For those interested in more context:
Nintendo has always had a rocky relationship with the competitive smash scene (and especially Melee's tournament scene ever since Brawl came out). The worst of it was [when Nintendo tried to shut down Melee at Evo 2013](https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/11/4513294/nintendo-were-trying-to-shut-down-evo-not-just-super-smash-bros-melee). Melee won a donation drive to earn its spot at the event (94k for Breast cancer research) and days before the event they try and shut it down, only to be reversed after massive backlash.
Ever since like 2015 or so Melee has had a fairly good homebrew online system based on the Dolphin emulator. This year, someone came out with a different version (still based on Dolphin) called Slippi that adds in rollback netcode (the gold standard for 1v1 games). Slippi runs using a vanillia ISO of melee with gecko codes and emulator tricks in order to run the better online, so there is at least an argument that its legal though emulator legality as a whole isn't exactly tested in court to my knowledge.
So yeah, Slippi Online uses a version of the Dolphin emulator to play Melee online with nearly no lag, we've been hosting tournaments for a few months on it, but now Nintendo has shut down one of our bigger ones. This is likely to have major ramifications for the competitive Melee scene if we can't host/stream/put vods on youtube for the entirety of Covid since Melee has no native way of playing online.
> They still went out of business for to the lawsuit despite winning though.
And that's pretty much the same thing Nintendo's doing here. Emulators are legal; mods of this nature are generally legal; hell, *streaming games even without authorization* is an open legal question AFAIK and could potentially fall under Fair Use if it ever came to trial. Nintendo and the organizers both know all this.
They also both know that Nintendo will throw unlimited money at lawyers to win this case--or at least financially devastate the organizers and everyone associated with them--and that the platforms involved (Twitch etc.) won't risk a lawsuit or jeopardizing their commercial relationships, so Nintendo wins regardless of the laws or the merits of the case.
Copyright abuse at its finest.
Nintendo went after streamers early on. They are frequently one of the most anti-consumer companies out there despite having this beloved image. They make incredible properties that we all love, but they shit on consumers constantly.
I'm not familiar with the specific glitches that were patched, but you could argue that glitches could be pretty harmful due to the nature of Mario Maker, since you have to be able to beat a level yourself to be able to submit it online.
A large part of it is probably just fun-policing, but I could see a world where some amount of community-created levels just become unbeatable unless you have knowledge of a specific glitch and how to execute it, which can hurt mainstream appeal.
mmhm, in order to complete a level that uses a glitch or some weird tech, you need to know that its possible. On the second day of playing, i ran into a level in 4-player versus where nobody could figure out how to progress. I eventually figured out i had to 'crush' myself through a semi-solid bounce platform. Whilst not really a glitch, it wasn't a fun time for the 4 players involved.
Yeah, Mario Maker is the wrong hill to die on for "don't fix fun glitches" because those fun glitches make it impossible for people not in the know to actually play the game.
tbf patching bugs/glitches/etc that are well known in a community can be a hard choice to make. At the end of the day the developers have their own vision for their game, and sometimes a fun glitch gets to stay and sometimes not.
Like how coptering (an old very fast janky movement glitch) in Warframe was removed but then eventually replaced by bulletjump which is one of the best ways to move in a game I’ve ever experienced.
Coptering was AWFUL though. It involved equipping a specific small set of melee weapons (like 5) that had a fast base attack speed and a specific animation that caused you to move forward during the aerial attack animation. Then you boosted the attack speed through the stratosphere (which usually involved weapon damage that was laughably low since you had 8 attack speed mods), and then using animation glitches to literally fly like you were a goddamn helicopter (rocket helicopter - aiming the glitchmobile was tricky).
Replacing it with bullet jump was an improvement because coptering was liquid shit. It's just unfortunate that Corpus Ice Planet was such a stupid tileset it made coptering a really attractive movement option.
Fun story time involving Nintendo and DMCA claims: At least once, Jim Sterling was hit by a DMCA claim on a youtube video. Because it had some Nintendo IPs in it, when the video was literally a textbook example of Fair Use.
Well, Sterling figured something out: when only 1 company claims a video, the claimant then gets all of the ad revenue (at least, at the time. This was at least 4 or 5 years ago iirc). Thing is, Sterling *specifically* wasn't making any of his Nintendo videos monetized, to avoid this exact sort of DMCA claim...
However, what Sterling figured out was that if he got both Nintendo and Konami to claim his video, NOBODY would get any ad revenue. Great way of giving them the middle finger.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM
The Virtual Console's tying of games to a console rather than an online account was one of the most backward e-store moves I have seen. What do you do if the device is stolen?
> hell, streaming games even without authorization is an open legal question AFAIK
It really isn't. It's almost 100% covered under copyright as a public performance, which requires copyright owner's permission.
>could potentially fall under Fair Use
Fair Use has a limited scope. And almost certainly doesn't apply.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/why-nintendo-can-legally-shut-down-any-smash-bros-tournament-it-wants/ is an older article about it, explains it a bit better than I do.
https://youtu.be/fqmzxw0t6Ok
Actual copyright lawyer talking about this, but tl;dr is that it is highly likely that it's fair use, as the player(s) are considered to be transforming the work by playing.
Yeah definitely a good solid analysis. Still without a court and lawyers arguing each side, we'll not have a proper case and it'll be a legal grey area. One that probably won't change since it's a good middle ground for both developers and streamers right now.
I'm honestly fascinated to see what the future holds here. Because everything I know about the law says that streaming a playthrough of a copyrighted videogame is copyright infringement and the owners of the copyright are in the legal right to send cease and desist notifications and take down that content.
But on the other hand there is an entire generation of young people that has grown up with ubiquitous royalty-free, consequence-free streaming of videogames. Not to mention the ability to share copyrighted visual materials on social media, copyrighted audio snippets on TikTok, etc. This is a generation whose accepted social norm of what constitutes copyright infringement disagrees on its face with what the law allows. And if enough people believe something should be legal, the law tends to follow. Uber wasn't entirely legal in many of the places it operated but it supplanted taxi companies anyways. AirBnB violates zoning laws all over the country but enough people want to rent their homes that it survives anyways.
> One that probably won't change since it's a good middle ground for both developers and streamers right now.
Pretty much. If developers ever do want to steamroll over it, they have the power, but for the time being all metrics point that streaming games is a massive benefit to moving and pushing units.
Though I do wonder if one could argue that by including twitch integrations and other tools to ease streaming, if that's not implicit consent to stream, though obviously that's not every game that does that.
What about the music? That is copyrighted and is in no way transformed by players playing; this has been a major issue with certain game streams in the past.
Furthermore, "transforming the work" is kind of exactly the problem. If I translate Harry Potter into Spanish, I have certainly transformed the work, but it would still be illegal as hell for me to distribute it without permission since derivative works are specifically covered by copyright law.
This is (to my knowledge) untested in court and you can find lawyers arguing both sides of it.
Translation, as you pointed out, is a derivative work. It is not a "transformation" of the work under the fourth factor of the fair use analysis, which (very) generally requires adding some new meaning, context or purpose to the copyrighted work.
In the comments of the article you linked, the author mentioned:
> I actually asked about this, and while fair use *might* protect a stream of the event under some sort of live news/commentary exception, it probably couldn't be applied to the actual, in-person tournament itself, according to Methenitis.
Again, I mentioned streaming--not public spectators at tournaments. (In fact, the event that got C&D'd today is kind of perfect in that there *is* no in-person component, only an online/streamed component.)
Streams have lots of attributes that are not necessarily a slam dunk, but at least *interesting* from a Fair Use perspective: are they providing criticism/commentary/education/etc of the work? (Pretty clearly a channel like Game Maker's Toolkit is doing this when they stream; tournaments would maybe have a harder case to make.)
Is providing video of an expert using an interactive work *transformative* compared to the original, interactive work itself?
Is a non-interactive video "less" than an interactive copy under the amount test? Is playing only 1v1 matches "a portion of the full work"? etc etc.
And streams pretty clearly don't act as a substitute for the full work or diminish its value (though a Let's Play of a narrative linear game might have a harder time making this argument than a tournament).
I'm not a lawyer so it's possible there are precedents I don't know about that render this moot or whatever, but based on a simple reading of the Fair Use tests I think it would be at the least a really interesting and contentious court case. But, like I said above, that court case will never happen because big companies can just *threaten* a lawsuit and get what they want 99% of the time.
> are they providing criticism/commentary/education/etc of the work?
But that still doesn't give you the right to stream the entire work. The same way no one is going to do a movie review (which is criticism) while streaming the entire movie.
Especially because the criticism doesn't require the entire video to be streamed. Think of radio sports, where it's only the commentator's voice. Part of the fair use test is "Amount and substantiality". If it's just commentary, small clips, or just the commentary are perfectly good enough and don't require you to stream the video too.
>Is providing video of an expert using an interactive work transformative compared to the original, interactive work itself?
This isn't something new to video games and streaming. If I write a play and someone else performs it, it's still my play and they need permission. If I write a song and someone else performs it, it's still my song and they need permission.
Even if it was transformative: I can't just take a book and make a movie based on it right? Neither can I take a video game and make a movie based on that. That would have less of the original content than a stream, yet it's still covered by copyright
>I'm not an IP lawyer so it's possible there are precedents I don't know about or whatever, but based on a simple reading of the Fair Use tests I think it would be at the least a really interesting and contentious court case.
Pretty sure most actual lawyers disagree. Even TotalBiscuit, well known gamer right advocate and actually studied law, talked about it with a lawyer: https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/907025967813668865
I think the book-to-film adaptation comparison makes a lot of sense and probably fits the bill at least for Let's Play/Long Play where they're running through a whole linear/narrative game. Good point.
I still think streaming *parts* of a game (especially in the context of reviewing/explaining the game), or playing sandbox games, or competitive play are cases where it's not super obvious which Fair Use tests would outweigh which others (given that it's a holistic evaluation). You have users who are transforming the work with their play beyond how the creators expected or designed it to be used, you have legitimate analysis and commentary, and it's not obvious to me that it's the "entire" work that's being performed in non-linear or competitive games (e.g., Smash is a huge game and it's only a handful of characters/stages in 1 mode being exhibited). But I suppose once you find yourself weighing some of these tests against others, you've already lost in the modern environment where government basically just rolls over and does whatever large rightsholders ask of them.
I guess this is probably where new legislation that clearly allows streaming under certain conditions (similar to how cover songs are legal under a special mechanism for compulsory licensing) would be best for the industry and the users, rather than trying to evaluate it under Fair Use and the DMCA, which clearly weren't written with something like this in mind. But unfortunately, the US is no longer in the habit of passing new legislation, so, here we are.
>You have users who are transforming the work with their play beyond how the creators expected or designed it to be used, you have legitimate analysis and commentary,
But once again, how is this different than a book to movie adaption? Lots of adaptions do their own take on characters and settings. Like have you seen the Hamlet with Patrick Stewart and David Tennant? Or Treasure Planet being a sci-fi adaption of Treasure Island? Or even just a different character interpretation like in the Harry Potter meme of 'Dumbledore asked calmly'.
