Gabe Newell summarized it perfectly: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." And that also applies to game emulation.
GabeN literally built an empire out of the neglected PC gaming market, game stores and publishers only cared about console and mobile, even Microsoft shunned PC gaming.
Same thing applies to TV/movies/music. Streaming made it a LOT easier to consume content conveniently, so piracy went down drastically. But then streaming got split between tons of different platforms, so piracy's back up
Where i live, triple a games are 15 dollars, it is still to much for my people since our money is near worthless but people do buy from steam because of it. Noone is giving 600 on a game, when average salary is 4000
Truth. One guy can make 300 bucks from one old cartridge that the game companies won't see a dime for, or the company instead could make $5000 selling 5000 digital downloads for a dollar a piece. Company makes money, customer gets to experience game for virtually no legal/financial risk, and everyone can be happy. And the cartridge people can do whatever they were gonna do anyway.
Emulation is what got me into retro gaming over a decade ago. Now I own over a 100 retro cartridges, and you know how much money Nintendo got from me for buying all those? The same they got from me emulating them.
@@Hide_Me I've heard this said quite a few times when this topic pops: piracy doesn't really lose you much money. The one that pirated it, wasn't gonna buy it regardless. Also it may just become free advertisement and make new fans.
@@Kalvinjj yeah. Yet emulation gets such a bad rap. Without it, we wouldn't be seeing retro games on our newer systems. It is still true today. Pc users don't want a console, so they were never going to buy your game for console in the first place. Yet if a version of a Nintendo or Sony game was available on pc to buy at a fair price, download, play, and keep forever, people will 99 percent of the time do that instead out of convenience and easability. So yeah, you are right, its been shown before that it is not really a lost sale, cause yeah, they were never going to buy it anyways for whatever reason.
The problem with companies "just emulating" is that fans have been doing it for decades for free at significantly better quality, while the big companies expect us to pay $70 for the original with like, two extra features
While true, at the same time, official emulation projects tend to be limited in terms of stuff like deadlines, gauging potential profit and wages, and just generally remaining within the realm of “legality”, so of course possibly decade-long projects done for free by passionate fans are going to inevitably just be better in every way
@@jomaq9233 But the thing is: THE BIG COMPANIES OWN THE HARDWARE. They know it inside and out. Fans only took decades because big companies hid everything from us. And again, $70 price tag for worse quality than free
Yes and no... When I try and look for game footage to contemplate whether or not to buy a certain game, it is waaaay too hard nowadays to find "real" footage of a game, especially the more obscure ones released before the RU-vid-age.
@@Yoshik379 I think what you said is just a consequence of what Nido the King said. The reason it's hard to find "real" footage is because the fake footage is so much better, so that's what people do. I can relate, I'm actually making a review for Mario 64, using footage from the original cart, and I didn't even realize how blurry it looked until I captured footage from Star Fox 64 off the Switch service for a joke and the contrast for those three seconds was insane. I'm never recording off of original carts again if I can help it. Unfortunately I already have a whole season's worth recorded...
seriously. I've seen let's plays before where they use real hardware and recording devices, and it's looks shit because the video quality of the original console is so bad
My college forced us to emulate extremely old games, and write an essay on them. I questioned the legality of it, and my lecturer said "As long as it's before [Year], it should be ok"' I didn't chose the thug life, the thug life chose me.
The piracy/emulation situation always reminds me that games are more for gamers than for developers. Game companies don't want to preserve old games because they don't make them money anymore.
If GBA was released on 3DS VC I would have bought so many games, but no the one thing everyone was asking for and they didn’t do it, so I got all the games for feee on my 3DS instead, their loss I would have gladly paid $10 per GBA game for no reason
To be honest games for me should be prioritised more for the devlopers, not company developers that just want to profit of the works of their employees but the actual developers that create the games, is after all their work and if you apreciate the game and it's vision for what it is, then I think it should be respected to preserve the game as the creator intended, since modifications that emulation produce in fact modifies the experience that the creator had for it, or if they want to still preserve to this day or want to wait for a time to make it available again, is no only their product, but their creation as well and it could feel bad if a random person now wants to determine the fate of your creation without you having a word about it, videogames are not natural resources that should be available for anyone. If the creator is fine with it then go for it since it provides the opportunity to expose the game for many people, but if the creator has it's concerns and do not want the game to be exposed in that way and wants to wait foor a time to expose it, it is that bad? Emulation and pirancy are always gona be a topic of debate and we need to consider every variable before commiting into it in my opinion. It varies so much in many cases and can not be an universal truth that is only good or bad.
@@supaskiltz9877 you probably already know this but you can get semi-official looking gba vc, now it doesnt use an official nintendo emulator but it looks convincing enough, get the ultimate injector it makes a cia of the rom
@@liammcnicholas918 I fail to see how this fact shames save-state users, if anything I'd rather download a rom of Mario 3 for saving than make $60 deal with Nintendo to get official save states.
