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poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Here is the write up from dolphin.
What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to...
dolphin-emu.org
Phase
Member
I often wonder why Nintendo cares so much about this. Emulation will always be around and most of the people emulating Switch games weren't going to buy your product anyway, so it's not like you're losing paying customers (just enthusiasts who probably even help the popularity of your products). The amount of people actually using emulation is so small too, as most don't care to go through the effort of emulation - like this:
Bring Back Scalebound
Banned
What is or would stop Nintendo from taking that one down too?
Genuinely asking. It does not look like a victory for emulation, to me...
Genuinely asking. It does not look like a victory for emulation, to me...
As long as there’s no paywall behind emulators then I’m sure Nintendo probably wouldn’t want to spend lawyer fees on an emulator that makes no money. Yuzu was ranking in 30,000 a month supposedly and they said Zelda was downloaded a million times. So they investigated how yuzu was making money and found a way to attack through breaking dmca.
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Musashipan
Member
I hope Nintendo goes after them
justiceiro
Marlboro: Other M
I mean, I can't say Nintendo came losing from a 2.4 million settlement, but man, it's good to see that emulation will not die because of it.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
They can easily identify themselves as non Yuzu developers. It's 2024.
ReyBrujo
Member
Well, one could say there were a million TotK downloads, not each of them was played or the same individual could have downloaded it more than once but the ones played might have been played by more than one individual. One million is a large number, though.
Also, after "every download is a lost sale" fallacy comes the "it surely promoted sales" one, it never fails.
Doubt they would do that if they just conceded and might face a much, much, much larger amount (70 million at the very least, Nintendo might ask for the cost of every TotK downloaded).
Phase
Member
For how popular the game is I don't think 1mil downloads is a huge amount. I also meant popularity will spread among those who played the rom and enjoyed it rather than them not playing the title at all. It helps to have hype about your product wherever it is coming from.
ReyBrujo
Member
It's counterfactual because I can say that if a million downloads is not a huge amount (since it sold 21 million legally) then the hype provoked by that million download is not huge (since it already had the hype from the 21 million sales). And their opinion is also subjective, from that million there could be half who think the game should be played on an emulator because "nobody with head would play it at 720p 30fps" or that it's not worth the 70 bucks. If you ask me when someone who played it using an emulator is asked how to get the game they won't pass the eShop link, they will pass the emulator+ROM link.
Phase
Member
And I would agree with this. I think it's a waste of Nintendo's time and only serves to make them look bad in the eyes of many gamers.
Zannegan
Member
"Sue you"?
Closer
Member
That's... actually pretty great lol
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Remember that people can play those downloaded games on hacked Switch too.
Barakov
Member
Yeah. If they fly under the radar and don't try to make money off it they should be fine. If Yuzu didn't open a patreon then Nintendo would've probably ignored it.
Still kinda crazy how long Nintendo took to take action against this.
VGEsoterica
Member
People may find this interesting
Jinzo Prime
Gold Member
Suyu is a waste of time. Devs need to support Ryujinx right now.
BacklashWave534
Member
I know, right. There is only like 8 programmers in the entire world who are looking for a challenge. What will we ever do.
ReyBrujo
Member
This. Ryujinx has done the correct thing since the beginning (plus it's written in C#).
diffusionx
Gold Member
I’m pretty sure one of these already shut down, so yea.
ReyBrujo
Member
Those 8 programmers were the ones pushing the boundaries of the project (partially because they were actually getting paid for developing it full time). Sure, you got lots of other programmers around but most of the ones taking charge are people who never had the whole picture in their head, it will take months for them to be productive. Also, since this time they "won't" be pirating they won't be testing it as much as the original team was. And having to deal with code written by others is something not many developers can stomach (believe me, I work full-time working with legacy code).
The PRs will be interesting, though. "Fixing issue which made the menu screen of... a certain game I own and legally dumped but won't name it here... stutter because of unconventional usage of callbacks", "That PR made... uh... a game I own and legally dumped obviously drop frames in the opening where those callbacks were used..." How can you justify modifications if you can't have people test it with a ROM (when naming that ROM could be admitting to piracy)? There will be a lot of "trust me bro" moments in the future because of the baggage they accepted to carry.
