The Video Game Industry

Moon Channel dropped his video on the whole situation with Nintendo, Yuzu, emulation, and piracy

TL;DW:

• Discord is not the place to have legally consequential discussions
• Tropic Haze employees were idiots who actively, knowingly encouraged users to break the law
• It's best that Tropic Haze settled, because had the case gone to trial, they would have been obliterated.
•  If you make an emulator, fly under the radar, not up to the sun

He doesn't comment on the drive full of pirated games, because that's hearsay.

EDIT: Huh, pagetopper.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:06:35 PM

Well if it is shit slop why do you even want it?

I think most AAA games nowadays are lacking too. Hence why I don’t buy them or play them.

Edited by M84 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 10:34:04 PM

From what I gather the obvious answer is that its illegal. now morality and legality do not necessarily correlate, but law is still an influence on what is considered good.

The slightly more convincing argument here is two fold. First as a variant of The Golden Rule (after all you wouldn't want someone stealing your stuff now would you)? and the second is that theft in general means that someone isn't getting paid. And odds are the employees slaving away over their computers will get the brunt of that.

To use an example, lets say the pirated game was not something from Actiblizz or whatever the current AAA punching bag is, but instead some indie darling made by a literal Starving Artist, someone in the same social class as you at best.

The other argument is that piracy tends to also entail the sale of stolen digital goods as well. Not only did they stole the program in question but also the opportunity of a sale as well. The closest analogy is scalping, (which need not entail the scalper gets their wares the legitimate way).

It basically comes down to if you think the existence of a black market itself is moral or otherwise. That is all I will say on the matter.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 7:50:50 AM

Yes, intellectual property is a legal construct, as the content of a book/videogame/movie/invention/etc... are not physical objects and thus have very different characteristics from things like cars and hammers. However, if society decided to stop treating intellectual property as real property, how would creators and inventors be able to put food on their table and pay rent with their ideas?

As said, because the cost of copying information (including software) is close to zero compared to the cost of creating information, fewer people would be willing to create content for a living. Pure science is an example; subscribing to scientific publication databases is cheaper (but still quite expensive for individuals) than producing the research that goes into them. This is why most scientists get their paychecks from tax revenue (and why it is the government's responsibility to fund science research).

Maybe this might not be so bad, as not many people are able to make a living from content creation in our current world anyway, so there won't be much difference. Content creation will primarily shift towards revenue models such as advertisements and loot boxes.

With that said, I do agree the current copyright system is too much in favor of corporations rather than actual creators, and there should be some reform like shortening the expiration date for copyrights. Also, there should be measures to prevent content from being lost forever just because the copyright holder went out of business, like getting rid of DRM bullshit. Some parts of software copyright law will have to be removed, as enforcing them would be unfeasible without violating the freedom of speech or undermining antitrust legislation. Perhaps then, we will have to accept that intellectual property is less sacred than tangible property.

Personally, the metaphor I'd use is that digital piracy is akin to those crappy react videos or livestreams where the guy reposting the video doesn't actually react much. It's kind of seen as pretty sketchy to do that.

I'd argue that the imbalance of power in question distorts our perception of piracy in general.

To use a hypothetical example, let's say someone made an Indie game with the intent to sell it on their home computer all by themselves. Then, a big AAA company copied the game and then let people download it for free on their website. The Indie Dev would be within their right to be pissed, I think.

Basically, the difference between that and 'regular' piracy is that the victim is a big megacorp, which doesn't really matter for the law.

In fairness I do think this matters on a pure ethical level. While ripping money off of rich people is wrong, doing it to the poor is even worse. I see piracy as being kind of a Poke the Poodle if you will, it's not good but it's not an atrocity either.

I will say I do think that copyright laws have issues in them. The big one is mostly that I Ps last too long (I feel like copyright should expire after like 30 years if that). But the idea itself is sound.

I will also say that the hypothetical opposite extreme would be an issue. Like if we imagine a world where piracy was straight-up legal and DRM didn't exist, then that would be pretty bad as companies would basically have to live purely off of donations.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 9:24:50 AM

I’d also like to chime in that even big-name ”faceless” companies have employees, ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, who need to put food on the table and pay rent. It’s very hypocritical to say that they’re somehow less worthy of earning an income for making games than an indie company just because YOU think it’s ”shit slop.”

Remember, when you steal from a bank, it’s not the bankers who starve.

Edited by MagmaTeaMerry on Apr 3rd 2024 at 7:04:10 PM

I mean, it's not as if not paying for games directly leads to those employees having smaller paychecks. The individuals employees already got paid salaries by the corporation during the development of the game, if the game is already out then the developers themselves have already gotten paid. Any money being spent by customers is going to the company itself to recoup the costs of those salaries and then into profit. The only way piracy could harm the employees is if it was so rampant and impactful to the company's bottom line that it caused the company to downsize or shut down, thereby causing employees to lose their jobs.