OpenEmu is the best to use for mac emulators, but it’s kinda limited like I haven’t figured out how to change things like Lil Manster to add the QOL changes that emulator added (idk how to patch the rom)
Instead of talking about video games and everything Nintendo he now talks about pencils and the best paint drying videos also don’t worry about the dog I didn’t put his dna in the dog
Tbh, about the savepoints: Back in the day games were made way more difficult to make then seem longer, so a bunch of them were just unfair. In those cases i feel like saves work just fine
Some people hold that unfairness as quality as in hard good easy bad, when really there a more ways to make a game hard without being unfair or giving one checkpoint every 20 level
@@dekumidoriya2928 soulslikes usually use a bonfire system, where once you use one you will spawn there when you die and you can teleport between them. theres also always bonfires before bosses.
More like every other second and third world countries. Like bruh some of us don’t even have PCs and your pretty much privileged to have a Laptop with 4 gbs of ram and integrated graphics.
emulation is terrible. Now excuse me while I go buy paper mario: the thousand year door for $125 from my local video game store which is more than double the price from when it released 18 years ago and where none of the proceeds will go to nintendo.
Finally a RU-vid that talks about emulation and doesn’t hide behind the “here’s my physical copy of the game I burned it onto my pc this is legal so can’t get me” no Scott straight up tells it like it is. Legit no one has gone to jail for downloading roms
And no one ever will Distributors on the other hand.... Ofc they literally make money out of stuff they didn't make so it don't have any particular sympathy
@@DimT670 Plenty of people make money out of stuff they didn't make. Bobby Kotick didn't make Diablo 1, 2, or 3. Starcraft 1 or 2. Warcraft 1, 2, 3, or the World of. Any of the Call of Duty games. And many, many more. He makes millions of dollars EVERY YEAR. All while firing the people that actually DID make those games. Where do we draw the line on who gets to make money on something they had nothing to do with?
Isn't it fitting how GabeN is the only guy still in the tripleA video game industry to decently understand why piracy is actually done. The creator of Steam-the platform that re-released the most video games- is the only person in the triple A video game industry. SEGA may go easier on piracy than any other game company, but that's because they can use it to find remarkable potential employees.
The main thing I hate about company’s going after emulation is the fact that one day every cart will stop working, every disc will rot no matter how well you take care of it, these things happen due to time, online files never rot, undeniably emulation is the best way to preserve games
That is exactly the point. Nintendo wants their fans to do not have control in what they can or cannot play. It is so convenient to sell the same 30-year-old game for the 20th time in the same decade to the same target audience for an absurd price. With emulation, fans don't need Nintendo's re-releases and collections. Furthermore, Nintendo finds its own trademark divine, and seeing it for free online is so painful for them. "Why does Nintendo don’t just release Virtual Console on Switch? They would win even more money!" Simple. With Virtual Console, fans would play whatever they want for a fair price. Everything Nintendo doesn't want. Emulation makes old Nintendo's games old, and their stupid re-releases give them a bit of youth. Nintendo want you to love their retro games and still not be able to buy and play them, so when they release Super Mario 3D All-Stars, for example, you'll buy immediately.
Emulation is so important for preserving gaming history. When stores like the PSP close and a whole library of digital only games are lost to time for one reason or another - emulation can help keep those games alive. The same can be applied to retro gaming as a whole. it is SO important to keep gaming history alive and its a crying shame companies either don't care to preserve their games themselves or actively stop it like Nintendo. I almost always suggest trying to go through "legal" means to play games but when its not possible or just not a feasible option due to a variety of reasons - emulation should be welcomed into gaming with open arms.
It is welcome, the ones against it are corporations (nintendo included) that get no money out of it, and since they only like money they fight against it
If it wasn't for emulation, I would never get to play some of the best games and classics on PSP or GBA, now they are some of my favourite games and I can have a sentiment for something I would normally miss. I understand the legality issues with emulation but... If you just want to play a 20 year old game that is so hard to buy anywhere that it sometimes feels even more illegal than actual piracy, it's hard to argue against the emulation and, as you said, how it allows old classics to stay alive and be available for younger generations.
PSP doesn't even have batteries made for it anymore and most of the original batteries are swollen and dangerous. Who wants to play a PSP plugged into a wall? Not certainly as it was intended.
"ItS oN sWiTcH tHoUgH!" Yeah, a system that hasn't been out my whole 30 years of life, imagine that. Almost like I downloaded the ROM quite the number of years ago or something. Imagine that, people doing things a long time ago. Weird, I know!
@The Lost Wooly We don't buy emulated games. We download them. I already bought the game years ago, and the company that decided I don't get to experience it anymore when my decades old hardware failed can just deal with it
@The Lost Wooly I just have trouble understanding the whole "might" want to rerelease. Rereleasing should be a no brainer. It costs nothing aside from maybe figuring out how to emulate it on the specific hardware like the Switch and then putting the game file up on the eshop. There's no retailer fees or risks if the game doesn't sell well, there's only money to be lost by not doing. Heck, if they don't want to build the emulator, then let us continue using the private ones and sell the game files behind a legal download link. Even if it doesn't help with the convenience and people could just copy and share the files, it's already being done anyway! At least then download links would be trustworthy and get rid of the main justification for pirating of having no alternatives to play the game.
@@jacobg8640 The whole "figuring out how to emulate" is bigger than you think. Hiring teams to do that takes time and money and can take an extreme amount of work. And if its a port? even worse
Gonna be honest, of all things for Scott to cover, I never would've expected Emulation of all things. Really awesome video Scott!! Good points!! Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to jail for using Project64 9 years ago.
