For example: "What would happen if all companies blocked individuals from doing what they want with the hardware they bought?" You get a hacking community and people imprisoned for the unlocked hardware they paid for. Not to mention a whole lot of ewaste that could otherwise work for years.
No, that's not a good example. How about this one: "What would happen if all companies opened up their hardware and stopped forcing people to upgrade for no reason?" Eutopia, that's what! Less ewaste. Less consumerism. People can actually use the hardware they paid for the way they want to use it.
This argument has been (ab)used since piracy has been a thing. I'm not aware of any company going under directly because of piracy, especially not just because of emulators. If there is one, I'd love to know, but even so, the numbers is negligible. Also, emulation is not the same piracy. While emulation can be used for piracy, it is not the main use case.
Corporations like Nintendo are not your friend.
You can go further than that, there's never been a study proving that piracy is making companies lose money.
It's repeated ad-nauseam by lobbies but as far as I'm aware, it's just urban legend for now.
One empirical demonstration of piracy's impact on sales (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Softwar...>):
>Will Wright said that Raid on Bungeling Bay sold 20,000 copies for the Commodore 64 in the US, but 800,000 cartridges for the Nintendo Famicom with a comparable installed base in Japan, "because it's a cartridge system [so] there's virtually no piracy".
That's not a demonstration, that can be explained by the difference in hardware penetration, the quality of service provided which was much higher on consoles at the time, pricing, market differences or other factors. You had plenty of counterfeited/bootleg cartridges as well on the famicom.
I'm sure we can find more than one story from the 80s if that's really a thing.
> Factors cited were the heavy debt incurred during its aggressive expansion in the 1990s, growing competition from mass discounters and Internet piracy.[10] Mismanagement, managerial incompetence, and crippling restrictions from the first bankruptcy deal also contributed to Tower's demise.[11]
Not just piracy to say the least.
The Government Accountability Office came out in 2010 with a report that said these numbers “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.”
http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-mov...
Sorry, but what is "X"? Emulation? If everyone emulated Nintendo games, we don't really know that Nintendo would cease to exist, but they probably would not cease to exist because plenty of folks who emulate Nintendo games still buy Nintendo products, because they are, you know, Nintendo fans. :)
> And failing that if you want to just steal, then just steal. But what really rubs me the wrong way is when people who have chosen to steal start moralizing their position like they're standing up for some vague rights or principles.
What really rubs me the wrong way is when commenters on HN paint people who use emulators as thieves, and emulator developers as enablers of theft, and nothing more. The irony here is that you're doing moral posturing yourself in this comment. The commenter you responded to never mentioned piracy. The article in question never mentioned piracy. So if by "X" you meant "piracy", well, nice strawman, otherwise you're equivocating emulation with piracy, which is wrong.
EDIT: By the way, a great reason to emulate Switch games is to experience them at higher resolutions and higher framerates. Thought you should know, not everyone does it to save a few bucks.
So if by "X" you meant "piracy", well, nice strawman, otherwise you're equivocating emulation with piracy, which is wrong.
Related to this, accessibility, particular for retro games. I'm visually impaired, it's easier for me to emulate GB games because have you played on a GBA screen recently? Likewise, since my MS gives me twitches, the ability to do things like save scum is nice when I'm replaying NES games. I own an NES and a GB along with the games. I'm not stealing anything; I'm preventing my disability from locking me out of my own belongings.
Nintendo needs to make a better argument for their hardware if they want people to buy it. Not by dictating laws about hardware usage. Simply put, they're living in the past where different hardware and different firmware mattered.
What's next, Microsoft doesn't let me run anything other than Windows on my hardware? Wait ... https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o... https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-...
Hey look, propaganda! Your favorite <3 Hopefully, this is a wake up call for you to read between the lines. In this case: No, Microsoft did not invent secure cloud computing.
You can apply this to literally anything to make it bad.
What would happen if everyone only ever emulated pirated Switch games? Nintendo would cease to exist. What would happen if everyone just stopped buying consoles and only played games on PC? Nintendo would cease to exist, Sony and Microsoft would take a massive hit. What would happen if everyone just... stopped playing games at all, ever? The entire video game industry would die.
