"Nintendo Makes It Clear that Piracy Is the Only Way to Preserve Video Game History"

General and high profile video game topics.
User avatar
Retro STrife
Posts: 2531
Joined: August 3rd, 2015, 7:40 pm

"Nintendo Makes It Clear that Piracy Is the Only Way to Preserve Video Game History"

Postby Retro STrife » January 30th, 2019, 11:19 am

Here's a great new article inspired by today's closing of the Nintendo Wii Shop, but looking at it from a *big picture* perspective regarding the future of gaming and retro gaming. The article delves into a lot of the themes that we discuss regularly here, like the VGC's frequent point that you don't really own the things you buy digitally and that gamers aren't vocal enough about stopping it. It also goes deep into my personal biggest concern -- the lack of ability to preserve today's games in their original form... we'll be losing a lot of good games forever each time a dead console closes its digital store. With that, I feel like this digital/online era puts the retro gaming hobby in an uncertain position in 20 years or so, as retro gaming on today's systems certainly won't look the same as it does for us gaming on the systems of our childhoods. [i.e. - I loved Excitebike as a 7 year old, and I can relive that feeling anytime I want by popping it in my NES. If a 7 year old of today loved Excitebike World Rally on the WiiWare platform, he will have nothing but his memory of that game when he grows up.]

While this article focuses on Nintendo because their shop is closing this week, it obviously will apply to Sony, Microsoft, and many others too. Anyway, I highly recommend the read - here's the link and some snippets of the article quoted below that:

LINK: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... me-history

The day Nintendo pulls the plug on the Wii Store Channel should be a strong warning to those who care about video game preservation, and any consumer who uses a digital store: We often don't truly own products we buy digitally, and when one of these digital stores go down, piracy is often the only way to preserve its history.
...
In the digital era, companies increasingly pull the rug out from under products consumers may falsely assume they actually own, notes Case Western Law Professor Aaron Perzanowski, whose last book The End Of Ownership highlighted this problem extensively.
...
Other consumers may simply view such behavior as unavoidable, Perzanowski said. “Unfortunately, I think consumers are starting to see these moves as inevitable,” he said. “Especially for sophisticated digital consumers, like gamers, there is a growing sense that companies are likely to abuse their authority in ways that harm consumers.”
...
“Consumers need to be vocal in their objections to these sort of bait and switch tactics,” he argued. “They need to develop a longer memory and vote with their wallets. These firms rely on consumers getting over their temporary outrage.”



Thoughts?

User avatar
Stalvern
Posts: 1952
Joined: June 18th, 2016, 7:15 pm

Re: "Nintendo Makes It Clear that Piracy Is the Only Way to Preserve Video Game History"

Postby Stalvern » January 30th, 2019, 12:23 pm

In the digital era, companies increasingly pull the rug out from under products consumers may falsely assume they actually own, notes Case Western Law Professor Aaron Perzanowski, whose last book The End Of Ownership highlighted this problem extensively.

Ownership isn't ending; it's being consolidated. Everything has to be safely under corporate control.

User avatar
scotland
Posts: 2561
Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:33 pm

Re: "Nintendo Makes It Clear that Piracy Is the Only Way to Preserve Video Game History"

Postby scotland » January 30th, 2019, 2:16 pm

In some ways, retro-gaming has made enormous strides. I like to game on old 8 bit microcomputers, but I've had some fun either with hobbyist made add-ons like disk drive emulators or complete software computer emulators. I can find scans of old magazines, and there always seems to be a new retrogaming product in the works.

There are parts of gaming I can't replicate that many people don't discuss - the gaming experience on a 1970 university mainframe, or arcade gaming that lacks the specialized controller many arcade games had (MAME is one thing, but the controllers are quite another - "arcade perfect" when it only concerns how the game runs and not how we interact with it is not a term I agree with. Its interesting in that arcades were also 'games as a service' - you rented your enjoyment, and in time, that machine would go away to be replaced by another.

DIgital distribution has some connections to those old arcades. You enjoy your game, but know they will go away and be replaced by another. Even before that was the Gamestop culture of trade in the last game to finance the next game. Many of those gamers never looked back even with physical product.

Video gaming has such a technological element to it. Will kids of today really be retrogamers in the future? Will they assume that they will be able to stream those games onto whatever game playing thing they will have in the future?


Return to “Video Games General”