That is different from an indie game, which implies an individual or small group not being paid salaries by a large company have spent their own money and time making the game without any guarantee for payment. In that case, the customer's money is directly right to the person/people who made the game so they can be compensated for it.

Edited by KuroBaraHime on Apr 3rd 2024 at 1:10:52 PM

Most laws cant really be enforced at scale, go look up the statistics for how often various crimes get jail time some time and you will find that even for major offences like rape and murder the rate is something like 4%.

Between needing the crime to be reported, needing the crime to make it's way though the police investigation, needing the crime to make it's way through court, then needing the court to actualy make a conviction....

Even when your dealing with cases where you can prove a crime happened alone, your incredibly unlikely to actualy see any one charged with it due to compounding rates and points where the charge can stop.

Does that mean we shouldn't consider those major offences crimes either because there is a comparable lack of enforcement?

It's not really the enforcement of crimes that makes them work, it's the fact that the possibility of enforcement is there that works as a deterrent.

...

That and most people abide by the social contract by default...

But that's starting to get off topic.

Though I guess at the same time what I am really getting at here is the social contract involved is also what most people tend to think about when they try to justify if a criminal offence is valid or not, not enforcenent.

Edited by Imca on Apr 4th 2024 at 2:24:31 AM

OK, so the issue of piracy an and of itself notwithstanding: Wasn't Yuzu also, like, an emulator that they wanted to charge money for? Because pirating games is one thing, but trying to make money off of the games you effectively stole? Like, surely, there has to be a line somewhere, right? That's basically grifting, isn't it?

Considering Nintendo's stance on people who pirate their stuff and don't try to make money off of it, why Yuzu thought that this wouldn't backfire on them is beyond me, to be honest. Like, regardless of your stance on piracy... You gotta admit, that was incredibly stupid.

They weren't charging money for the emulator per se, they had a Patreon page where you could donate money to them to support the emulator. A perk for donating though was that you got early access to updates to the emulator before they were put into the main branch you could freely download from their website or github. Though funny enough, because the emulator was open source they couldn't stop people from "pirating" the early access releases by just sticking them on github themselves.

In any case, there's nothing illegal about selling an emulator to someone else's console. That was literally what the old Sony vs Bleem lawsuit that established the legality of emulators was about, Bleem was straight up selling their Playstation emulator in stores and that was ruled to be perfectly legal. If you coded an emulator from scratch with no code taken directly from the console it's emulating, then you own the copyright to that emulator's code and can legally do whatever you want with it.

What screwed over the Yuzu team was that they had Discord logs with tons of incriminating stuff in it like talking about pirating games and sharing pirated game copies, as well as sharing Switch encryption keys which are really shaky in what you can legally do with them and was a big point in Nintendo's case, and they were explicitly talking about getting leaked copies of TotK running pre-release which Nintendo was trying to argue was something that unfairly harmed sales of their game and incentivized people to pay their Patreon for early access builds to play TotK.

Two things.

• 1: Advocating for piracy is against forum rules. Piracy is illegal and we’d like to not get the site shut down.
• 2: It’s interesting to see the intellectual disconnect between people online saying that game piracy isn’t really stealing when those same people will fight tooth and nail for as broad a definition of stealing as possible when it comes to publicly available art posted on social media.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 4th 2024 at 8:04:59 PM

It’s interesting but not inexplicable. Art posted on social media can be consumed right there, at no extra cost, and then reposted within the platform, making it easy to share without loss of attribution, and even supports the artist by extending reach (something the artists will often praise you for). The broad arguments for theft come into play when its reused without attribution, as you now deny them both income and brand recognition. Or of course its merely NFT apologia in disguise.

Meanwhile, games cannot be consumed without cost: you can SEE the painting or video on Instagram, but you can’t play the game without buying/downloading it, or in the case of F 2 P engage with the premium features with a fee. Additionally, whereas art on social media comes directly from the artist, video games are mediated by platform and distributors, and so pirates resolve that cognitive dissonance by blaming corporations and casting themselves as Robin Hood: “I’m not stealing from an artist; the studio already stole from the artist, I’m just stealing it back from the rich and giving it to poor little me.”

Edited by Readersprite on Apr 4th 2024 at 6:35:03 AM

Nazi symbols found in the next Life is Strange game are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to toxic culture at developer Deck Nine, including abusive leadership, encouraged crunch, especially by Square Enix London, and allowed bullying by people asking for more representation.

Wtf. Deck Nine took over that franchise after Dontnod was no longer apparently in charge. I suspect that people at the company didn't want to work on the games, but figured they had to.

Ironically, Life is Strange triggers the right for being too Woke.

God that's so painful to read, in like the emotional sense.

Have any symbols been found in True Colors?

Also, this tweet has some details on Square’s current new strategy.

https://x.com/okami13_/status/1776245109694091567?s=46&t=7YT7yMPCw2VMMwQUxWj5_A

Edited by BigBadShadow25 on Apr 5th 2024 at 8:47:08 AM

Someone's showing their True Colors, that's for sure.

...I'll see myself out.