Eh odds are this is related to the Kotaku debacle of saying'' just pirate and emulated Metroid dread'' basically riding on the coattails of that news wave that happened .. not that I blame the guy but the timing is way too much a matching scenario as he has done similar on older vids to maximize views and such Edited for a typo
@@lloydlandrum3040 Small correction here. All the kotaku article said was that people are emulating Metroid Dread, and at higher resolutions than Switch. It never stated any specific stance for or against emulating it. Just that it's happening.
Another feature of emulation is the ability to make rom hacks and fan games. GBA Pokémon in particular has a ton of rom hacks ranging from catch ‘em alls, adding mons and mechanics from newer games, extra hard difficulty, and even completely new games with new stories. Radical Red is one of my favorite Pokémon experiences and I think stuff like that deserves a place in gaming
Pirating a video game is (in most English speaking countries) is illegal, but it's not a criminal offence. That means that the company has to actually contact you and sue you personally, which is really not worth the effort for targeting the people downloading, only the people supplying the copies on a mass scale.
You think one guy sued an elderly woman who put a listing for a CD for $10 all she did was sell her husbands old stuff but since it was an illegal boot she was fined $10,000 This was German btw
I lived since my pre-teens until early adulthood in the US (coming from South America) and I emulated games a lot because I liked emulation and seeing what it was capable of, and because I mostly emulated games that at that time were not available anywhere else, and I was not going to get an old tv just to play some games, it was mostly games I had missed (knew about them but didn't have the opportunity to play them) in my childhood in the 90's and so I emulated them, nothing ever happened. I otherwise owned all the current consoles (at the time) of the 6th and 7th gen and paid for every single game and played online. The same thing with PC gaming for the last almost 15 years, I buy everything legally, specially since Steam and other stores started having regional pricing (I stil paid the normal 50-60 usd for a game from time to time, but now some cost 20-30 or less sometimes due to regional pricing).
@@jmurray1110 Yeah, that was a bootleg CD, of course, it would be taken seriously. You don't sell this stuff, even if you didn't make it. Unless you're as big as Amazon, I guess.
It really is. Because the only people that are ever actually contained by laws are exactly that - either too lazy to put up resistance to them, or too stupid to get around them . . . though you can also substitute apathy for laziness I guess. If you're a smart criminal, you can skirt the law for years upon years beyond it ever mattering (and the smartest end up in politics and legalize their actions even), and if you're motivated to break a law it's a guarantee you'll be able to do so with enough effort.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe dude nobody is looking for you by pirating Mario 64... The laziness comes more from the fact emulation have far more steps than people like to admit, also because you are downloading illegal software, it also tends to have malicious software, and my god if you have a expensive PC you won't take that risk.
As a latina the only reason I got into gaming is emulation/piracy otherwise I would have never been able to afford any legal game even today expending on something like a switch is a luxury I can't afford. Growing up some of my fondest memories come from video games so I'll always be thankful to the fan communities that pour so much effort on emulation
Growing up poor with little to no money to spend on games in a country where even if you could they are really hard to get/expensive really makes you appreciate emulation for what it is. You can run emulators even on very old phones and have an enjoyable experience
Same for me! Games were really expensive for us before (they still are tbh) but now we can somehow afford them (talking mostly about me and my family here) My brother used to emulate old games on our pc and bc of that I had the opportunity to play a lot of games that I probably wouldn't know today. I personally view emulators like an alternative to play games for people that can't afford them, especially old games since they don't require a really powerful pc/phone.
Yeah, thats kinda a case where I think that the morality of preserving history outweighs any of the legality issues, as some games are only kept alive by emulator. Especially as it is so common that companies go defunct or ignore the game entirely. Some games are so extremely rare that the common folk can onlt access it throughe emulation. Then theres the case of localisation, as theres entire catalogues people in the west have no official translation to, the most famous example being Mother 3 fans are still waiting for an official english release.
The illegal part of piracy is uploading roms/games online. Downloading a rom is not illegal (depending on were you live), thats why if you look up anti piracy screens (real one's) it usually say something like "Report this copy" or "To report this copy call [Phone number]" or some times "We hope that you buy a real [Console] and legit games" Downloading is not illegal. uploading is.
17 U.S. Code § 501 - Infringement of copyright (a) Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as provided in section 106A(a), or who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be. You're an idiot. It's most certainly illegal.
The fact he talked about emulation instead of the Nintendo Online Expansion like everyone else is is the absolute funniest thing ever to me. So perfect, this is why this is my favorite channel
Pirating and emulation are almost always issues of CONVENIENCE. If a decent port is available from the original publisher for a decent price, the majority will choose that. If a game requires old hardware, is incredibly rare or grossly overpriced, people will emulate. As much as Nintendo and other companies complain about emulation, it is really quite a simple (and profitable) fix for them to just perserve their old titles.
When they do rereleased older games, all I see is people complaining about having to pay for them and go straight back to pirating so why should Nintendo bother?
@@crazyfire9470 Exactly. Nintendo Swith Online is 20 dollars a year for a bunch of old games, and people still bitch about "I don't really own them". And with the virtual console, the same stuff, complaining about paying for old games. So a bunch of people only want shit for free. Like fans that pirate tv shows and then complain when they got cancelled because they didn't made any money.
