TLDR
Because Valve asked Nintendo if it was allowed, and Nintendo said it shouldn’t (pretty please), so Valve asked Dolphin to ask Nintendo if they could. Dolphin’s team finds of obviously impossible to accomplish.
I think it’s smart on Valve’s part. With how litigation-happy Nintendo is, I don’t think Valve really wants to go to bat for a program that isn’t even their own, and isn’t even needed on Steam anyway.
Plus it helps leave the door open for a potential partnership if Nintendo ever decides to bring some of their games to PC. I think it will happen at some point because there is both a growing frustration with having to re-buy your library with every new Nintendo system and a lot of profit to be made on PC if you approach it like Sony has.
That growing frustration ain’t doing shit to stop people from rebuying. Even if we get to the point where there’s 10 pissed off fans for every 1 buyer, it’s pretty much free money for Nintendo.
I hope I’m wrong but I think we’re several generations away from that. I think what’s more likely is game licensing getting tied to your Nintendo Home account (or whatever it’s called, I don’t have a Switch) and being accessible on new consoles…for a fee, of course.
Haven’t all nintendo consoles been backwards compatible since the Wii though? Don’t Nintendo store games bought on the Wii work on the switch?
I don’t understand, why are people mad that Nintendo isn’t allowing a random person to make money off its intellectual property and consoles? Why would or should they? There’s nothing for them to gain
Its not that much of a loss given you can still launch Dolphin from steam anyway. It just won’t be on the storefront.
I use Steam ROM Manager to add my games to Steam and it works wonderfully.
Yeah, but you don’t get cloud saves or achievements
Can’t complain too much though. Dolphin is so good were spoiled.
it’s a bit of a tangent on this story, but it’s been super disappointing that the wii/gc emulation layers they built for the mario collection hasn’t really materialized in anything else. I feel crazy for thinking we would start getting ports of gc/wii games that feel lost to time
You’d think Nintendo want’s people to play their games, but you’d be wrong. Nintendo wants people to buy their games. Whether they play it or not is irrelevant. While some producers and creatives might still have fun and the user first mindset, current Nintendo is only interested on profit. New releases will always make way more money than supporting old releases via emulation. They don’t care that people can’t legally purchase or play their old games. They think of them as marketing to leverage nostalgia for new releases. They place no value in their library of past games.
I’ve never thought about it like that, but this is so true. I’ve thought about how easy it would be for Nintendo to port for example gen 1 Pokemon to phones and charge $5 or $10 and make a boatload of cash. Easy money. But as you imply, that would devalue new releasesand reduce sales if people would rather spend time playing old games.
You’d think Nintendo want’s people to play their games, but you’d be wrong. Nintendo wants people to buy their games.
Ford doesn’t want you to drive their cars, they want you to buy their cars.
Apple doesn’t want you to use their computers/phones, they want you to buy their computers/phones.
My town doesn’t want me to use water, it wants me to pay for that water.
I don’t think the Ford and Apple examples apply, as these companies make primarily physical products. Both of these companies really do want you to use their products for two reasons:
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Most of their marketing is literally just people seeing their products being used.
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Cars wear out with usage, as do computers, so the more you use their products, the sooner you’ll buy a new one.
Digital media is unique in that it’s not highly visible and using it more doesn’t make it degrade.
Old Nintendo was only interested in profit as well, they just didn’t have the reputation to act quite as greedy.
Current Nintendo is the capitalist wet dream
Replace Nintendo with Sony or Microsoft and you get the same result. No company cares about you playing their games, just buying and spending money. Hell they’d prefer if you didn’t play them and just gave them money.
Frankly I don’t think this is quite accurate when it comes to media companies. They want people playing games because people who play games are more likely to talk about them and sell them to other people.
But they would rather have people talking of their new games. for sure.
They’re not lost, although they would be if Nintendo ever got their way. They have conclusively proven they’re not up to the challenge of preserving stuff, and luckily people have done so anyway - despite Nintendo’s attempts at fucking with it. The bummer is that you have no legal recourse.
So there’s two thoughts on this, yes the games are preserved thankfully. But also, they are culturally lost. If people don’t have easy access to creative works, those creative works become lost to all but the few who 1, even know they exist and 2, have the ability to aquire them
So yeah you and me, we can go grab images and emulators. I have a hacked wii and a retrotink. But that doesn’t mean the games aren’t lost to the vast vast majority
retroarch remains.
