brand loyalty remains unclear.

The revival of the NES and SNES through emulation has gradually settled down, and NES and SNES ROMs are actually getting easier to find. A common justification pirates try to make is that they believe the pirated games will never see the light of day again and because the titles are no longer on sale, no damage is done to the company. However, Nintendo's opposition remains, due largely to its tendency to re-release old games within new ones, as with Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime, and The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition, as well as with the re-release of many older games for the Game Boy Advance Classic NES Series. The enhanced remake idea sometimes, but not always, curbs the need for emulation of NES quality games on the Nintendo GameCube. Recently Nintendo has announced that their upcoming Nintendo Revolution console will be backwards compatible, allowing users to play GameCube games by inserting the game discs. The system will also allow for the downloading of NES, SNES and N64 games onto the console over the Internet, with them being playable on the console which may actually be achieved through emulation. With this new feature, coined the "virtual console" by the company's president, Nintendo may be able to reduce the illegal ROM downloading and open up a new revenue stream, although success is still unknown. Another possibility is that while Nintendo's official policy is to oppose emulation, they actually encourage third party developers, emulation and distribution of old ROM images through lax enforcement. This may actually benefit Nintendo in the long term as revenue from older, less sophisticated games tends to be low but sales of newer products or remakes are increased by having a larger mindshare. It should be noted that there is a considerable amount of emulation software available for nearly every Nintendo system produced to date while Sony and Microsoft spend considerable amounts of effort trying to prevent such uses of their hardware and software. It should also be noted that sales figures and profitability of Nintendo is considerably higher.

It is notably quite easy to find sales figures for titles believed to be defunct, and in fact those retail streams can continue to generate money, though the release of old titles as pirated software generally kills those revenue streams immediately. Used software is a common counterpoint argument, claiming that the reflux of titles through retailers generates no new revenue for publishers, but studies show that these titles actually perform a role similar to franchise loss leaders, and that in fact used prequel software in circulation can dramatically boost sales rates.

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