Does that mean I can never decide games are a waste of my time and money? Obviously not. People are different and make different decisions.
And when I've done my duty and bought one, and bought the games, am I allowed to tinker then?
I see what you're driving at, but there are a great number of advantages to emulation and system hacks even for those of us that buy our games.
My PSP, when properly hacked, didn't need disks as I could store all the games I owned on a memory card or two. They loaded faster, used less battery and I didn't have to carry the damn things around. Similarly I had a PS2 with a hard drive so I could have all the games available on a menu system, and with faster load times. Same story on the Wii.
The other way around, I would play my Wii games that I had bought on Dolphin, which generally could render them at a higher resolution to target the 1080p tv I had at the time, where the Wii itself was limited to 576p. I routinely emulate the megadrive/genesis on all sorts of platforms including those hacked consoles, so I can play Sonic, which I bought many years ago.
I don't think these actions are wrong, nor do I think they hurt Sony, Sega or Nintendo, unless we're getting into the territory of "you denied them money they could have had if you re-bought everything multiple times". Sure, and I could give them 100 bucks a month direct from my paycheck, but I'm not doing that either.
This is an awful rule to live by. There are very few things in the world that _everyone_ would actually do.
I feel like this "law" really fails to account that not everybody on Earth is the same person and won't do the same thing because they either don't want to or can't.
Not everybody will want to use an emulator (because they want to play online, have a deckable console, or whatever other reason) or be able to get one (because they don't have a powerful enough pc). And people using emulators might make additional publicity that might bring new consumers to Nintendo products.
So, like, if John really dislikes Joe, the rule saying "if you really dislike someone, punch Joe in the face" wouldn't be a rule of the appropriate sense. It doesn't make sense that if Steve really disliked Erwin, that he would punch Joe in the face as a result.
The rule that John should be considering whether he would approve of, is closer to[1] the rule "If you really dislike someone, punch them in the face." . Presumably John would find this rule less appealing than "If you really dislike someone, punch Joe in the face.", because someone might dislike John and therefore punch John in the face, and John would rather not be punched in the face.
So, in the case you gave an example of, about "whether to have children", the question would be along the lines of, "If everyone decided whether to have children (as well as how many) using the same criteria that you are using (where these criteria could include their personal tastes, aspirations, etc. as a factor), would you approve of the outcome?" This seems quite compatible with the ways that people differ.
Like, it isn't about assuming everyone behaves in the same way, but about assuming everyone responds to their desires and motivations in "the same way", for the right sense of "the same way".
[1] I won't say that this is exactly the right rule to consider. idk. Probably not quite.
But also remember that this is about human choices, not forced realities. The thought experiment is about what happens if everyone chooses to act in a certain way, not if everyone is a literal copy/paste automaton. To illustrate, even if everyone decided they didn't want kids, assuredly thousands/millions would still have "whoopsie" babies.
With regards to choosing to have three kids: overpopulation, famine, and destruction of Earth are not a given. Firstly (and again) because nowhere close to everyone on Earth is actually able to have three kids for a variety of reasons, and secondly because even if you did have exponential population growth you can avoid those things, mostly by colonizing space / building vertically / Dyson Sphere / etc. Unlikely but not a given so therefore hard to argue its necessarily bad.
Yes!
> Is it immoral for me to have 3 kids because it means exponential growth, overpopulation, famine and destruction of the Earth? If we follow the logic to its end, the only moral choice is for everyone to have not 1, not 3 but exactly 2 kids.
Limiting to 2 would cause the extinction of the human race. Some people should have 3 so that we get a sustainable level of population growth - especially people in countries where the population is declining.
(I'm not anti-emulator, I'm not even a huge fan of the categorical imperative, but this is an astonishingly weak counterargument)
> Yes!
This is a flawed rule then.
There is no moral implication that you need to create kids.
There is also a number you can orientate yourself if you like to achieve a certain outcome
Nonetheless are you aware that Nintendo had quite bad numbers on and off?