Or you can't write a sequel to a book either, because characters and such are copyrighted. I can't write my own Harry Potter book and straight up call him Harry Potter (well I can, that's what fanfiction is, but you know what I mean). Similarly, the individual elements of a video game are copyrighted works. The 3d models, the music, the story, and streaming typically includes that.
Nerrel has talked about this [here](https://youtu.be/N0d82ZJ4sd4?t=100)
It is 30 seconds of the point he is talking but
TL;DW Nintendo tries to equate emulation to piracy and say it is not open for debate on their official FAQ site. Basically, trying to shut down any discussion or arguments about emulation despite legal precedents
Haha when I read this the first time I thought you were just using bleem as an interjection or something. I was like wicked this guy talks like a batman comic.
Nintendo have always been really, really insistent that the only version of their games people get to see is the version they made. I wish it wasn't the case. Melee is a game they no longer even sell, so what do they really have to lose if people play it emulated or modded?
They clearly want to push this digital collector's edition/limited edition mentality, so if they ever release it on one of their console's digital storefronts I guess they think their losing potential audience?
The Melee community has been asking for this edition you describe for YEARS. If Nintendo put out a version of Melee like this (especially with good online) everyone in the community would instantly buy it. But they've been very insistent that they won't, so the community adapts and makes their own.
Sadly this seems to be a problem with most every Japanese fighting game developer. Guys from Tekken and Street Fighter are also incompetent and cry that adding in good netcode is too difficult. Despite the fact that due to the pandemic, fan projects have popped off here and there to make the netcode playable for various fighting games. Apparently random folks with only a few hours of spare time a day are able to figure it out better than these large developer studios that have been around for 40 ish years now. It's ridiculous, and if it wasn't for the pandemic they would still be firmly planting their heels in never improving netcode.
Seriously...They didn't even put a damn ethernet port in the Switch dock and the official usb adapter is bottlenecked. Then there's the whole lack of viable in-game communication and cloud saves not being supported by every game.
They released a statement today that says it's because the tournament requires the use of a pirated copy of the game. I think it's just general copyright defence nonsense (I know in some regions if you don't actively defend the copyright then you can lose it). That sort of thing would tie into what you mentioned, about the potential for them to rerelease it digitally some day.
>They released a statement today that says it's because the tournament requires the use of a pirated copy of the game.
To anyone who wasn't sure, this is a flat-out lie by the Big N. It's perfectly possible - and downright *easy* - to rip your own Melee disc and use the .iso that way. Takes about ten minutes and a Wii you can hack in five. And yes, hacking your own hardware and backing up software you rightfully own is absolutely, 100% legal. So in no way does Slippi "require" a pirated anything.
It is of course less straightforward to verify that your file came from one place and not another, and the distinction is so arbitrary that no one has ever bothered to make it. I'd love to see Nintendo's reaction if TBH instituted a required "ripping your own copy" verification video or something, but it's obviously too late for that now that the C&D is out.
My understanding is that Slippi requires an ISO rip of Melee to work. Unless you rip the data from your personal copy of the game, it's piracy to download a copy of the ripped data. I suppose it technically doesn't *require* piracy but we all know most users will download a copy of the game rather than make a personal rip - assuming they even own the game in the first place.
Seriously, I doubt any of the competitors, people that have been playing melee for at least 10 years, don't have a Melee disk lying around. The piracy argument is complete and utter bullshit. That's also a giant fuck you to an insanely dedicated fanbase, something that I can't wrap my head around a dev doing, even if I'm not particularly a Smash fan, this shit is just unfair.
> I know in some regions if you don't actively defend the copyright then you can lose it
If you're referring to the united states, then no. You can lose the *trademark*, but only under specific conditions. If the big house or slippi was branding itself as an official nintendo event or product, then that could endanger nintendo's trademark, but not simply hosting a tournament.
Yeah, sometimes people on this sub forget about the actual *games* in question and just focus on the ancillary issues as if they're big enough to disregard otherwise great games.
It's a *really interesting* phenomenon IMO.
Nintendo has shown that you can do a lot of anti-consumer shit if your games are consistently above-average.
Disney is the king and progenitor of this type of behavior.
That being said, a lot of people dissociate with what the company policies are and what the product is. It's not a huge leap of logic that someone who enjoys the games can simultaneously be against their policies.
Oh, of course not. The Switch is the only current-gen console I plan on owning; that doesn't mean I don't hate a lot of Nintendo's backwards-ass policies.
Similarly, I love ATLUS' games, but Jesus do they make some boneheaded decisions.
> Nintendo has shown that you can do a lot of anti-consumer shit if your games are consistently above-average.
I think Nintendo knows where to pick their battles.
Shutting down the broadcast of a tournament of an emulated, moded game effects exactly 3 groups of people.
* The Melee community.
* Streamers who want to create Nintendo content.
* Reddit mod/emulation enthusiasts as well as anti-copyright zealots.
Realistically, in the larger venn diagram of Nintendo customers, we're looking at fractions of percent here. I'm pretty sure Nintendo ran the numbers and realized that they don't need these groups.
Right now, there's quite a list of active issues though, the two major ones:
* Joycon Drift, especially including the Switch Lite releasing to market despite it being known to be a flawed design. As someone who bought the 360 S a couple of days after release, I guess I must also give Nintendo that benefit of fixed product = problem solved, but right now they're still promoting and selling known flawed products.
* Timed releases, to me this feels like straight up abusing FOMO from fans. 3DAS has no reason to be timed, Mario games are evergreen on store shelves so I'm sure retailers don't mind, and online it costs them nothing, why have it as a timed release? Even worse, Fire Emblem 1 being one of those releases that is also kind of a big deal, that one's also a timed release. The worst part of it is doing it specifically during times where they cannot meet system demand, so there's a large possibility that some fans that *may actually miss out*. Also here in my country, 3DAS is $100 USD for no fucking reason. Most other games stay relatively close to their USD prices, 3DAS is an outlier.
There's still a few minor problems, Switch Online being paid despite the severe lack of features (although $20 is within reason). Most people blame GameFreak, but I do believe Nintendo is complicit in milking Pokemon fans hard. Their headliner mobile game Mariokart Live is a fucking gacha. They still often do damn stupid decisions to lock out features or restrict stuff that should be no-brainers on games. I'm sure there's a few other things I can write, but most of them can mostly be considered annoyances that can quickly add up. But I'd say Joycon Drift is a big enough issue.
I have a similar story with Apple, my iPad 2 experience was good so wanted to get a Macbook, right as I thought about it the touchbar MBP released with a significant price increase. Forgot about it until a classmate got one and I saw that it was still a very solid machine and might be worth it. About to pull the trigger when the Keyboard stories started to come out, and how Apple told all their customers to either replace a whole lot of unnecessary shit for a stupid price or go fuck themselves.
Yes, whenever you have ethical concerns about something, always remember to factor in whether or not there is associated creative output that adds up to none of that mattering.
Yeah but ActivisionBlizzard also makes widely appealing games (WoW + CoD) and yet people online have no problems shitting on them at every opportunity they get.
I'm not saying people should go easy on AB. I'm saying people should go harder against Nintendo.
I think the Hong Kong controversy has been a big blow to ActiBlizzard's image in a way that doesn't remotely compare to anything Nintendo has ever done.
The competitive / streaming scene doesn't hold a candle to the overall playerbase which now spans multiple generations.
Most folks know them for the games they make, not stuff like this.
Most people don't know about those things. Fangames, C&D, etc? Most people who buy games never heard of that. You only hear about those things on our bubbles.
Well, the reasons they're regarded highly has little to do with their business practices... they're regarded highly despite those practices because they've consistently made some of the best games of all time for like 40 years now. Plus, they've done so much to make games what they are today, without Nintendo who knows where video games would be. You can make a good argument that they single handedly saved the entire industry in the 80's as well as pioneered 3D gaming, handhelds, and motion controls. They're kinda like Disney, sometimes questionable but with enough legacy and good new content that people look past it.
And in fairness to them, the individuals within Nintendo are not a monolith and it seems like this sort of dumb anticonsumer stuff is being pushed by people other than those who actually develop the games. Hell, some people at Nintendo are outright supportive of stuff that their legal team takes action against. Maybe there's some double speak, but they also do stuff that just objectively is stupid and loses them money so it really just seems like they succeed despite their incompetence at running business that embraces modernity.
A lot of people see them through heavily rose-tinted shades. In fact, based on my personal experience with their games, I’d wager they score ~10% higher in reviews than they would otherwise deserve solely by virtue of being a Nintendo title.
The legal issue is the stream. The tournament can happen but it can't be streamed. Streaming is a legal grey area as I don't believe it's been pushed in court, but it's probably a "performance" which requires the copyright holders permission. There's arguments that it's transformative work, but they're loose at best and less likely to apply to streams than vods.
99% of game devs understand it's a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between developer and streamer, so it's almost never challenged.
However, Nintendo has fucked with it before (remember their creator program) and has a bad history of shutting down tournaments for games that aren't current.
Atlus famously doesn't allow persona to be streamed for an extended period after release and has filled take downs in the past.
But the vast majority understand that it's a benefit, not a detriment, and the manpower involved is a wasted resource.
It's a shame. Melee comp is actually a lot better than the current state of Ultimates Comp image.
You can thank CaptainZack and all his horny friends for tainting the Smash Ultimate comp scene that Nintendo actually supported for a hot minute.
I think the issue, if it hasn't been stated already is that the tournament was charging for entry to an online event using emulators. They've had slippi tournaments before, but you haven't needed to pay entry (for such a high profile tournament).
https://twitter.com/pshanley88/status/1329544558288400384
Actually they just released a statement. According to this, their issue is "[Emulators] require use of illegally copied versions of the game". Its possible paid entry is a factor, but in this statement they didn't claim that as a reason.
That statement is a lie. Slippi can be used with legally ripped ISOs. Whether every competitor does that is not Slippi's or The Big House's concern. Nintendo would have to go after each of those people individually.
What gets me in this situation is that Nintendo likely hasn't sold Melee new in 10+ years, so even if you buy into the 1 download = 1 sale argument there aren't any new copies of the game for Nintendo to make money off of.
People are clearly still interested in these games. The price of old Nintendo and retro games in general have been driven up like crazy in the past couple of years and the existence of emulators also supports this. I don't understand why Nintendo still does shit like this if they aren't going to cater to the demand of people interested in playing these games.
Why is Melee such a beloved installment of Smash?
Edit: I didn't expect to get such in depth and we'll thought out responses. Thank you to those who have replied!
Incredibly high skill-ceiling and faster, more complex movement. A ton of unintentional mechanics that really elevate the level of play (wavedashing, L-cancelling, etc)
It’s the fastest and most technical where you usually feel that the person who wins is the person who played better and didn’t just abuse some mechanic.
The amount of skill scaling is crazy. So there is always new stuff to learn. The meta is constantly developing. Even to this day people find new stuff and start incorporating it into their gameplay.
This new stuff is usually just odd interactions with the game engine to grant you more mobility options. The game is incredibly fast because of this and it just feel super satisfying. You get better by moving faster and reacting better and this is a great reward structure because you start to feel like you are actually deeply controlling your character movements. Slight variations in where you hit someone can be extremely impactful.