The PRs will be interesting, though. "Fixing issue which made the menu screen of... a certain game I own and legally dumped but won't name it here... stutter because of unconventional usage of callbacks", "That PR made... uh... a game I own and legally dumped obviously drop frames in the opening where those callbacks were used..." How can you justify modifications if you can't have people test it with a ROM (when naming that ROM could be admitting to piracy)? There will be a lot of "trust me bro" moments in the future because of the baggage they accepted to carry.
BacklashWave534
Member
Switch emulation will continue. It will just take a while for it to get moving again.
diffusionx
Gold Member
I never said otherwise. I just said that Yuzu developers can't work on Yuzu source code. That doesn't mean those developers can't start working on a new emulator, or that other developers can pick up on Yuzu source code, although either of these paths is difficult.
tkscz
Member
Besides making absolute bank on their patreon (anywhere from $30k - $40k a month) Tropical Haze, the devs of Yuzu and Citra, also had an illegal stash of ROMs that they used to get those games working before the game officially released to the public.
In fact that's what got Nintendo's attention in the first place, Tears of the Kingdom leaked several days early and it just so happens that Yuzu could run it perfectly. ROMs have to be debugged to run correctly on an emulator, which means the devs of that emulator have to have a copy of the ROM and somehow Tropical Haze had an early ROM of TotK. They even openly announced TotK worked early on Yuzu days before it came out, almost the same time as the game leaked (which everyone said was a dumb thing to do and made them look very suspicious).
As long as these new guys understand not to get ROMs early to make money off of this, they should be fine. Ryujinx is still going strong so honestly not sure why these guys don't just go help with that.
Do people just pretend Ryujinx doesn't exist? It's still going strong with no DMCA or law suit in site.
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Hugare
Gold Member
They will 100% be pirating, they just wont be stupid about it. For example: Ryujinx is safe, 'cause they dont report that they have games not yet available being emulated day one, or a Google Drive with .iso files and etc.
But even with the legal stuff out of the way, yeah, they are in a complicated situation. I doubt that they will try to decypher that spaghetti code. Suyu so far has only changed the logo and removed Yuzu mentions from the code. Its 100% Yuzu code still, and it will be for a long time.
Its funny to see people making comparison videos already between Yuzu and Suyu on Youtube
Dont download a thing yet, people
Holammer
Member
Who is this mysterious moustachioed gentleman submitting code to the project? Nobody knows.
I use Ryujinx myself, but if you have limited CPU juice, like a Steam Deck or an ageing PC it matters.
Omnipunctual Godot
Gold Member
They're trying to monetize emulation in some of the scummiest/lowest effort ways possible, like subscription services.I often wonder why Nintendo cares so much about this. Emulation will always be around and most of the people emulating Switch games weren't going to buy your product anyway, so it's not like you're losing paying customers (just enthusiasts who probably even help the popularity of your products). The amount of people actually using emulation is so small too, as most don't care to go through the effort of emulation - like this:
ReyBrujo
Member
Holammer
Member
They chilled out and updates stopped for a few days during the happening (probably went over social media posts, internal coms etc), then it went back to business as usual.
SportsFan581
Member
I'd expect these things to stay around. Nintendo can't really ever stop this.
They can only stop projects that attempt to profit (as that gives them a tangible target), but distributed methods that never identify the coders are almost impossible to shutdown. People that are really into this kind of thing know where to look even when things hop around.
They can only stop projects that attempt to profit (as that gives them a tangible target), but distributed methods that never identify the coders are almost impossible to shutdown. People that are really into this kind of thing know where to look even when things hop around.
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Solarstrike
Gold Member
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Pejo
Member
Definitely the right approach. I think back sometimes to that thread about Dolphin on Steam where I said it was a bad thing for emulation to gain mainstream notoriety and easy access and people disagreed with me, but really that seems to be the correct approach. Don't poke the bear, as it were.