@@crazyfire9470 From what I've seen that's mostly with games that they have effectively already bought. Like,, 'Why do I have to buy this again on the Nintendo e-shop, I already bought it on the Wii shop!' I hardly ever see people who complain about having to pay for games that are released for emulation for the first time officially (like,, No one complained about having to buy Earthbound once it was finally added to the e-shop, just moreso confusion over why it cost twice as much as other snes games)
@@crazyfire9470 You see that because the price points are insane. Project64 was able to emulate Majora's Mask in 2011 perfectly, and that's available for free. The game is 21 years old. Charging $50 or $30 or even $19.99 for the convenience of playing it on a modern console is absurd. If Nintendo can get MM to work as easily on Switch as I can on PC, then it's highway robbery to charge $20 for that. Rerelease emulated ports that have been long available elsewhere should be dirt cheap. I'd pay $5, maybe $10 for an emulated port of N64 MM on Switch, but it really should be like $3.99. Any more than that just isn't reasonable for the work involved.
I've always played that you get tax dollars for landing on free parking. Idk if that's the correct way or not but looking back it definitely makes the game take longer than it should
@@dont-feed-ben4833 its not. The default rules are faster then all the house rules people have. In fact some house rules exist to speed the game up because of some other house rule slowing things down.
Sega is like the complete opposite to Nintendo when it comes to emulation. I recently got some games from the Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classics on Steam and they literally provide you with the roms. You can either just play them in their emulator or if you feel like it just pop them in your favorite emulator and have fun that way. This approach where you just spend a buck or two to play old games, which you then actually own almost completely negates the need to pirate stuff.
@@S.I.L. but do they still make gamecubes, wiis or snes's? I don't think so, so bundling some more obscure roms that they wouldn't of put on nso into a collection won't negatively impact them at all.
@@MrMoon-hy6pn why you guys act like the only games you download are the ones Nintendo don't sell anymore? We all know is not true, I'm ok with people emulating, the only thing is annoying is this high ground you take where there is an evil corporation, we aren't in an illumination movie, this kind of childish behavior is why gamer is an insult nowadays.
@@PEDROGARCIA-qj3gr Get off your high horse. Most emulation these days extends maybe to the GameCube. PS2 and above requires beefy hardware. Sure, some modern games have been successfully emulated, but to assume people haven't paid for those games because they are emulating them is asinine as well. I personally have a little handheld that can emulate everything up to PS1, and I loaded all my old games on it, and you can sit and spin for pretending like I must be stealing modern games for doing so. You take the straw men companies line up and prop them up for those companies, when people just want to play games that aren't easily available anymore.
you can completely legally dump your own roms, without downloading them. you just gotta buy an adapter to connect cartridges and such to your computer. this was legally proven in the Bleem! vs Sony case
Which means you can freely download them because who the fuck can actually prove that dump is yours or one you downloaded because the file is going to appear the exact same either way. And they know this, if it wasn't the case they would bring people who download these games to court just to prove a point and deter people.
While still think radical red is too hard to ever be a real game, I really wish the real games would take notes from it. Along with making the game harder, npcs used a lot of different strategies and items, forcing you to do the same. Games like RR prove Pokémon’s battle system is much more complex and interesting than you’ll ever see in the main game
@@Blastronaute same goes for the "newer super mario bros" series, which COMPLETELY overhauls those games. Not 1 level is the same, and in some cases the game feels 100% diffrent. Its not like the minecraft "create" mod, which ADDS things that change the game a lot, but you can still ignore or forget.
Emulation is one of the greatest things to ever happen in video game history. There, I said it, cry about it, I didn't buy a SNES game for $900. Preservation, ROM HACKS, FAN GAMES, breaking apart games to deconstruct their code, giving generations a way to play games from before their time or ones they missed out on.
I'd kill to see research done on how many top notch gaming coders working for big industries started off messing around with old game code and emulators. How much these businesses trying to strike down emulation owe to it for creating some of their best minds.
I may prefer original hardware for many games, but emulation is definitely the better way to experience them, especially in the long term. Emulation is an amazing tool, because not everyone is going to be as stupid as me and go out of their way to own 28+ game consoles and hundreds of games.
If it's from a generation that's extremely rare or expensive I get why people do it but modern games that are cheap and readily available to buy there no excuse for piracy imo.
The most that can happen is that your ISP sends a letter to scare you (usually only happens if they catch you on a torrent). Unless you live in Germany, which in that case you get executed without a trial.
Well, SoujaBoy was pretty close to jail for selling Nintendo games on his chinesee console 🤔 Is there any news for smash bros on my souja boy console btw?
Save states are honestly a blessing in emulations. It saves you the time and pain from going all the way from your last checkpoint to the point you died last time and having to repeat multiple times.
Imagine a dvd player without a pause button because "you cant pause the movie on the theater!" It surprises me how good Scott is at making points in every way like, damn.
@@draguOdoT wasn't the "pause button" argument about using a save state specifically when closing the game and reopening it later? he used a different argument for using it to return to anytime.
As much as I want to support game developers, piracy sometimes is the only way to get your hands on a certain game. I have a psp, and with the online store dead and game disks being impossible to find in my country nowadays, roms are god's blessing. It hardly has anything to do with money, if a game's accessible, I'll be more than happy to pay for it.