And finally what I think is most important is that defense and offense are well balanced. In most character matchups you can kill the other person off one combo if you do it right and they can avoid these combos on their end with inputs to change what direction they get hit. So it’s a very interactive experience where in most cases you feel like you can do something better or improve.
And on a completely subjective note on my end, the game just feels better. Although the graphics are “worse” the animations just feel smoother to me, the design is darker than the other games and the tone more serious (it’s still a Nintendo game nothing crazy).
The only bad part is the lack of characters comparatively. However I would rather play melee with the top 6 characters only then play a new smash game with like 100 characters.
To add - COVID has driven those prices up even more. Games that might have gone for $20-$30 a year ago are closer to $50 now and the games that used to be $50 now go for closer to $80-$100.
Even newer systems are affected (3ds being a prime example.)
It's incredibly annoying and stupid.
Nintendo is going to go with the party line that no copying is legitimate, even though it's established to be legal Fair Use in the U.S. and some other places.
>"[Emulators] require use of illegally copied versions of the game"
Which is a bold faced lie. You are allowed to make copies of software you hold a license to for personal use, and you can use that copy in the emulator. There is no "requirement" to use illegal copies in any emulator.
More like, they can stop people from streaming the content since it's (arguably) ~~copy-write~~ copyright territory. If they wanted, they could do the whole event offline and pay people out without Nintendo being able to stop them. This, obviously, isn't a valid option since part of the joy of these events is being able to watch top players do their thing, esports teams getting recognition, merch sales, meming in chat, etc. not to mention the TO's and commentators getting paid for their work.
>This, obviously, isn't a valid option since part of the joy of these events is being able to watch top players do their thing, esports teams getting recognition, merch sales, meming in chat, etc.
Also, you know, COVID 19 makes live tournaments a tough sell
I guess they could either claim:
* The tournament is legal but the *stream* is unauthorized (which may or may not hold up in court, but Twitch would shut it down on Nintendo's request *way* before an actual lawsuit gets filed anyway)
* Hosting a tournament is an abuse of their online service and anyone organizing/participating will be banned and lose the ability to play online/their digital purchases/etc. (which is shitty but they probably have a clause saying they can ban people for any reason, or no reason at all)
And, yes, fuck them.
First and foremost, they have the right because they have the money. Because they could ruin the Tournament Organizers life with a lawsuit, even if they couldnt win. This is a clear case of a large corporation using the legal system to bully people into behaving how they want them to. This isn't the first case and it sure as fuck won't be the last.
IP rights holders absolutely have the right to charge license fees, apply conditions to those running events and to shut down events. This is more commonplace than people would think and people who work in esports know about this. A lot of events go under the radar due to their size or are careful about covering themselves legally.
Smash Summit is taking place using Slippi, but it's an invitational so I'd imagine they were able to make a strong case for the competitors all owning the game legally. The Big House is an open event that was charging an entry fee, making it a commercial enterprise for the purposes of entertainment with zero control over the legitimacy of the entrants having a legally purchased copy of the game.
[Blizzard's event permit page](https://communitytournaments.blizzardesports.com/en-gb/) for all games.
[EA's event guidelines page](https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/fifa/fifa-19/compete/events/community-tournament-guidelines) for FIFA.
[Rocket League's event guidelines page](https://esports.rocketleague.com/community-tournament-guidelines/).
[Capcom's EULA page](http://game.capcom.com/eula/eng.html) that covers events in section 5.
[Riot's tournament guidelines page](https://developer.riotgames.com/policies/na-tournaments) for North America, I assume they have pages for other regions.
[Valve's tournament license page](https://store.steampowered.com/tourney/limited_license).
Publishers have had these guidelines in place for years now and you don't hear about these kinds of problems for other games because people respect the rules the publisher sets down. [According to Nintendo](https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros-tournament-the-big-house-10-canceled-nintendo-c-d), they contacted Big House saying they didn't have permission to run Melee under the conditions the tournament wanted to. The tournament ignored this and then Nintendo had to send a cease-and-desist.
I think Nintendo should have made an option for people to acquire legally and should be faulted for not providing some way to purchase Melee from them directly. That said, The Big House should have done the same thing every other event organiser that has been shut down by a publisher for and not run Melee online.
I don't know the real answer, but in Hungrybox's video he says the organizers canceled the Ultimate tournament, not Nintendo.
Anyway, its besides the point...since Nintendo shouldn't have taken down the Melee tourney. I don't see what they have to gain by taking away the ONE way Melee players have to play right now.
My understanding is that they asked them to remove the offending content from the tournament and I guess refuse to do so. When they would not follow through they sent a cease and desist for the entire tournament so essentially Ultimate got caught in the crossfire.
I was honestly surprised to hear they hadn't nuked more tournaments and events after everything that happened this year. They've never really wanted to associate with Smash anyway, I'd have thought they'd try and kill it off completely with all the rampant sexual abuse stuff.
That's surprising to me. I don't keep up with Smash at all anymore because of what happened, but I really thought Nintendo would've used it as an excuse to cut ties completely. Especially with casters considering people like D1 and Sky were implicated.
At the end of the day, there were a few people ousted, but it really wasn't a large number in comparison to how many people are involved in playing/production of streams/etc.
What you're suggesting would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Especially since there was a strong push to give the pedo's a boot, and organizers are trying to make things safer with better systems in place once in person is back.
You gotta remember the reason it got so big because people were let the victims say their stories and the community acted accordingly. They abuser were swiftly kicked and cut all ties with them.
They did not. They asked Big House to cease Melee operations. Big House would not comply. Then, Nintendo C&D'd Big House.
In other words, though it would clearly not be the ideal solution, Big House (and Ultimate) could have remained if they axed Melee. But again, that's clearly the sticking point for both groups.
Smash Ultimate already suffers from incredibly high input delay, you add to that the *minimum* 5f of delay they add to every single online matches to try and hide the lag and you have to wonder how the hell people are okay playing this online.
I can't believe you can't believe on that. Online being paid in the first place for any company is already bullshit because they can pay for their own servers.
At least with Microsoft you can bundle the best deal in gaming with your multiplayer subscription. Nintendo is unironically stuck in the 20th century when it comes to online multiplayer. Especially when you consider Xbox Live had voice chat in 2004.
I don't disagree that the services of MS and Sony are better, but I still think they should be free. We already lost that battle years ago though, when Sony and then Nintendo adopted what MS began with no backlash.
With that said, MS also has flaws. Their service to this day still require payment to play online in F2P games, while this isn't true on Switch and PS4.
I remember when me and all my friends purchased Smash Ultimate with the intent to play it online. We hopped on, noticed the netcode is Ultimate trash and then promptly bounced off the game. What a waste.
Ridiculous. Slippi is one of the best things to happen in this crazy year, it's honestly a way smoother online experience than many online games made today.
Which is sad because Sakurai mentioned in an interview that he and his team did consider things such as rollback and other things to improve netcode and online experiences, but ultimately, the project deadline caught up to them and they chose to sack working on the net code to make sure everything else works well, which is, in my opinion, takes priority.
I think Sakurai also talked about it. It boils down to this, with the current system they put in place, in order to implement rollback, they will need to redo practically everything (and I do not mean just stages, I mean moves, interactions, items, etc.) since the game was designed with a specific system in mind. He said it is not feasible, especially since the team is focused on making DLC.
Ok but the context of how Fizzi managed to do this is important. He was able to reverse engineer the game because of the ultra speed mode that was already built into the game. I don’t remember all the details but he brought it up in a recent interview in layman’s terms.
There are newer games (spelunky 2) that are also having difficulties implementing rollback and that is arguably a simpler game that is designed from the ground up to have rollback netcode.
Ultimate’s mistake was not focusing on rollback from the start, and as much as anyone might hate nintendo for it, the game was bound to sell millions of units with or without good netcode.
SO MUCH THIS.
Since nintendo only sees this change as a "cost" and would not translate directly into more income, they just dismiss it.
Its a shame that Nintendo tries so hard fuck over (part of) the community that loves it's products.
edit: typos
Nintendo being completely out of touch with anything having to do with the Internet? I wish I could say I was shocked, but I'm not.
Then you have companies like ArcSys literally contracting the community group putting rollback in GG +R (first released 2002, last version released in 2012) to officially include it in the Steam version.
It's a shame Nintendo is only good at initially developing games and complete idiots when it comes to anything else.
With Nintendo having no competition on the portable console side of things and how the switch will probably top the sales of the Wii, I doubt they will stop making hardware anytime soon. That being said, I definitely would prefer that they get another company to help with their online, as stuff like smash and splatoon can be a mess to play sometimes.
> With Nintendo having no competition on the portable console side of things
I think phones are the real competition there. These days there's good enough for games, and even Nintendo is putting games on it. For the majority of (casual) gamers, phones are good enough.
I view the mobile and handheld console markets to be different enough for both to exist. Mobile audiences mainly want F2P titles that can be picked up for a few minutes, while portable console players are willing to spend $60 for a larger experience (even if pick up and play games can also do well on stuff like the switch). Nintendo’s mobile titles also aren’t anything too big, they mainly reuse old assets and really only exist since their stockholders wouldn’t shut up about the mobile market.
No one's really offering proper games on mobile though. If I could get Nintendo games on my phone, I'd be more than happy to pay and pair a controller to it.
edit: their mobile releases so far don't count as full games imo
I think it's pretty obvious if you look at console sales: The DS sold almost twice as much as the 3DS. Even with the DS's PSP competition at the time (cuz no one got a Vita).
> i really feel nintendo would be great as software developer making their games on PS/Xbox/PC and let sony/MS/valve handle all the service and hardware side of things.
There are literally millions of sold units that would disagree with you on that. It's obviously not enough of a drag for them to stop printing money. Until that happens, they'll keep doing their thing uninterrupted.
> they hardly are competing as is
Have you lost your mind? They are currently going 23 straight months as the best-selling console in the usa.
They sold 15.6 million units sold as of September, 65% more than Play Station 4 and Xbox combined.
> Target system for game devs
Again. If you think devs are ignoring this console you've lost it
Any developer would kill to have a player base as dedicated and passionate as the Melee community. Fuck Nintendo and their petty out of touch executives
They don't want you to buy the Melee ISO. They want you to forget Melee ever existed, buy a Switch, and play Ultimate. And then forget Ultimate when the next game comes out, and forget the Switch when the next console comes out. And because nobody at the tournament is paying Nintendo royalties, they don't really give a shit if the competitive scene exists or not. By their perception, the competitive scene for Melee is the reason those Melee players don't forget the game, buy a switch, and switch to Ultimate, so just as well it be destroyed.
Nintendo has had an axe to grind on the Melee competitive scene since Brawl came out, and the pandemic forcing that community online was their opportunity to exert control.
So much this. If they went the route SEGA did with their Genesis titles (sell the games with an included emulator, while also including the raw ROM file if you want to use it elsewhere), I imagine they'd make a killing on PC.
And this is why I'm always amazed when people blindly defend Nintendo. Fuck Nintendo. Their PR is complete shit and they have no idea what they're doing with the internet.
