>There's next to no loss for them here.

If anything, going after the people making this would be a greater loss than just letting it exist. Lawyers ain't free.

For most people yes, but Rockstar probably has a salaried legal dept with nothing better to do.

If they had nothing better to do then they’d fire half of them.

You overestimate managerial competence and underestimate misaligned incentives and the ability of people to justify the existence of their jobs by inflating the importance of useless tasks to management.

GTA III was recently remastered so this isn’t strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all.

They brought the impact on themselves by having the remaster be a rebuild of the crappy mobile port. One of the most well known games ever and they treated it like trash.

Digital Foundry did a video back when it released detailing the problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1JJt7xHTlE

>... this isn't strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all.

You're right, but you're right because you're arguing against a statement/point I never made. :)

There's "next to no loss" (I did choose my words carefully...) because people will continue to buy the remastered versions for the consoles they were released for. The only segment of people Rockstar may or may not lose out to are the people who are going to go to the effort to port this to an old, defunct console (one that Rockstar doesn't even see profitability in, since they don't have a version for it), but even then this project requires a legally purchased copy of the game in order to get started.

So now we're into a fun legal/moral area of, "I've purchased this game legally, and I've purchased this console legally, and now I would like to use both together".

Remastered for dreamcast? Right..

They didn't even bother to release san Andreas for the Oculus quest after promoting it. And the remaster was really bad quality.

For Dreamcast?

The Dreamcast port requires a purchased copy of the game for the assets, so if anything I'd expect it to drive more sales.

None of which makes the game not their property. It's their right to prevent people from doing this if they want. I don't disagree that they shouldn't, but ownership doesn't hinge on the recency of the work nor the profitability of it.

They could defend, but there is significant precedent to allow decompilation and reverse engineering and even Nintendo won’t go after projects that decompile code, but don’t include original artwork or audio (hence the need to supply your own copy of the game for this port).

Legal precedent?

Yes, that's why the laws need to be changed to get a fairer ownership system on older titles.

If you don’t defend it. A court could tell you one day it’s not yours to defend.

This gets repeated so frequently online it’s bordering on an (inaccurate) trueism because people vastly overestimate how at-risk entities are for losing their IP. A niche Dreamcast project is not a threat to Rockstar. They’re not going to look up one day at a reality where due to piracy the courts strip one of the largest video game companies in the world of their core IP. Frankly that’s too ridiculous to even consider a possibility.

This is 100% false in terms of copyright. This only applies to trademarks.

There is some loss for them here, Take2 has invested a lot of money into getting a mobile games porting company to port the game to phones and then back to PC as a "re-release". Fans just fixing the original game so it runs on their platform of choice and running that rather than buying the much inferior remasters will hurt their bottom line and make their bad investments even worse.

And, of course, current copyright law doesn't care about good will, it's there to protect the interests of the copyright industry, although the AI industry seems to get away with blatant copyright infringement as long as the copied contents are passed through a model as an intermediary step.

As far as I can tell, Rockstar doesn't really care all that much, it's the suits at the top of the publishing chain that do the legal threats.