Preservation is my eternal middle finger towards anti-piracy stances. It's clear from lack of legal support that no company is invested enough in their own history to attempt true, full scope preservation. The best they can do is rereleases of the hits everybody knows or batches of backwards compatible titles baked irregularly. If Nintendo in particular have a problem with retro emulation then they have my permission to do better. For that, we're still waiting.
I don't understand why theft and vandalism are seen as morally grey these days. Companies don't want true full-scope preservation because then everyone will be so busy playing old games that they won't buy new games that companies can charge more for.
Everytime emulation or video game piracy comes up I think of Ross Scott's videos he's made on the preservation of games and how, many studios don't allow this and or care for older titles they've made, and going forward many games are a "service" per say so when the game developer pulls the plug on an always online game your screwed out of being able to play it. I'm all for preservation, I believe we should be allowed to play older titles that we may not be able to play because of console or cartidge availbility, or price.
Most people don't realize that they merely purchase a license to play a game when they "buy a copy" of them. Read the terms & conditions. You might find something interesting, fellas.
@@austinfondren5053 yup. People don't realise that even when they buy a physical game. They *still* don't own the game. They own the plastic that hosts the game (wether it's a disc, card or cartridge) but the game is still 100% owned by the copyright holders. Buy a game is actually, as you said, paying for a lisence to play it. The advantage of getting a physical copy however is that the license is transferrable.
@@chaosdimension6433 So you pee in a foley catheter or something? or you wait for a "boring scene" and rush to the bathroom and pee as hard as you possibly can?
@@Faded.Visuals What I do, and I know this is a revolutionary idea (thinking of patenting it) is........(drumroll) I pee before sitting to watch a movie
@@chaosdimension6433 And that's great! Because you can just ignore pausing if you want to, and others can just pause because its so much more convenient for them.
It’s interesting that Scott says emulators don’t work half the time. I’m not sure what emulators he’s using besides Dolphin, but I’ve literally never had issues with emulation. It’s as easy as download the rom, load the rom on the emulator, and you’re set
Emulators on Mac are still a little rough, but still very capable of functioning if you tinker around with them. The one he is shown using is OpenEMU, which is similar to RetroArch, as it has a lot of different emulator cores.
It can still be tricky setting up the paths for game detection and save files can be tricky if you don’t know what your doing plus you can run into problems of having to unzip and reformat file types which isn’t hard once you know what you are doing.
dude, im from a country where it was so easy to get a pirate copy of a game that i never saw a official psx disk until 12 and a official gba cadtridge until 16 XD
Great point about the original games "feeling right" on the original consoles, i've never considered before that the type of controller you used could change the experience you have with a specific game
I’m playing Super Metroid rn on switch and Metroid Fusion on a PC emulator using a PLAYSTATION CONTROLLER. it does feel weird and i never played either games on the original hardware
It's true for some games, I tried playing Jet Set Radio through the ps3 HD version and it felt pretty weird and I was messing up alot of tricks, so I just chalked it up to the game being old and put it down. Few years later when I started collecting, I got my hands on a DC and Jet Set and it was a night and day difference in the controls.
this is especially true with games like NiGHTS into Dreams on Sega Saturn, where the game was designed concurrently with a specific controller, there's a ton of little nuances tht future ports and modern thumbsticks just don't capture quite as well
As someone who emulated games in their pc since i was like 4 (third world country, that's how it is round here) you definitely learn how to enjoy the games what they are, even when played in the "wrong" context
I got a wii and N3DSXL Which are cheap decades later I homebrewed the shit out of it Being in a third world country I just had to hack it and bomb a lot of emus on it
You couldn't have worded it better. I live in Brazil, this place is a poor 3rd world shithole filled with poor people (myself included). Most nintendo consoles and games literally cost more than a car here, nobody has the money to buy original hardware. Emulation and piracy are the main reason for why i got into pretty much all of my favorite game franchises.
I enjoy my ROM collection neatly organized, fully meta-data'ed, filterable, retro achievement powered, searchable, quickly navigated and everything else on my RetroArch setup as much as I like my pretty game boxes on the shelf.
@@IWillNeverThinkOfAGoodHandle yeah but i was referring to when something is still being sold. Someone from a different video (not sure if the story is. entirely true) talked about wanting to get some racing game on pc but didn’t have the money so instead got a pirated version of the game and thats when the ip sent him a letter about it
Scott here makes a similar point to another famous Scott, of the Ross variety, that games shouldn't die. I agree with this beyond wholeheartedly. If a game company is done with a game, letting it just die is wrong. I am not a PC emulator user myself, but the fact that there are a lot of old games that still live because of emulators makes me happy. The work and manhours that go into any given game is insane, and a company just letting that work die because they are bored of selling it is awful. I'm glad to see the more famous Scott take a positive stance for game preservation, even though there is still a long way to go for more games to be safe.
At Least They Just Port Those Games To modern consoles But they still feel the same just a normal game but with no deference other that you are Playing on a different Controller
@@tree561 Most old games aren't ported. Just cuz a lot of em are, doesn't mean a lot of em are. And most ports are pretty shitty or trade a feature out for another, have janky controls etc.