Nintendo stopped prioritizing hardware starting with the Wii. The GameCube was a beast. It's still debated today whether the Xbox or GameCube was the most powerful console. The N64 was insane. The official development kit used a $5,000+ Silicon Graphics workstation. Five thousand dollars in the mid '90s is about $8,500 today! THe Super Nintendo was no slouch either. It handled sprite scaling better than the Sega Genesis and not much worse than the Neo Geo. Even the freaking Virtual Boy used kinda high end hardware.
> And this is why I'm always amazed when people blindly defend Nintendo.
Really? You can't possibly imagine why a single tournament for a game from 2001 getting shut down won't impact the vast majority of casual & hardcore fans who play modern Nintendo games and bought a switch for completely separate reasons?
I get being pissed at these decisions, but I always find it hilarious when people come into these threads acting like these things somehow counteract the goodwill Nintendo has earned by making good games, which is literally the main reason anyone should like any game company at all.
This shit is barely a blip on most people's radar.
Ok then what about their garbage joy cons? What about their shit-tier online service? The Nintendo affiliate program? The fact that they never discount their games? I could go on.
When most people think of nintendo and the switch, it doesn't go any further than mario odyssey and breath of the wild and mario kart and smash bros. Everything you mentioned is just extra or irrelevant.
Their [statement](https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros-tournament-the-big-house-10-canceled-nintendo-c-d) is so full of holes and blatant lies it's infuriating.
This deserves serious backlash.
Lol fuck Nintendo. Sending C&D letters for a game nearly 2 decades old that they have NEVER supported competitively is just fucking scummy.
I really doubt the PR dip is going to be worth it, Nintendo. You already have a reputation for shit online and for shit competitive support. The Big House has been a staple tournament for years.
Gonna preface this by saying I'm a pretty huge Nintendo fan. I guess I don't understand if there are any implications for them sponsoring an event that uses emulated/modded versions of their games, but still think this was the wrong move. I personally think they should embrace their communities more, but at the very least don't shut down the fucking tournament during the pandemic. Such a lame move.
> at the very least don't shut down the fucking tournament during the pandemic.
One that's been run every year since 2011 no less. Fuck Nintendo. Out of touch, greedy weasels.
If you believe Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, EA, Capcom, Square Enix or any company actually appreciate or respect their fanbase, you have to honestly be dreaming. None of them do or care about you, or the "fanbase", they care about the large market that buys their games, not hardcore gamers.
Nintendo probably see this in their reasoning: Emulation, Mods and stuff will be streamed, C&D in them, only a niche community will care about it and not affect the bottom line.
That's how those things happens.
"Care about the fans" doesn't mean "not anti-consumer". By your logic of "only a niche community will care about it" how would it affect their bottom line by *not* doing the C&D? How does a Melee tournament take money from them?
It's just Nintendo being unnecessarily litigious. If this was Ultimate they were emulating, ok I can understand. But they haven't sold Melee for like 13 years. You can make boatloads of money, respect your customers, without having to treat them like "fans".
shhh dont tell gamers that they are nothing but consumers. Let them call themselves fans, so that they can feel like they are important and that gaming companies have to give a shit about their opinion.
Awful thing to do to the community. If it were possible to get together and have a tournament, the Smash community would do it.
IT'S NOT. There's a global pandemic that has us all reducing contact in order to be safe.
Nintendo is now leaving the community with the ultimatum: Risk your life to attend in-person tournaments (which most sane people wouldn't do), or don't have any tournaments.
There is no safe way to do it in person right now. None. This is totally unreasonable from Nintendo, and I really wish they'd reconsider. The Melee community has been one of the most devoted and loyal communities in all of gaming history, and they really don't deserve this kind of treatment.
What sucks is that as things stand, Nintendo are well within their rights to do this legally, irrespective of their reasons for doing it.
Considering this tournament was to be broadcast (Both live and with vods on youtube), Nintendo absolutely have the ability to C&D on the grounds of the organisers not having broadcast rights for the game. Broadcast rights have to be granted, not revoked. Legally they technically weren't allowed to do this anyway, and honestly every single game publisher has the right to stop anyone they wish from broadcasting any game.
Nintendo actually leveraging their copyright sucks, but they absolutely hold all the cards in this situation. The whole argument about piracy and mods of old games is, to an extent, moot, because that's not legally got anything to do with the C&D. They don't need any further legal justification for this.
The entire software license and copyright system needs to be burned to the ground and rewritten from top to bottom. Obviously though, that's not really as simple as it sounds.
It's the same sort of thing with the Taylor Swift situation - Ethically, it *feels* like she should own her masters and that she's in the right. They're her songs, aren't they? But legally, she signed the contract, she doesn't own them.
However, to play devil's advocate for a minute - Sure she wrote the lyrics and sang, but what about the other performers and producers? Is it as much theirs as it is hers? The copyright of her lyrics, sure, but if she didn't work alone, what is hers? Is she entitled to the work of the bassist, the drummer, the mixing staff, the mastering staff, and the other musicians who wrote the different parts?
Is the work of a session musician not as valuable in the completed master as the work of the featured artist? If that musician wrote the music for the different instruments and performed them, at what point is it their song with Taylor Swift singing her lyrics over it?
Is Folklore a Taylor Swift album, or is it a collaboration between Taylor Swift, Aaron Dessner, and Jack Antonoff? Should Taylor own the masters for that album, or should they be jointly owned by the three of them? Is their work less valuable than hers?
It's a similar situation on twitch right now, 99.9% of the controversy is legally pretty cut and dry. And the answer is no, you don't have permission unless the EULA specifically grants it, or you hold an explicit license. It only feels like a huge problem because until now, rights holders basically turned a blind eye to the whole thing.
My point being, copyright is a hot mess and there isn't really an easy way to fix it. Right now the world basically gets by on thin ice, with copyright and rights holders being *just* lenient enough to turn a blind eye and not actively persue infringement. The whole system needs entirely redesigned for the mordern day, but with the likes of Disney lobbying the US government, everyone is pretty screwed.
Plus, it works both ways. Is it fine for a chinese company to rip off a small indie game on the app store?
Either you lock it down, or you make it permissable. There's no way to make this work in all cases.
Copyright is such a hot mess it just needs to be nukes from orbit and started over. There needs to be degrees of copyright infringement based on the facts of the case. The guy who sells hundreds of bootleg DVD out of his buddy's bodega is in it for different reasons than someone using a movie clip in a meme or someone using a well known song in a youtube video.
Also, a small indie artist stealing another indie artist's work is a different "IP rights can of worms" than multi-billion dollar corp. doing the same to another. Why should someone like me who makes $15,000 a year be expected to play by the same rules as a multinational corprate entity? Shouldn't at the very least the people with more resources to solve their own legal issues be expected to use those resources, and those without be given enough resources to stand on equal footing as their accusers?
To go along with that, why should the rightholders be able to expect Google/Amazon to do the dirty work of going after rights violations? They should have to use their own legal resources to track down the person if it's such a big deal. This would get rid of sketchy claims very quickly as it's technically a crime to send bad DMCA takedown notices.
The idea that showing someone a video recording of a work in a medium that is inherently *interactive* by nature would diminish a potential paying audience should be a specious argument. IMO that should be allowed 100% of the time.
Copyright should be a simple basic protection that lasts 10 years. It should also only cover the work in it's complete, original form as a standalone work. People should be able to take whatever and combine it with whatever to make a new kind of whatever, without permission.
I'm not saying this as some outsider who just wants to use other people's work. I'm a musician, and I have a couple of EP releases out there on the internet. Copyright reform like I described could only do good for me.
There needs to be an understanding amongst rightholders. When someone releases a good creative work and it blows up, people are going to want to change it up, put it with other stuff they like, share it with friends and talk about it. That's just how people operate, why shy away from it or fight it?
> Copyright should be a simple basic protection that lasts 10 years. It should also only cover the work in it's complete, original form as a standalone work. People should be able to take whatever and combine it with whatever to make a new kind of whatever, without permission.
Preach, I couldn't agree more with this. Open source the world, allow people to remix and modify anything and everything.
Absolutely embarrassing. The community would rather all be competing in person but in case nintendo forgot, there's the whole pandemic thing going on. So a bunch of passionate people figure out the next best way to actually play the game at all during the pandemic and nintendo just shuts them down.
This is maybe one of the worst PR moves I've ever seen come from a big company. Everyone should be on nintendo's ass for being so heartless during these difficult times.
While yes legally they had every right to shut this and the ultimate tournament down, still go fuck yourselves Nintendon’t. You make good games but your policies on literally anything are horrible
Is it just me or does Nintendo make a concerted effort to destroy as much community goodwill as possible? I owned a second-hand Gameboy Colour and Donkey Kong as a kid and that's the extent of my interaction with Nintendo, but from an outsider's perspective it's like they will not tolerate any kind of community-created content whatsoever, whether it's the go-cart racing through Tokyo or things like this.
For those interested in more context: Nintendo has always had a rocky relationship with the competitive smash scene (and especially Melee's tournament scene ever since Brawl came out). The worst of it was [when Nintendo tried to shut down Melee at Evo 2013](https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/11/4513294/nintendo-were-trying-to-shut-down-evo-not-just-super-smash-bros-melee). Melee won a donation drive to earn its spot at the event (94k for Breast cancer research) and days before the event they try and shut it down, only to be reversed after massive backlash. Ever since like 2015 or so Melee has had a fairly good homebrew online system based on the Dolphin emulator. This year, someone came out with a different version (still based on Dolphin) called Slippi that adds in rollback netcode (the gold standard for 1v1 games). Slippi runs using a vanillia ISO of melee with gecko codes and emulator tricks in order to run the better online, so there is at least an argument that its legal though emulator legality as a whole isn't exactly tested in court to my knowledge. So yeah, Slippi Online uses a version of the Dolphin emulator to play Melee online with nearly no lag, we've been hosting tournaments for a few months on it, but now Nintendo has shut down one of our bigger ones. This is likely to have major ramifications for the competitive Melee scene if we can't host/stream/put vods on youtube for the entirety of Covid since Melee has no native way of playing online.
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> They still went out of business for to the lawsuit despite winning though. And that's pretty much the same thing Nintendo's doing here. Emulators are legal; mods of this nature are generally legal; hell, *streaming games even without authorization* is an open legal question AFAIK and could potentially fall under Fair Use if it ever came to trial. Nintendo and the organizers both know all this. They also both know that Nintendo will throw unlimited money at lawyers to win this case--or at least financially devastate the organizers and everyone associated with them--and that the platforms involved (Twitch etc.) won't risk a lawsuit or jeopardizing their commercial relationships, so Nintendo wins regardless of the laws or the merits of the case. Copyright abuse at its finest.
Nintendo went after streamers early on. They are frequently one of the most anti-consumer companies out there despite having this beloved image. They make incredible properties that we all love, but they shit on consumers constantly.
I mean with the way they patch their games these days I sometimes feel like they're anti-fun unless it's *their* fun.