It could have broken Nintendo.
Also, leave it to HN to take some news about video game emulation to a discussion about antinatalism, haha
Also it would be 2.something not 2 exactly, because some number of people die from various causes before reproducing.
Of course, due to mortality we actually need more than 2. Around 2.1 - 2.4 for most developed nations IIRC.
And this doesn't hold if the household have more than one wives, say.
Even if every human were single and babies were made in sperm banks and creches, and every human was assigned one baby from the pool to raise, you still "have" 2 kids, in the sense that you took part in the creation of 2 kids.
I don't know how this needs to be explained to any human?
It takes 2 to replace 2. Not 1 for 1, 2 for 2.
How the ever loving F do you wind up asking about the 2 kids mating with each other? What the hell is going on in there?
The context though is the current real world: It’s perfectly fine to have 1 kid or even no kids at all and just adopt existing orphans, because a lot of other people have been having way more than 2 kids for way too long.
Someone misunderstood the purpose off that question, and said that by that logic everyone should have 2 kids. They were wrong about that but not because the number 2 was wwrong. 2, or really 2.something, is the number that everyone has to have, IF they were applying the "what if everyone does X" correctly.
What they were wrong about was a couple things:
1 The question isn't a simple litteral absolute rule. It's a tool that you use along with others to evaluate some idea or action. It only helps judge one dimension among many.
A previous commenter gave the simple example of queues. Imagine you have figured out a trick that lets you get away with jumping every line. The trick works. No one else in the line ever complains that you're cutting instead of waiting for your turn.
What's the harm then? Free market people like to try to excuse bad actions that way. Maybe the trick is you tell a joke, so it's a transaction, the people you cut in front of voluntarily let you and they got a funny joke out of it.
The question exposes the problem, because, ok, cool, life hack, do this trick and never have to wait in a line again. Since it's sound advice, let's teach this knowledge to everyone in schools. What happens then? Does it still work?
This exposes that this advantage you are taking is actually coming from somewhere. You aren't just more efficient at lines, you are benefitting only on the backs of everyone else.
2 In this case the X in "What if everyone did X?" wouldn't be "have exactly 2.36 children" it would be more like "had however many children they wanted"
Because it turns out that people want different things, and so if you just let everyone have however many kids they want or feel they can manage, it more or less works out naturally.
Everyone doesn't want 5 kids, or 0 kids, and so if everyone did what they want, it's fine, and so it's fine for you to have however many kids you want.
You CAN in fact have just 1 kid if you want.
But the thing you were replying to was about the basic math, and 2 was the right number in the context of that oversimplified misunderstanding of "what if everyone did that?" If letting people do what they want would not work out, and we had to make a rule to make everyone do exactly the same thing, it would indeed be everyone has to have 2 kids.
Yes I think some people would cherry pick skewed numbers to justify whatever action they want, but doing it with good faith estimates is pretty helpful. Usually the answer is don't do that.
Nintendo has a long habit of stopping console support and games become harder or impossible to buy; waiting for a Nintendo console to reach end of life before emulating and dumping the games means that some games are going to be missed. Also, emulating currently supported consoles allows for things like archival records of system OSes to study how they changed over time. (Because in 100 years, some graduate student will study how 20th and 21st century video gaming companies handled security updates).
I think a better question would be "what if it were possible to buy 90% of Nintendo's historic catalog to play on the switch instead of less than 1%?"
I emulate because I already know the retro games I want a) cost $15-30 b) would cost that if available, are never on the eshop anyways so I don't even bother checking and c) I remember when SquareEnix android games accidentally, and carelessly, deleted everyone's saves because they arbitrarily forced offline single player games (NES/SNES final fantasy series) to be online-only cloud saves.
We're at the tail end of a decade of being shat on and in some cases Nintendo just refusing to sell us the products we want to buy.
The entitlement is not with the users in this case.
That's a very nice strawman you're putting in the middle of that field. I can do the same too. What if everyone in the video game industry opened its games to mods and gave out tools? An unbelievable breadth of quality content and a new generation of excellent designers. What if everyone stopped buying video games because we now all own rubles? What if we all became blue?