Big mood. Sometimes emulation is the only way to preserve and play old games that companies don't make available. I'm not gonna blame someone for not wanting to spend a ton of cash hunting down old hardware and software when the option is available. And big mood on letting people play the way they want. As a Fire Emblem fan it's so annoying to hear snobs shit on casual mode even though they can just choose classic mode. If the harder option is there then let people enjoy the accessibility of easy features.
Agreed. Emulation let me play old PSP games on PC that I couldn't play long long ago because my poor thing broke at the time, but now I can literally replay them with a dang ps4 controller, it's a beautiful thing.
I played Pokemon platnium a ton in my childhood. That save file I have for the DS had some of my best memories of primary school. Do I like the decisions that I made while playing? No. Do I want to replay the game now that I'm an adult so I can appreciate the game more? Yes. Do I want to delete that save which again, contains fond memories of childhood? Also no. Therefore, emulation
@@iiiivvvv9986 emulation also helps content circunventing through mindboggling decisions from the devs, like Game Freak insisting to only have 1 save file per Pokemon cartridge. Because as much as I want to play Black/White in Hard Mode, I really don't wanna lose my previous save file to do that
A very valid argument, at least in most cases. There is the argument of flexibility, however. Codes and any kind of built-in saving mechanics place you at specific points in the game, usually the very start of a level with whatever default powerups you may have at the beginning of the game. Save states allow you to save wherever, whenever, which can make any failure have no punishment at all, therefore removing any challenge and/or tension. It ultimately depends on the game and how often the save states are used, at least in my opinion.
@@329link Fair point; however, I typically only use save states when I a.) need to exit the game quickly without enough time to find a save station, or b.) am done playing and want to save before I use up all my power-ups. Of course, that refers to games that you *could* save in, I often use save states in Ristar, for example, to save after I beat a level or a world. Since you can't save in the original game, this makes progression SO much easier. I understand if you don't use save states, just don't force *me* to conform to *your* beliefs. This also applies to religion and politics.
@@MmmMmph1968 That was kinda my point. I use save states the same way. The issue comes in with people who can't help it, and end up abusing them horribly and ruining their experience by doing so. But ultimately, the problems that *can* arise aren't big enough to warrant the removal of save states, I was mostly just playing devil's advocate because I enjoy discussing these kinds of topics. I also agree with your last point.
Interestingly some lawyers have brought up the legality of downloading game copies you already own. It basically boiled down to this: If you already own a copy of a game, you are legally allowed to make a backup as it counts as software but you have to do it off of your own copy yourself... Maybe. See, they also stated that whether or not downloading it or making it yourself matters when the end result is the same is up in the air as it was never tested by courts. (See the video: "Smash Bros. "Big House" Online Tourney Cancelled by Nintendo") Something tells me game companies don't want to test it either because the last time something like that happened, the one who tried it lost hilariously and they're scared of it. "Bleem!" is what I'm referring to and courts ruled that the emulation was legal and their use of screenshots to market it is fair use. Now... Some people think that the legal fees were what put Bleem! out of business which is what Sony was going for to begin with. But that's debatable because it ended up setting a precedent for the future of emulation, opening up more than just Bleem! to get a foothold (which it did), but no one knows for sure why Bleem! went under. They might've made more stuff than they sold thinking that it would catch on more than it did for all we know. Plus Sony would never have known what their funds were and they could've lost a ton to Bleem! and inadvertently funded their operations. Even when Nintendo took ROMUniverse to court and "won", they didn't exactly "win". See the video "Nintendo Wins Empty Victory over ROMUniverse (Nintendo v. Storman)". So the more things that come out about emulation and ROMs, the more it looks like smoke and mirrors by companies just to scare people so they can generate sales even though people who weren't going to pay still wouldn't. Sort of like how they handled copyright on RU-vid where they would claim basically anything even though lawyers said that they couldn't. Primarily companies do so to intimidate people into thinking they had the right to and to make money they weren't entitled to. When people pushed back, the companies had no choice but to back down as their public relations were so negatively perceived between them being found to have been illegally abusing the copyright system and going after their most devoted fans that it became a nightmare for them. ....Needless to say I find this topic incredibly interesting which is why I looked into all of this, lol! I think it's because it's such a gray area that there's a lot of possibilities. Overall, I too would agree that however people play games isn't a big deal, nor is emulation. Companies aren't really "losing" sales that never could have existed to begin with and they are certain;y not going under anytime soon. Developers are already paid during game development anyway as well. Anything after that point is just funds that go to the company and not the developers that actually worked hard on the games to begin with. Thus companies are really the one double dipping and trying to make people feel bad. Heck... more than double in a lot of cases. But then there are cases like you mentioned where they complain about games being emulated they aren't even selling anymore like Melee. I've seen people actually make arguments that they don't have to make their entire library available and that people aren't entitled to have access to them at any time. But if companies don't care enough to keep them available, then why would people care if others emulate them?
If so then I don't get why people bitch so hard about Nintendo in this point, they can't stop piracy, so why is there even a discussion? Like that Mario trilogy controversy, or is it people nothing better to do than whining about corporations?