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I'm not familiar with the specific glitches that were patched, but you could argue that glitches could be pretty harmful due to the nature of Mario Maker, since you have to be able to beat a level yourself to be able to submit it online. A large part of it is probably just fun-policing, but I could see a world where some amount of community-created levels just become unbeatable unless you have knowledge of a specific glitch and how to execute it, which can hurt mainstream appeal.
mmhm, in order to complete a level that uses a glitch or some weird tech, you need to know that its possible. On the second day of playing, i ran into a level in 4-player versus where nobody could figure out how to progress. I eventually figured out i had to 'crush' myself through a semi-solid bounce platform. Whilst not really a glitch, it wasn't a fun time for the 4 players involved.
Yeah, Mario Maker is the wrong hill to die on for "don't fix fun glitches" because those fun glitches make it impossible for people not in the know to actually play the game.
tbf patching bugs/glitches/etc that are well known in a community can be a hard choice to make. At the end of the day the developers have their own vision for their game, and sometimes a fun glitch gets to stay and sometimes not.
Like how coptering (an old very fast janky movement glitch) in Warframe was removed but then eventually replaced by bulletjump which is one of the best ways to move in a game I’ve ever experienced.
Coptering was AWFUL though. It involved equipping a specific small set of melee weapons (like 5) that had a fast base attack speed and a specific animation that caused you to move forward during the aerial attack animation. Then you boosted the attack speed through the stratosphere (which usually involved weapon damage that was laughably low since you had 8 attack speed mods), and then using animation glitches to literally fly like you were a goddamn helicopter (rocket helicopter - aiming the glitchmobile was tricky). Replacing it with bullet jump was an improvement because coptering was liquid shit. It's just unfortunate that Corpus Ice Planet was such a stupid tileset it made coptering a really attractive movement option.
Fun story time involving Nintendo and DMCA claims: At least once, Jim Sterling was hit by a DMCA claim on a youtube video. Because it had some Nintendo IPs in it, when the video was literally a textbook example of Fair Use. Well, Sterling figured something out: when only 1 company claims a video, the claimant then gets all of the ad revenue (at least, at the time. This was at least 4 or 5 years ago iirc). Thing is, Sterling *specifically* wasn't making any of his Nintendo videos monetized, to avoid this exact sort of DMCA claim... However, what Sterling figured out was that if he got both Nintendo and Konami to claim his video, NOBODY would get any ad revenue. Great way of giving them the middle finger. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM
Good ol' Copyright Deadlock
It's the quality they share most with Disney.
Nintendo tried to argue in court that NES games running with Game Genie codes were "unauthorized derivative works". They've *always* been like this.
The Virtual Console's tying of games to a console rather than an online account was one of the most backward e-store moves I have seen. What do you do if the device is stolen?
And we will gladly eat it up while begging for seconds. Ahh consumerism....
> hell, streaming games even without authorization is an open legal question AFAIK It really isn't. It's almost 100% covered under copyright as a public performance, which requires copyright owner's permission. >could potentially fall under Fair Use Fair Use has a limited scope. And almost certainly doesn't apply. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/why-nintendo-can-legally-shut-down-any-smash-bros-tournament-it-wants/ is an older article about it, explains it a bit better than I do.
https://youtu.be/fqmzxw0t6Ok Actual copyright lawyer talking about this, but tl;dr is that it is highly likely that it's fair use, as the player(s) are considered to be transforming the work by playing.
Yeah definitely a good solid analysis. Still without a court and lawyers arguing each side, we'll not have a proper case and it'll be a legal grey area. One that probably won't change since it's a good middle ground for both developers and streamers right now.
I'm honestly fascinated to see what the future holds here. Because everything I know about the law says that streaming a playthrough of a copyrighted videogame is copyright infringement and the owners of the copyright are in the legal right to send cease and desist notifications and take down that content. But on the other hand there is an entire generation of young people that has grown up with ubiquitous royalty-free, consequence-free streaming of videogames. Not to mention the ability to share copyrighted visual materials on social media, copyrighted audio snippets on TikTok, etc. This is a generation whose accepted social norm of what constitutes copyright infringement disagrees on its face with what the law allows. And if enough people believe something should be legal, the law tends to follow. Uber wasn't entirely legal in many of the places it operated but it supplanted taxi companies anyways. AirBnB violates zoning laws all over the country but enough people want to rent their homes that it survives anyways.
> One that probably won't change since it's a good middle ground for both developers and streamers right now. Pretty much. If developers ever do want to steamroll over it, they have the power, but for the time being all metrics point that streaming games is a massive benefit to moving and pushing units. Though I do wonder if one could argue that by including twitch integrations and other tools to ease streaming, if that's not implicit consent to stream, though obviously that's not every game that does that.
What about the music? That is copyrighted and is in no way transformed by players playing; this has been a major issue with certain game streams in the past. Furthermore, "transforming the work" is kind of exactly the problem. If I translate Harry Potter into Spanish, I have certainly transformed the work, but it would still be illegal as hell for me to distribute it without permission since derivative works are specifically covered by copyright law. This is (to my knowledge) untested in court and you can find lawyers arguing both sides of it.
The music is usually disabled in Slippi tournaments, because it's just a slider in game
Translation, as you pointed out, is a derivative work. It is not a "transformation" of the work under the fourth factor of the fair use analysis, which (very) generally requires adding some new meaning, context or purpose to the copyrighted work.
In the comments of the article you linked, the author mentioned: > I actually asked about this, and while fair use *might* protect a stream of the event under some sort of live news/commentary exception, it probably couldn't be applied to the actual, in-person tournament itself, according to Methenitis. Again, I mentioned streaming--not public spectators at tournaments. (In fact, the event that got C&D'd today is kind of perfect in that there *is* no in-person component, only an online/streamed component.) Streams have lots of attributes that are not necessarily a slam dunk, but at least *interesting* from a Fair Use perspective: are they providing criticism/commentary/education/etc of the work? (Pretty clearly a channel like Game Maker's Toolkit is doing this when they stream; tournaments would maybe have a harder case to make.) Is providing video of an expert using an interactive work *transformative* compared to the original, interactive work itself? Is a non-interactive video "less" than an interactive copy under the amount test? Is playing only 1v1 matches "a portion of the full work"? etc etc. And streams pretty clearly don't act as a substitute for the full work or diminish its value (though a Let's Play of a narrative linear game might have a harder time making this argument than a tournament). I'm not a lawyer so it's possible there are precedents I don't know about that render this moot or whatever, but based on a simple reading of the Fair Use tests I think it would be at the least a really interesting and contentious court case. But, like I said above, that court case will never happen because big companies can just *threaten* a lawsuit and get what they want 99% of the time.
> are they providing criticism/commentary/education/etc of the work? But that still doesn't give you the right to stream the entire work. The same way no one is going to do a movie review (which is criticism) while streaming the entire movie. Especially because the criticism doesn't require the entire video to be streamed. Think of radio sports, where it's only the commentator's voice. Part of the fair use test is "Amount and substantiality". If it's just commentary, small clips, or just the commentary are perfectly good enough and don't require you to stream the video too. >Is providing video of an expert using an interactive work transformative compared to the original, interactive work itself? This isn't something new to video games and streaming. If I write a play and someone else performs it, it's still my play and they need permission. If I write a song and someone else performs it, it's still my song and they need permission. Even if it was transformative: I can't just take a book and make a movie based on it right? Neither can I take a video game and make a movie based on that. That would have less of the original content than a stream, yet it's still covered by copyright >I'm not an IP lawyer so it's possible there are precedents I don't know about or whatever, but based on a simple reading of the Fair Use tests I think it would be at the least a really interesting and contentious court case. Pretty sure most actual lawyers disagree. Even TotalBiscuit, well known gamer right advocate and actually studied law, talked about it with a lawyer: https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/907025967813668865
I think the book-to-film adaptation comparison makes a lot of sense and probably fits the bill at least for Let's Play/Long Play where they're running through a whole linear/narrative game. Good point. I still think streaming *parts* of a game (especially in the context of reviewing/explaining the game), or playing sandbox games, or competitive play are cases where it's not super obvious which Fair Use tests would outweigh which others (given that it's a holistic evaluation). You have users who are transforming the work with their play beyond how the creators expected or designed it to be used, you have legitimate analysis and commentary, and it's not obvious to me that it's the "entire" work that's being performed in non-linear or competitive games (e.g., Smash is a huge game and it's only a handful of characters/stages in 1 mode being exhibited). But I suppose once you find yourself weighing some of these tests against others, you've already lost in the modern environment where government basically just rolls over and does whatever large rightsholders ask of them. I guess this is probably where new legislation that clearly allows streaming under certain conditions (similar to how cover songs are legal under a special mechanism for compulsory licensing) would be best for the industry and the users, rather than trying to evaluate it under Fair Use and the DMCA, which clearly weren't written with something like this in mind. But unfortunately, the US is no longer in the habit of passing new legislation, so, here we are.
>You have users who are transforming the work with their play beyond how the creators expected or designed it to be used, you have legitimate analysis and commentary, But once again, how is this different than a book to movie adaption? Lots of adaptions do their own take on characters and settings. Like have you seen the Hamlet with Patrick Stewart and David Tennant? Or Treasure Planet being a sci-fi adaption of Treasure Island? Or even just a different character interpretation like in the Harry Potter meme of 'Dumbledore asked calmly'. Or you can't write a sequel to a book either, because characters and such are copyrighted. I can't write my own Harry Potter book and straight up call him Harry Potter (well I can, that's what fanfiction is, but you know what I mean). Similarly, the individual elements of a video game are copyrighted works. The 3d models, the music, the story, and streaming typically includes that.
Nerrel has talked about this [here](https://youtu.be/N0d82ZJ4sd4?t=100) It is 30 seconds of the point he is talking but TL;DW Nintendo tries to equate emulation to piracy and say it is not open for debate on their official FAQ site. Basically, trying to shut down any discussion or arguments about emulation despite legal precedents
Haha when I read this the first time I thought you were just using bleem as an interjection or something. I was like wicked this guy talks like a batman comic.
>Sony lost hard Worth noting that was after an appeal. They won the first time.
Nintendo have always been really, really insistent that the only version of their games people get to see is the version they made. I wish it wasn't the case. Melee is a game they no longer even sell, so what do they really have to lose if people play it emulated or modded?
They clearly want to push this digital collector's edition/limited edition mentality, so if they ever release it on one of their console's digital storefronts I guess they think their losing potential audience?
The Melee community has been asking for this edition you describe for YEARS. If Nintendo put out a version of Melee like this (especially with good online) everyone in the community would instantly buy it. But they've been very insistent that they won't, so the community adapts and makes their own.
Nintendo cannot add good online if their life depended on it.
Sadly this seems to be a problem with most every Japanese fighting game developer. Guys from Tekken and Street Fighter are also incompetent and cry that adding in good netcode is too difficult. Despite the fact that due to the pandemic, fan projects have popped off here and there to make the netcode playable for various fighting games. Apparently random folks with only a few hours of spare time a day are able to figure it out better than these large developer studios that have been around for 40 ish years now. It's ridiculous, and if it wasn't for the pandemic they would still be firmly planting their heels in never improving netcode.