Is piracy selfish? Yeah. I'll be the first one to admit it. I pirate it because I don't want to pay for it, or I can't. Is piracy wrong? No. Data wants to be free, and we collectively thrive when ideas, plays, music, creations of the mind flows freely. And if it causes a company to make a tiny bit less on the billions it makes, I won't be crying for them.
+1 I like hacking and tinkering with tech but these should not be socialized solutions for the masses. They are fun hobby projects, if you want the thing go buy it. The money supports the thing and is the reason it exists.
The same argument used to say pirated music would kill music. I hope you realize how ridiculous it is.
Yes, because it was true then too. Well, mostly true. There are big differences between music and video games. For example, the vast majority of artists can't support themselves based on the sale of recorded music. Most support themselves through performances. Additionally, there is a lot licensing of music to movies, TV and advertising.
But yes if no one paid for music it's quite likely that the industry would cease to be.
None of this applies to video games.
But I don't care if you pirate music (I did, at least before Spotify made it too convenient not to bother, which is a whole separate lesson). I also don't particularly care if you want to emulate Switch games. What I find distasteful is dressing up this selfishness as somehow being moral or just. You're not a principled crusader standing up for freedom. You're just a guy who doesn't want to pay for something.
You don't get to define what is everyone's view of morality.
Do you find it moral that copyright holders can keep charging forever for the same goods AND enjoy state protection at the same time? Piracy is what limits this behavior from becoming too extreme. Remove piracy, and you will see the most outrageous corporate behaviors in action in no time.
Checks and balances - that's the name of the game.
An emulator is just an API-compatible device. It is legal to make and sell an emulator. It can be used for playing legit and pirated copies of games, just as the original console can. It's a healthy form of competition (like between PC manufacturers), resulting in better performing hardware for the consumer.
The comment you're replying to doesn't mention or defend piracy. They're only saying Nintendo's Switch hardware is lacking so people are searching for a better performing alternative, and Nintendo is using anti-competitive legal trickery to suppress alternatives, instead of improving their product.
I don't understand when this rule should/should not be used. Clearly, the rule breaks down in certain situations.
For example: What if everyone decided to go into tech? That's not really good for society since we need things like doctors, but some people do need to go into tech.
I feel like these are the same people that haven't learned how to shut up in highschool
Nintendo's hardware business would cease to exist, and the world would have a little less e-waste in it. How would that be a bad thing?
If we want to cut down on e-waste, we should rather lengthen the smartphone replacement cycle. That's a better impact just because of sheer numbers. Lobby for replaceable-battery mandates in smartphones and a minimum duration for security updates of 5 years or even 10 years.
How is a Switch materially different from a laptop, or a tablet with a controller strapped on to it?
> If we want to cut down on e-waste, we should rather lengthen the smartphone replacement cycle. That's a better impact just because of sheer numbers. Lobby for replaceable-battery mandates in smartphones and a minimum duration for security updates of 5 years or even 10 years.
Why not both? Disposable devices are bad, needing duplicate devices in the same form factor is bad, DRM is bad (especially when it's locking down how you can use or repair your own hardware). Tackling one doesn't prevent anyone from tackling the rest. We need to fix all of them
They don't even need to stop releasing their own accessories when they have a legitimate reason to do so. The Wiimote could have just been a Bluetooth gamepad and a LED strip. In fact, that's exactly what it was!
If you steal then thats your problem, but its wrong morally and is gross to do without reasons.
Like PC game studios ceased to exist?
A good rule to live by is to ask "what would happen if everyone did X?" In this case, Nintendo would cease to exist. Maybe you'd be happy about this. Plenty of people wouldn't. Switches are generally available and not that expensive. If you want to play Switch games, buy one. If you don't, don't.
And failing that if you want to just steal, then just steal. But what really rubs me the wrong way is when people who have chosen to steal start moralizing their position like they're standing up for some vague rights or principles. At least be honest about it. The hyporcrisy, intellectual dishonesty, bad faith arguments and self-delusion is in many ways worse than the theft.