@@PEDROGARCIA-qj3gr Because Nintendo still works really hard to make it impossible. Emuparadise was a safe website that made it really easy to get old roms. I don't have the super expensive hardware to rip my old game carts, so this was an amazing thing to have. Nintendo sued them into irrelevancy, and now they don't host roms anymore. Now you have to go back to the sketchy sites again, or sources I won't mention here for fear of Nintendo shutting them down too. These giant corporations deserve all the criticism. And you dare to call it "whining" when we point out their abusive behavior?
When Scott was talking about how annoying emulation is to actually set up properly I couldn't help but think of Retroarch and how much of a pain in the ass it can be to get working properly.
Yeah. RetroArch has a steep leaning curve for beginners. It can take a long time to get stuff configured right. Took me a long time to get the hang of it. It's worth the trouble I think.
"Save states are cheating, play the game as intended" I've heard from some people. Meanwhile, in reality: Games were made harder in the US often to combat rentals and saves were not included in games because that made the cartridge more expensive. You think Battle Toads is a masochistic adventure? Boot up the Japanese version where it doesn't have friendly fire and gives more lives. Boy Resident Evil 1 & 2 could be hard- if you play the launch version in the US where they removed the lock on aiming and lowered the number of ink ribbons you got. Play Castlevania or Contra then play the JP version and realize just how boned we got. Emulation is great. Pirating games you don't own or can actually easily get that still supports the company? Is a great way to help make sure a series you love never gets support again. IDK how many great games are not being sold at all or not on modern platforms but goodness the list is long. Edit: Okay y'all need to calm down about pirating or actually read what I said. I never said piracy is 100% bad. If the company hasn't sold it for years? Yeah, go ahead and download Road Rash 3 on the Genesis, no one cares. You got DOOM 3 on CD but no disc drive- I'm sure Bethesda can deal with a download. Want to play Metroid Prime without CRT cables and you don't want to dig it out of the closet? Well Nintendo should have made a collection for Switch anyway. Photoshop is a bloated pile of garbage that's priced for corporations, not people, so go nuts- but also there's better software for cheaper so I would say don't bother pirating it, get something good. But if you're gonna pirate some indie developer's game? Yeah, that's not cool.
On the other hand, you had games like Mega Man 2 or Mario Bros 3 made easier for the US (or hell, the infamous case of Final Fantasy 4 getting turned into full-on baby mode). It's not quite a one-way street.
@@ExeloMinish That is true that some games were made easier- I would say most were made harder. But that's not my point... My point is they were made...Rather, the ones that WERE made harder here & we didn't get saves because that was more money they'd have to spend. So I argue that save states are either a counter to companies making our games harder for reasons that weren't our fault or countering the cheapness of not having a save battery in the cart.
@@CinnamonOwO Not true, at all. Just about every Konami game was made harder, Castlevania, Contra, from the NES to SNES/Genesis and so on. Contra Hard Corps was made so much harder it's unreal. You had 3 hits in JP vs 1 in the US, you get more continues and lives. The Castlevania games you took more damage and they changed enemy placement to be more hard Battle Toads Legendary difficulty is unique to the US, it's vastly easier in JP. Streets of Rage 3's hard mode is Japan's Mania mode in difficulty. Every enemy hits like a truck and moves faster. Resident Evil 1 & 2 removed the lock on, you took more damage & got less ink ribbons. You know that super hard mode you unlocked in remake where the chests weren't linked? That was how they were going to bring it to the US. The later versions of RE1 & 2 added the lock on back in. Devil May Cry 3's difficulties were SO skewed in the US on it's OG release. Every mode was one difficulty harder than the JP version- meaning we got an even harder mode. Metroid NES had lost it's 3 save files that the Famicom Disk version had leaving us to start with 32hp and almost no missiles. Ranger X had it's easiest mode removed, literally removing a tutorial level unique to it. I've heard some JRPGs lessened the money/exp earned to increase the grind- again all this crap was done to combat rentals since Nintendo was a big hand in making them illegal in Japan (without permission from the publisher). Those are the ones that I know off hand, there's way more than that I've seen over the years. So if there's more games that got made easier, that's news to me. I know there's a bunch but most of the big, popular ones seem to be way harder.
Big shout out to the random dude in college who put left 4 dead and star fox 64 out of my Macbook pro in 2008. You gave me many hours of joy And I can never thank you enough.
The original has very satisfying movement and is a great platformer overall while rehydrated has (in my opinion) horrible movement and is kinda a glitchy mess. If you’ve never played the original then you’d probably think it’s a good game but if you played the original then there’s no going back. There’s a lot of other reasons but the original is just so much better
Personally I prefer the originals art style because it's similar to the early seasons of the show. The remake is based on the current seasons which looks worse to me. I also dislike the obnoxious meme faces they added from the current show.
I think there's a good serious analogy here: translation Ports are like buying a translated book: the (assumed perfect) translation takes effort, publication, and adds cost, but captures everything about the original in an official package for a new audience. Emulation is like a (hypothetical) perfect machine translation of a book on an ereader: every book can be read this way and it's a blessing it exists, but it lacks some of the original authorial intent and output is variable. Having a physical copy of a book has a number of beneficial qualities to it purposely chosen by the publisher, but the machine translation has an infinite library. Both have their benefits. Of course reading the book in its native language is another discussion altogether, as is the acquisition of the book
In all seriousness, this video does a great job of exposing all aspects of emulation and why it raises a lot of questions. Even if it doesn't give any conclusive answers, it can at least help you make your mind with it.