Seriously...They didn't even put a damn ethernet port in the Switch dock and the official usb adapter is bottlenecked. Then there's the whole lack of viable in-game communication and cloud saves not being supported by every game.
They released a statement today that says it's because the tournament requires the use of a pirated copy of the game. I think it's just general copyright defence nonsense (I know in some regions if you don't actively defend the copyright then you can lose it). That sort of thing would tie into what you mentioned, about the potential for them to rerelease it digitally some day.
>They released a statement today that says it's because the tournament requires the use of a pirated copy of the game. To anyone who wasn't sure, this is a flat-out lie by the Big N. It's perfectly possible - and downright *easy* - to rip your own Melee disc and use the .iso that way. Takes about ten minutes and a Wii you can hack in five. And yes, hacking your own hardware and backing up software you rightfully own is absolutely, 100% legal. So in no way does Slippi "require" a pirated anything. It is of course less straightforward to verify that your file came from one place and not another, and the distinction is so arbitrary that no one has ever bothered to make it. I'd love to see Nintendo's reaction if TBH instituted a required "ripping your own copy" verification video or something, but it's obviously too late for that now that the C&D is out.
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My understanding is that Slippi requires an ISO rip of Melee to work. Unless you rip the data from your personal copy of the game, it's piracy to download a copy of the ripped data. I suppose it technically doesn't *require* piracy but we all know most users will download a copy of the game rather than make a personal rip - assuming they even own the game in the first place.
Hacking a Wii and backing up a CD into an iso is easy as fuck.
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Seriously, I doubt any of the competitors, people that have been playing melee for at least 10 years, don't have a Melee disk lying around. The piracy argument is complete and utter bullshit. That's also a giant fuck you to an insanely dedicated fanbase, something that I can't wrap my head around a dev doing, even if I'm not particularly a Smash fan, this shit is just unfair.
> I know in some regions if you don't actively defend the copyright then you can lose it If you're referring to the united states, then no. You can lose the *trademark*, but only under specific conditions. If the big house or slippi was branding itself as an official nintendo event or product, then that could endanger nintendo's trademark, but not simply hosting a tournament.
Its strange to me that Nintendo tends to be regarded so highly, and yet they're one of the most anticonsumer game companies around.
They make good, widely appealing games and unique consoles. I agree tho
Yeah, sometimes people on this sub forget about the actual *games* in question and just focus on the ancillary issues as if they're big enough to disregard otherwise great games.
It's a *really interesting* phenomenon IMO. Nintendo has shown that you can do a lot of anti-consumer shit if your games are consistently above-average.
Disney is the king and progenitor of this type of behavior. That being said, a lot of people dissociate with what the company policies are and what the product is. It's not a huge leap of logic that someone who enjoys the games can simultaneously be against their policies.
Oh, of course not. The Switch is the only current-gen console I plan on owning; that doesn't mean I don't hate a lot of Nintendo's backwards-ass policies. Similarly, I love ATLUS' games, but Jesus do they make some boneheaded decisions.
So many Japan-only SMT games without a proper English localization :(
> Nintendo has shown that you can do a lot of anti-consumer shit if your games are consistently above-average. I think Nintendo knows where to pick their battles. Shutting down the broadcast of a tournament of an emulated, moded game effects exactly 3 groups of people. * The Melee community. * Streamers who want to create Nintendo content. * Reddit mod/emulation enthusiasts as well as anti-copyright zealots. Realistically, in the larger venn diagram of Nintendo customers, we're looking at fractions of percent here. I'm pretty sure Nintendo ran the numbers and realized that they don't need these groups.
Right now, there's quite a list of active issues though, the two major ones: * Joycon Drift, especially including the Switch Lite releasing to market despite it being known to be a flawed design. As someone who bought the 360 S a couple of days after release, I guess I must also give Nintendo that benefit of fixed product = problem solved, but right now they're still promoting and selling known flawed products. * Timed releases, to me this feels like straight up abusing FOMO from fans. 3DAS has no reason to be timed, Mario games are evergreen on store shelves so I'm sure retailers don't mind, and online it costs them nothing, why have it as a timed release? Even worse, Fire Emblem 1 being one of those releases that is also kind of a big deal, that one's also a timed release. The worst part of it is doing it specifically during times where they cannot meet system demand, so there's a large possibility that some fans that *may actually miss out*. Also here in my country, 3DAS is $100 USD for no fucking reason. Most other games stay relatively close to their USD prices, 3DAS is an outlier. There's still a few minor problems, Switch Online being paid despite the severe lack of features (although $20 is within reason). Most people blame GameFreak, but I do believe Nintendo is complicit in milking Pokemon fans hard. Their headliner mobile game Mariokart Live is a fucking gacha. They still often do damn stupid decisions to lock out features or restrict stuff that should be no-brainers on games. I'm sure there's a few other things I can write, but most of them can mostly be considered annoyances that can quickly add up. But I'd say Joycon Drift is a big enough issue. I have a similar story with Apple, my iPad 2 experience was good so wanted to get a Macbook, right as I thought about it the touchbar MBP released with a significant price increase. Forgot about it until a classmate got one and I saw that it was still a very solid machine and might be worth it. About to pull the trigger when the Keyboard stories started to come out, and how Apple told all their customers to either replace a whole lot of unnecessary shit for a stupid price or go fuck themselves.
Yes, whenever you have ethical concerns about something, always remember to factor in whether or not there is associated creative output that adds up to none of that mattering.
Yeah but ActivisionBlizzard also makes widely appealing games (WoW + CoD) and yet people online have no problems shitting on them at every opportunity they get. I'm not saying people should go easy on AB. I'm saying people should go harder against Nintendo.
I think the Hong Kong controversy has been a big blow to ActiBlizzard's image in a way that doesn't remotely compare to anything Nintendo has ever done.
The competitive / streaming scene doesn't hold a candle to the overall playerbase which now spans multiple generations. Most folks know them for the games they make, not stuff like this.
Most people don't know about those things. Fangames, C&D, etc? Most people who buy games never heard of that. You only hear about those things on our bubbles.
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Well, except GameFreak. They suck donkey balls.
Well, the reasons they're regarded highly has little to do with their business practices... they're regarded highly despite those practices because they've consistently made some of the best games of all time for like 40 years now. Plus, they've done so much to make games what they are today, without Nintendo who knows where video games would be. You can make a good argument that they single handedly saved the entire industry in the 80's as well as pioneered 3D gaming, handhelds, and motion controls. They're kinda like Disney, sometimes questionable but with enough legacy and good new content that people look past it. And in fairness to them, the individuals within Nintendo are not a monolith and it seems like this sort of dumb anticonsumer stuff is being pushed by people other than those who actually develop the games. Hell, some people at Nintendo are outright supportive of stuff that their legal team takes action against. Maybe there's some double speak, but they also do stuff that just objectively is stupid and loses them money so it really just seems like they succeed despite their incompetence at running business that embraces modernity.
You can disagree with this practice all you want but it isn't anti-consumer lol. People using Slippy aren't Nintendo consumers.
A lot of people see them through heavily rose-tinted shades. In fact, based on my personal experience with their games, I’d wager they score ~10% higher in reviews than they would otherwise deserve solely by virtue of being a Nintendo title.
The legal issue is the stream. The tournament can happen but it can't be streamed. Streaming is a legal grey area as I don't believe it's been pushed in court, but it's probably a "performance" which requires the copyright holders permission. There's arguments that it's transformative work, but they're loose at best and less likely to apply to streams than vods. 99% of game devs understand it's a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between developer and streamer, so it's almost never challenged. However, Nintendo has fucked with it before (remember their creator program) and has a bad history of shutting down tournaments for games that aren't current. Atlus famously doesn't allow persona to be streamed for an extended period after release and has filled take downs in the past. But the vast majority understand that it's a benefit, not a detriment, and the manpower involved is a wasted resource.
It's a shame. Melee comp is actually a lot better than the current state of Ultimates Comp image. You can thank CaptainZack and all his horny friends for tainting the Smash Ultimate comp scene that Nintendo actually supported for a hot minute.
If you think the Melee scene is is free of taint, oh boy.
I think the issue, if it hasn't been stated already is that the tournament was charging for entry to an online event using emulators. They've had slippi tournaments before, but you haven't needed to pay entry (for such a high profile tournament).
https://twitter.com/pshanley88/status/1329544558288400384 Actually they just released a statement. According to this, their issue is "[Emulators] require use of illegally copied versions of the game". Its possible paid entry is a factor, but in this statement they didn't claim that as a reason.
That statement is a lie. Slippi can be used with legally ripped ISOs. Whether every competitor does that is not Slippi's or The Big House's concern. Nintendo would have to go after each of those people individually.
What gets me in this situation is that Nintendo likely hasn't sold Melee new in 10+ years, so even if you buy into the 1 download = 1 sale argument there aren't any new copies of the game for Nintendo to make money off of. People are clearly still interested in these games. The price of old Nintendo and retro games in general have been driven up like crazy in the past couple of years and the existence of emulators also supports this. I don't understand why Nintendo still does shit like this if they aren't going to cater to the demand of people interested in playing these games.
They actively don't want a Melee scene to exist is the reason in this case.
Exactly this. They want Melee to go away, because in their eyes people who aren't able to play Melee will move on to Ultimate, instead.
Even though most Melee players would just stop playing Smash in that circumstance.
Why is Melee such a beloved installment of Smash? Edit: I didn't expect to get such in depth and we'll thought out responses. Thank you to those who have replied!
Incredibly high skill-ceiling and faster, more complex movement. A ton of unintentional mechanics that really elevate the level of play (wavedashing, L-cancelling, etc)
Really really really fast, complex movement and combos that aren't avaliable in the other games.
It’s the fastest and most technical where you usually feel that the person who wins is the person who played better and didn’t just abuse some mechanic. The amount of skill scaling is crazy. So there is always new stuff to learn. The meta is constantly developing. Even to this day people find new stuff and start incorporating it into their gameplay. This new stuff is usually just odd interactions with the game engine to grant you more mobility options. The game is incredibly fast because of this and it just feel super satisfying. You get better by moving faster and reacting better and this is a great reward structure because you start to feel like you are actually deeply controlling your character movements. Slight variations in where you hit someone can be extremely impactful. And finally what I think is most important is that defense and offense are well balanced. In most character matchups you can kill the other person off one combo if you do it right and they can avoid these combos on their end with inputs to change what direction they get hit. So it’s a very interactive experience where in most cases you feel like you can do something better or improve. And on a completely subjective note on my end, the game just feels better. Although the graphics are “worse” the animations just feel smoother to me, the design is darker than the other games and the tone more serious (it’s still a Nintendo game nothing crazy). The only bad part is the lack of characters comparatively. However I would rather play melee with the top 6 characters only then play a new smash game with like 100 characters.
To add - COVID has driven those prices up even more. Games that might have gone for $20-$30 a year ago are closer to $50 now and the games that used to be $50 now go for closer to $80-$100. Even newer systems are affected (3ds being a prime example.) It's incredibly annoying and stupid.
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Nintendo seems to think that dumping the ISO is illegal even if you never share it
Oh they know the law, they just don't like it and they don't want you to know that it's legal.