@@rompevuevitos222 Thank you, no one mentions this! Sega and Sony especially so get the pass from people, when they deserve as much of not more scrutiny then Nintendo.
@@indisciipline well technicality on some SEGA games that they copyright. SEGA supports emulation of fanmade sonic games that there is already a new Sonic hacking contest happening now that has been going on for years as well as another happen every summer.
And yet you get cases like Metroid Dread emulation that, in a way, validates Nintendo's stance. It's as the saying goes, "One bad apple ruins the bunch."
Emulation is probably one of my favorite things about gaming. Got my 1st gaming pc last year and hardly even use it for modern pc games. it’s just great having your entire retro collection digital on on one device and playing them at 4K resolution with any controller you want.
@@waled7564 I'm kinda in the middle. I have my PS1 and 2 games and I play them to this day, sometimes instead of PC versions or versions from other consoles. I play Marvel Ultimate Alliance on PS2 instead of playing it of PS3. I also want to buy an og Xbox for some more obscure exclusives and some 6th gen multiplatform games that are not on PC. However I'm not buying a GameCube, because I'm interested in like one game, that I'll emulate. Others are available on Switch, which I also want to buy. Though from what I hear Nintendo turned accessing their older games on a Switch into a nightmare.
I'm glad Scott was so real about this. I really have a problem w other gaming content creators that tell you how to hack a system but not how to load roms on it or to only load roms of games you already own. Scott laid it down perfect. Nobody cares
I like to imagine that shortly after this video's outro gag (18:45), Scott asked "Square Enix fans, does this ever happen to you?" can't wait for Scott's prison sentence in this video to actually be foreshadowing for The Trial 2 (The Trial was a phenomenal video by the way)
Let me get this straight: You comment something that is unrelated to the fact that I have two HEAVENLY HANDSOME girlfriends? Considering that I am the unprettiest RU-vidr ever, having two handsome girlfriends is really incredible. Yet you did not mention that at all. I am quite disappointed, dear su
To me there is such a thing as piracy and there is such a thing as "neither the hardware to play it on nor the game itself are avaliable to buy below 1000 dollars collectors price"
Bonus points if the reason it's so expensive is because you also need to buy a foreign console because the game NEVER FUCKING CAME OUT in your country thereby proving that the developers never wanted my money in the first place.
The only people that complain about emulators are the guys who are retro traditionalists or the guys who have blew their life savings on game collecting. I see nothing wrong with undermining greedy corporations like Nintendo, Sony, etc.
I also saw people who would complain about emulation are people who are just... well, simply said "Nasty, Cruel, and seek conflict." The people who care only about the Legal part (that emulation is "illegal", it IS NOT) or people who are just cruel and shout on others for the sake of stirring up a conflict! And because of "Legal" people like this who lick corporate's feet for whichever reason, I was too afraid to Emulate until my 22th of age/year... Oh, do not worry, I've lost nothing, emulation has only got better (over time) in my absence :-)
@@WeskAlber For sure, and emulation can also be good for reviving old high quality games that didn't sell amazingly well and were too expensive. Chibi Robo may be gone for now, but if the only way to get it was paying 100+ bucks and finding a GameCube, very few people would be able to experience it and demand it back. You can get a lot more grassroots interest that eventually leads to a series revival if people can access the game for less than the cost of a console and physical cart and can mod it as well. If I were a dev, in the long run I'd rather have people invested in my games than milk fans dry to the point where they pirate it. I'd slap my game on PC and never take it down and print copies as long as I can. I understand supply and demand but I can't help but feel like I'm being ripped off if someone enjoyed a game for a decade or more and then sells it to me for a hefty profit. There's something inherently dickish about it, even if I wouldn't call it "scalping" like people are doing with PS5's. The Disney/Nintendo Vault technique of controlling nostalgia to revive a game/movie on THEIR timeline is frankly bullshit market manipulation. If they don't want people pirating their shit, then maybe rerelease HeartGold and SoulSilver for a reasonable price /rant.
While it wasn't something explicity mentioned in the video, shoutouts to Fightcade which allows people to play emulated older fighting games online with other people with terrific netcode far greater than most ports of fighting games have had. It has revived a lot of titles that otherwise have fallen into obscurity.
Emulation allowed me to play all my childhood games again as well as the games I missed and couldn't have played otherwise. Thanks to it, I finally can say as a MGS fan that I've played all the main line games. Emulation is also important for preservation of games and their history.
If it weren’t for emulation, I wouldn’t have been able to get into persona and ace attorney (before it released on pc) as well as Danganronpa. All three Of them impacted my life a lot and got me into multiple fandoms during my teenage years around 2012-2017. Also I had an ancient pc and the emulators worked decently on them without much lag, so I was able to play them despite my hardware being terrible. My parents also didn’t want to buy me any consoles and all I had was an old pc, so I made the best of it.
As a big JRPG fan, the fast forward feature is super useful. For instance, the Phantasy Star games in the Genesis collection can be slow, be it moving in the over world or doing battle. Fast forward helps it so much
My personal take on the emulation legality debate is pretty simple: The minute a company stops producing a console, and the only way you can realistically obtain the console is a third party seller or retailer, it should be free game for emulation.