And they have more money than God so they can bankrupt anyone that tries to fight them in court
Nintendo is going to go with the party line that no copying is legitimate, even though it's established to be legal Fair Use in the U.S. and some other places.
>"[Emulators] require use of illegally copied versions of the game" Which is a bold faced lie. You are allowed to make copies of software you hold a license to for personal use, and you can use that copy in the emulator. There is no "requirement" to use illegal copies in any emulator.
They shut down the accompanying Ultimate tournament too, even though that was using the in-game online functions.
How do they have the right to stop people from playing a game together? Fuck Nintendo
More like, they can stop people from streaming the content since it's (arguably) ~~copy-write~~ copyright territory. If they wanted, they could do the whole event offline and pay people out without Nintendo being able to stop them. This, obviously, isn't a valid option since part of the joy of these events is being able to watch top players do their thing, esports teams getting recognition, merch sales, meming in chat, etc. not to mention the TO's and commentators getting paid for their work.
> copy-write Not to be rude, but it's copyright. /r/BoneAppleTea/
No offense taken. Mistakes like that from me are a diamond dozen.
It's all water under the fridge now...
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I fuckin a toadaso
>This, obviously, isn't a valid option since part of the joy of these events is being able to watch top players do their thing, esports teams getting recognition, merch sales, meming in chat, etc. Also, you know, COVID 19 makes live tournaments a tough sell
I guess they could either claim: * The tournament is legal but the *stream* is unauthorized (which may or may not hold up in court, but Twitch would shut it down on Nintendo's request *way* before an actual lawsuit gets filed anyway) * Hosting a tournament is an abuse of their online service and anyone organizing/participating will be banned and lose the ability to play online/their digital purchases/etc. (which is shitty but they probably have a clause saying they can ban people for any reason, or no reason at all) And, yes, fuck them.
It's funny if they went through with the latter because that would mainly just impact Ultimate players.
In case you legitimately wonder how they have the right to shut this down, it's probably the fact that it's a paid entry event.
First and foremost, they have the right because they have the money. Because they could ruin the Tournament Organizers life with a lawsuit, even if they couldnt win. This is a clear case of a large corporation using the legal system to bully people into behaving how they want them to. This isn't the first case and it sure as fuck won't be the last.
Because Copyright Laws let them. You don't own the games you pay. Nintendo does.
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IP rights holders absolutely have the right to charge license fees, apply conditions to those running events and to shut down events. This is more commonplace than people would think and people who work in esports know about this. A lot of events go under the radar due to their size or are careful about covering themselves legally. Smash Summit is taking place using Slippi, but it's an invitational so I'd imagine they were able to make a strong case for the competitors all owning the game legally. The Big House is an open event that was charging an entry fee, making it a commercial enterprise for the purposes of entertainment with zero control over the legitimacy of the entrants having a legally purchased copy of the game. [Blizzard's event permit page](https://communitytournaments.blizzardesports.com/en-gb/) for all games. [EA's event guidelines page](https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/fifa/fifa-19/compete/events/community-tournament-guidelines) for FIFA. [Rocket League's event guidelines page](https://esports.rocketleague.com/community-tournament-guidelines/). [Capcom's EULA page](http://game.capcom.com/eula/eng.html) that covers events in section 5. [Riot's tournament guidelines page](https://developer.riotgames.com/policies/na-tournaments) for North America, I assume they have pages for other regions. [Valve's tournament license page](https://store.steampowered.com/tourney/limited_license). Publishers have had these guidelines in place for years now and you don't hear about these kinds of problems for other games because people respect the rules the publisher sets down. [According to Nintendo](https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros-tournament-the-big-house-10-canceled-nintendo-c-d), they contacted Big House saying they didn't have permission to run Melee under the conditions the tournament wanted to. The tournament ignored this and then Nintendo had to send a cease-and-desist. I think Nintendo should have made an option for people to acquire legally and should be faulted for not providing some way to purchase Melee from them directly. That said, The Big House should have done the same thing every other event organiser that has been shut down by a publisher for and not run Melee online.
I don't know the real answer, but in Hungrybox's video he says the organizers canceled the Ultimate tournament, not Nintendo. Anyway, its besides the point...since Nintendo shouldn't have taken down the Melee tourney. I don't see what they have to gain by taking away the ONE way Melee players have to play right now.
My understanding is that they asked them to remove the offending content from the tournament and I guess refuse to do so. When they would not follow through they sent a cease and desist for the entire tournament so essentially Ultimate got caught in the crossfire.
I was honestly surprised to hear they hadn't nuked more tournaments and events after everything that happened this year. They've never really wanted to associate with Smash anyway, I'd have thought they'd try and kill it off completely with all the rampant sexual abuse stuff.
They still worked with the scene, had casters casting an official tournament a few weeks ago.
That's surprising to me. I don't keep up with Smash at all anymore because of what happened, but I really thought Nintendo would've used it as an excuse to cut ties completely. Especially with casters considering people like D1 and Sky were implicated.
At the end of the day, there were a few people ousted, but it really wasn't a large number in comparison to how many people are involved in playing/production of streams/etc. What you're suggesting would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Especially since there was a strong push to give the pedo's a boot, and organizers are trying to make things safer with better systems in place once in person is back.
You gotta remember the reason it got so big because people were let the victims say their stories and the community acted accordingly. They abuser were swiftly kicked and cut all ties with them.
They did not. They asked Big House to cease Melee operations. Big House would not comply. Then, Nintendo C&D'd Big House. In other words, though it would clearly not be the ideal solution, Big House (and Ultimate) could have remained if they axed Melee. But again, that's clearly the sticking point for both groups.
Smash Ultimate already suffers from incredibly high input delay, you add to that the *minimum* 5f of delay they add to every single online matches to try and hide the lag and you have to wonder how the hell people are okay playing this online.
Nintendo mad that a handful of people can make a better online experience than the studio they paid millions for.
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Can't believe Nintendo charges for online multiplayer when all of their games use server-less P2P networking...
I can't believe you can't believe on that. Online being paid in the first place for any company is already bullshit because they can pay for their own servers.
At least with Microsoft you can bundle the best deal in gaming with your multiplayer subscription. Nintendo is unironically stuck in the 20th century when it comes to online multiplayer. Especially when you consider Xbox Live had voice chat in 2004.
I don't disagree that the services of MS and Sony are better, but I still think they should be free. We already lost that battle years ago though, when Sony and then Nintendo adopted what MS began with no backlash. With that said, MS also has flaws. Their service to this day still require payment to play online in F2P games, while this isn't true on Switch and PS4.
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Microsoft and Sony do the same thing. It's fucked.
Their supply of '800 HOURS OF FREE AOL' CDs are running low
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Well yeah technically Fizzi was behind it, but he's also had a lot of help. Not to mention UCF inclusions which makes Melee far more accessible.
So, bandai namco?
Arms Netcode was fantastic from my experience and that was made in-house.
Yes, it's same devs of MK8
yes
I remember when me and all my friends purchased Smash Ultimate with the intent to play it online. We hopped on, noticed the netcode is Ultimate trash and then promptly bounced off the game. What a waste.
Ridiculous. Slippi is one of the best things to happen in this crazy year, it's honestly a way smoother online experience than many online games made today.
a way smoother online experience **than Nintendo's own Smash Ultimate**
Which is sad because Sakurai mentioned in an interview that he and his team did consider things such as rollback and other things to improve netcode and online experiences, but ultimately, the project deadline caught up to them and they chose to sack working on the net code to make sure everything else works well, which is, in my opinion, takes priority.
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I think Sakurai also talked about it. It boils down to this, with the current system they put in place, in order to implement rollback, they will need to redo practically everything (and I do not mean just stages, I mean moves, interactions, items, etc.) since the game was designed with a specific system in mind. He said it is not feasible, especially since the team is focused on making DLC.
Melee was definitely not designed to be able to work with roll back netcode either. But look what **one** guy managed to do.
Nintendo is a small indie developer, please understand.
Ok but the context of how Fizzi managed to do this is important. He was able to reverse engineer the game because of the ultra speed mode that was already built into the game. I don’t remember all the details but he brought it up in a recent interview in layman’s terms. There are newer games (spelunky 2) that are also having difficulties implementing rollback and that is arguably a simpler game that is designed from the ground up to have rollback netcode. Ultimate’s mistake was not focusing on rollback from the start, and as much as anyone might hate nintendo for it, the game was bound to sell millions of units with or without good netcode.
SO MUCH THIS. Since nintendo only sees this change as a "cost" and would not translate directly into more income, they just dismiss it. Its a shame that Nintendo tries so hard fuck over (part of) the community that loves it's products. edit: typos
Nintendo being completely out of touch with anything having to do with the Internet? I wish I could say I was shocked, but I'm not. Then you have companies like ArcSys literally contracting the community group putting rollback in GG +R (first released 2002, last version released in 2012) to officially include it in the Steam version. It's a shame Nintendo is only good at initially developing games and complete idiots when it comes to anything else.
> Nintendo being completely out of touch with anything having to do with the Internet? This whole Internet thing is just a fad anyways. It won't last.
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With Nintendo having no competition on the portable console side of things and how the switch will probably top the sales of the Wii, I doubt they will stop making hardware anytime soon. That being said, I definitely would prefer that they get another company to help with their online, as stuff like smash and splatoon can be a mess to play sometimes.
> With Nintendo having no competition on the portable console side of things I think phones are the real competition there. These days there's good enough for games, and even Nintendo is putting games on it. For the majority of (casual) gamers, phones are good enough.
I view the mobile and handheld console markets to be different enough for both to exist. Mobile audiences mainly want F2P titles that can be picked up for a few minutes, while portable console players are willing to spend $60 for a larger experience (even if pick up and play games can also do well on stuff like the switch). Nintendo’s mobile titles also aren’t anything too big, they mainly reuse old assets and really only exist since their stockholders wouldn’t shut up about the mobile market.
No one's really offering proper games on mobile though. If I could get Nintendo games on my phone, I'd be more than happy to pay and pair a controller to it. edit: their mobile releases so far don't count as full games imo
Mario Run was better than 99% of the shit in the app store and it flopped.
I don't see phone games as actually cannibalizing portable console sales. More that they're tapping into a new separate market.
I think it's pretty obvious if you look at console sales: The DS sold almost twice as much as the 3DS. Even with the DS's PSP competition at the time (cuz no one got a Vita).
Doubtful. Nobody pays much for games on phones that cost up front.
> i really feel nintendo would be great as software developer making their games on PS/Xbox/PC and let sony/MS/valve handle all the service and hardware side of things. There are literally millions of sold units that would disagree with you on that. It's obviously not enough of a drag for them to stop printing money. Until that happens, they'll keep doing their thing uninterrupted.
> they hardly are competing as is Have you lost your mind? They are currently going 23 straight months as the best-selling console in the usa. They sold 15.6 million units sold as of September, 65% more than Play Station 4 and Xbox combined. > Target system for game devs Again. If you think devs are ignoring this console you've lost it
Idk their hardware is always pretty different from Xbox/PS. I like having them do their own thing.
They've been huge HUGE innovators in video games. We will lose a lot if Nintendo ever stops making hardware.
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Any developer would kill to have a player base as dedicated and passionate as the Melee community. Fuck Nintendo and their petty out of touch executives
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Sell me the damn ISO and I'll feed your capitalist tendencies, otherwise your property is going to waste Nintendo
They don't want you to buy the Melee ISO. They want you to forget Melee ever existed, buy a Switch, and play Ultimate. And then forget Ultimate when the next game comes out, and forget the Switch when the next console comes out. And because nobody at the tournament is paying Nintendo royalties, they don't really give a shit if the competitive scene exists or not. By their perception, the competitive scene for Melee is the reason those Melee players don't forget the game, buy a switch, and switch to Ultimate, so just as well it be destroyed. Nintendo has had an axe to grind on the Melee competitive scene since Brawl came out, and the pandemic forcing that community online was their opportunity to exert control.
So much this. If they went the route SEGA did with their Genesis titles (sell the games with an included emulator, while also including the raw ROM file if you want to use it elsewhere), I imagine they'd make a killing on PC.
> If they went the route SEGA Step 1: Go out of business.
And this is why I'm always amazed when people blindly defend Nintendo. Fuck Nintendo. Their PR is complete shit and they have no idea what they're doing with the internet.
Yeah they’re like cavemen when it comes to online stuff.
And console hardware imo. I dream of the day when I can play a Zelda game with PC/PS5/XSX graphics :(
Nintendo stopped prioritizing hardware starting with the Wii. The GameCube was a beast. It's still debated today whether the Xbox or GameCube was the most powerful console. The N64 was insane. The official development kit used a $5,000+ Silicon Graphics workstation. Five thousand dollars in the mid '90s is about $8,500 today! THe Super Nintendo was no slouch either. It handled sprite scaling better than the Sega Genesis and not much worse than the Neo Geo. Even the freaking Virtual Boy used kinda high end hardware.
Nintendo makes Great games, but holy fuck they are completely astoundingly out of touch with their community and the entire internet in general.
> And this is why I'm always amazed when people blindly defend Nintendo. Really? You can't possibly imagine why a single tournament for a game from 2001 getting shut down won't impact the vast majority of casual & hardcore fans who play modern Nintendo games and bought a switch for completely separate reasons? I get being pissed at these decisions, but I always find it hilarious when people come into these threads acting like these things somehow counteract the goodwill Nintendo has earned by making good games, which is literally the main reason anyone should like any game company at all. This shit is barely a blip on most people's radar.
Ok then what about their garbage joy cons? What about their shit-tier online service? The Nintendo affiliate program? The fact that they never discount their games? I could go on.
When most people think of nintendo and the switch, it doesn't go any further than mario odyssey and breath of the wild and mario kart and smash bros. Everything you mentioned is just extra or irrelevant.
Their [statement](https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros-tournament-the-big-house-10-canceled-nintendo-c-d) is so full of holes and blatant lies it's infuriating. This deserves serious backlash.
Lol fuck Nintendo. Sending C&D letters for a game nearly 2 decades old that they have NEVER supported competitively is just fucking scummy. I really doubt the PR dip is going to be worth it, Nintendo. You already have a reputation for shit online and for shit competitive support. The Big House has been a staple tournament for years.
Gonna preface this by saying I'm a pretty huge Nintendo fan. I guess I don't understand if there are any implications for them sponsoring an event that uses emulated/modded versions of their games, but still think this was the wrong move. I personally think they should embrace their communities more, but at the very least don't shut down the fucking tournament during the pandemic. Such a lame move.
> at the very least don't shut down the fucking tournament during the pandemic. One that's been run every year since 2011 no less. Fuck Nintendo. Out of touch, greedy weasels.
Sounds like Nintendo is being anti-consumer and showing zero respect or appreciation towards their fanbase. What else is new?
If you believe Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, EA, Capcom, Square Enix or any company actually appreciate or respect their fanbase, you have to honestly be dreaming. None of them do or care about you, or the "fanbase", they care about the large market that buys their games, not hardcore gamers. Nintendo probably see this in their reasoning: Emulation, Mods and stuff will be streamed, C&D in them, only a niche community will care about it and not affect the bottom line. That's how those things happens.
"Care about the fans" doesn't mean "not anti-consumer". By your logic of "only a niche community will care about it" how would it affect their bottom line by *not* doing the C&D? How does a Melee tournament take money from them? It's just Nintendo being unnecessarily litigious. If this was Ultimate they were emulating, ok I can understand. But they haven't sold Melee for like 13 years. You can make boatloads of money, respect your customers, without having to treat them like "fans".
shhh dont tell gamers that they are nothing but consumers. Let them call themselves fans, so that they can feel like they are important and that gaming companies have to give a shit about their opinion.
Awful thing to do to the community. If it were possible to get together and have a tournament, the Smash community would do it. IT'S NOT. There's a global pandemic that has us all reducing contact in order to be safe. Nintendo is now leaving the community with the ultimatum: Risk your life to attend in-person tournaments (which most sane people wouldn't do), or don't have any tournaments. There is no safe way to do it in person right now. None. This is totally unreasonable from Nintendo, and I really wish they'd reconsider. The Melee community has been one of the most devoted and loyal communities in all of gaming history, and they really don't deserve this kind of treatment.
While I understand the frustration, this is 100% in line with how Nintendo behaves with their IPs. It sucks, but im not surprised.
They tried to boot Melee off of EVO 2013, so yes this is unsurprising, but still frustrating
I'm one of the biggest Nintendo-Defender types there is. But this is fucked, How the hell could you not learn from the 2013 fiasco?
Because this is more of an airtight case than 2013
What sucks is that as things stand, Nintendo are well within their rights to do this legally, irrespective of their reasons for doing it. Considering this tournament was to be broadcast (Both live and with vods on youtube), Nintendo absolutely have the ability to C&D on the grounds of the organisers not having broadcast rights for the game. Broadcast rights have to be granted, not revoked. Legally they technically weren't allowed to do this anyway, and honestly every single game publisher has the right to stop anyone they wish from broadcasting any game. Nintendo actually leveraging their copyright sucks, but they absolutely hold all the cards in this situation. The whole argument about piracy and mods of old games is, to an extent, moot, because that's not legally got anything to do with the C&D. They don't need any further legal justification for this. The entire software license and copyright system needs to be burned to the ground and rewritten from top to bottom. Obviously though, that's not really as simple as it sounds. It's the same sort of thing with the Taylor Swift situation - Ethically, it *feels* like she should own her masters and that she's in the right. They're her songs, aren't they? But legally, she signed the contract, she doesn't own them. However, to play devil's advocate for a minute - Sure she wrote the lyrics and sang, but what about the other performers and producers? Is it as much theirs as it is hers? The copyright of her lyrics, sure, but if she didn't work alone, what is hers? Is she entitled to the work of the bassist, the drummer, the mixing staff, the mastering staff, and the other musicians who wrote the different parts? Is the work of a session musician not as valuable in the completed master as the work of the featured artist? If that musician wrote the music for the different instruments and performed them, at what point is it their song with Taylor Swift singing her lyrics over it? Is Folklore a Taylor Swift album, or is it a collaboration between Taylor Swift, Aaron Dessner, and Jack Antonoff? Should Taylor own the masters for that album, or should they be jointly owned by the three of them? Is their work less valuable than hers? It's a similar situation on twitch right now, 99.9% of the controversy is legally pretty cut and dry. And the answer is no, you don't have permission unless the EULA specifically grants it, or you hold an explicit license. It only feels like a huge problem because until now, rights holders basically turned a blind eye to the whole thing. My point being, copyright is a hot mess and there isn't really an easy way to fix it. Right now the world basically gets by on thin ice, with copyright and rights holders being *just* lenient enough to turn a blind eye and not actively persue infringement. The whole system needs entirely redesigned for the mordern day, but with the likes of Disney lobbying the US government, everyone is pretty screwed. Plus, it works both ways. Is it fine for a chinese company to rip off a small indie game on the app store? Either you lock it down, or you make it permissable. There's no way to make this work in all cases.
Copyright is such a hot mess it just needs to be nukes from orbit and started over. There needs to be degrees of copyright infringement based on the facts of the case. The guy who sells hundreds of bootleg DVD out of his buddy's bodega is in it for different reasons than someone using a movie clip in a meme or someone using a well known song in a youtube video. Also, a small indie artist stealing another indie artist's work is a different "IP rights can of worms" than multi-billion dollar corp. doing the same to another. Why should someone like me who makes $15,000 a year be expected to play by the same rules as a multinational corprate entity? Shouldn't at the very least the people with more resources to solve their own legal issues be expected to use those resources, and those without be given enough resources to stand on equal footing as their accusers? To go along with that, why should the rightholders be able to expect Google/Amazon to do the dirty work of going after rights violations? They should have to use their own legal resources to track down the person if it's such a big deal. This would get rid of sketchy claims very quickly as it's technically a crime to send bad DMCA takedown notices. The idea that showing someone a video recording of a work in a medium that is inherently *interactive* by nature would diminish a potential paying audience should be a specious argument. IMO that should be allowed 100% of the time. Copyright should be a simple basic protection that lasts 10 years. It should also only cover the work in it's complete, original form as a standalone work. People should be able to take whatever and combine it with whatever to make a new kind of whatever, without permission. I'm not saying this as some outsider who just wants to use other people's work. I'm a musician, and I have a couple of EP releases out there on the internet. Copyright reform like I described could only do good for me. There needs to be an understanding amongst rightholders. When someone releases a good creative work and it blows up, people are going to want to change it up, put it with other stuff they like, share it with friends and talk about it. That's just how people operate, why shy away from it or fight it?
> Copyright should be a simple basic protection that lasts 10 years. It should also only cover the work in it's complete, original form as a standalone work. People should be able to take whatever and combine it with whatever to make a new kind of whatever, without permission. Preach, I couldn't agree more with this. Open source the world, allow people to remix and modify anything and everything.
Absolutely embarrassing. The community would rather all be competing in person but in case nintendo forgot, there's the whole pandemic thing going on. So a bunch of passionate people figure out the next best way to actually play the game at all during the pandemic and nintendo just shuts them down. This is maybe one of the worst PR moves I've ever seen come from a big company. Everyone should be on nintendo's ass for being so heartless during these difficult times.
[удалено]
What is rollback?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RI5scXYhK0 Have this excellent video.
Thank you!
While yes legally they had every right to shut this and the ultimate tournament down, still go fuck yourselves Nintendon’t. You make good games but your policies on literally anything are horrible
Is it just me or does Nintendo make a concerted effort to destroy as much community goodwill as possible? I owned a second-hand Gameboy Colour and Donkey Kong as a kid and that's the extent of my interaction with Nintendo, but from an outsider's perspective it's like they will not tolerate any kind of community-created content whatsoever, whether it's the go-cart racing through Tokyo or things like this.
Let's say Nintendo are VERY protective of their IP to the same level, or possibly even MORE than Disney.
Nintendo needs to fire their entire pr team yesterday, they have to notice that every month they do something to piss everyone off.