What do you guys think Nintendo or Sega would care about people making / selling reproduction carts? I mean, they aren't losing money on them, as these are (mostly) games that have never been released in English or proto games. Now, im not talking about people making pirate carts like Earthbound and selling them on ebay....obviously that is a little more unethical.
I'm just curious if Nintendo or any other big company would care enough to go after a repro maker? I see some sites like Gamereproductions or Nesreproductions that have been around for a few years, and they still seem to be operating just fine.
Thoughts?
It's not that they approve or look the other way. Legal actions can be complicated and it's possible they aren't aware of such sites. And it's possible if they sites are not hosted in a nation that will do anything about it. Then there is little they can do about it from the angle of having the website shut down. Another thing is their costs/reward for doing anything. If it's one guy bootlegging various random games in small numbers, that may not be a big priority. Particularly when you aren't talking about new titles but ones over a decade old. Now if it's someone mass producing something it might be worth it to a company to do something about it, particularly if they appear to have alot of money that could be awarded from a settlement or court ruling. Though again, that means they need to be in a country where they can possibly win a judgement.
So I don't think it's about whether they care or not but how practical it is to do anything about it and just how many other things they are busy with. Those that pursue the piracy concerns are probably most focused on shutting down distributors of current titles for systems like the Wii, Wii-U, Nintendo DS & 3DS, and for Sega also the Xbox 360 and PS3 titles.
Another factor is the extent to which old games compete with "current titles". If people are buying bootleg copies of games for obsolete platforms, they're not buying copies of the same game on the authorized store for a currently supported platform (Wii Shop, Xbox Live, PSN), nor are they probably buying copies of the same publisher's other games on the authorized store.
getafixx wrote:
What do you guys think Nintendo or Sega would care about people making / selling reproduction carts? I mean, they aren't losing money on them, as these are (mostly) games that have never been released in English or proto games. Now, im not talking about people making pirate carts like Earthbound and selling them on ebay....obviously that is a little more unethical.
I'm just curious if Nintendo or any other big company would care enough to go after a repro maker? I see some sites like Gamereproductions or Nesreproductions that have been around for a few years, and they still seem to be operating just fine.
Thoughts?
"They" (big companies) care a lot more than you think, and it varies from company to company. Those sites should probably have a good set of attorneys ready to go at the drop of a hat (or if they can't afford them, they might as well close shop now). Nintendo still
actively has copyright on most all of its games (and this was re-established by their inclusion in things like Animal Crossing for the Wii and the "retro" games for the GBA that ran using a NES/Famicom emulator); selling games that they own copyright to is bound to upset them eventually. Chances are "they" don't know about these sites, but eventually will; just a matter of time.
Remember: back in the very late 80s/early 90s it took Nintendo about 3-4 years before they started cracking down on copiers for the SNES/SFC. Things take a very long time to happen within big companies, and that includes taking people to court. This is exactly why things like NDS flash cart companies pop up for a year or two then suddenly disappear without a trace, only to have another one pop up, rinse lather repeat -- it's a cat-and-mouse game.
Another more recent story would be that of Game Center CX -- where Arino wasn't allowed to play a substantial number of Nintendo or Capcom games because each respective company had plans to re-release those games on present-day consoles (thus it would cut into their profits somehow). This is why he tended to play weird obscure games rather than famous/popular ones. Sure, that's Japan rather than the United States, but these days the international border matters less when it comes to decision-making; think about it -- all it would take is a simple Email sent from KIMISHIMA Tatsumi to Reggie Fils-Aime and bam, the ball starts rolling.
Footnote story, semi-related: I did have a brief Email conversation with Konami Co. at one point regarding Parodius Networking (I was concerned about the name and if they would be offended/upset by it). I contacted them (out of respect) and asked about any potential legal ramifications. I was told that they weren't concerned about the name since what I/we did was completely different than what they did, plus there was no profit involved (and very little cash flow (donations only)) or legal business establishment. The only thing that concerned them was the Parodius logo + Takosuke-with-panties-on-his-head animation (which I painstakingly made myself) on our home page. I asked if a simply copyright/rightful ownership notice would be sufficient and was told that was acceptable. This was back in, hrm, 1997 I think. The world was different then (no DMCA, significantly fewer IP-copyright-infringement lawsuits going on, etc.), and even different prior to then. Today, the modus operandi is 24x7x365 CYA (cover your ass).
It's not the console maker who would care, it's the one who holds the copyright to the game. As far as losing money, they can argue at the very least that unauthorized distribution of the game competes with other games they're currently selling. If they have re-released it in an emulator, or plan on doing that in the future, they might also view it as unauthorized competition.
MottZilla's point addresses the main issue: limited enforcement resources. Small-time repro sites aren't having to outrun the bear, they're just having to outrun the person carrying a big pot of honey.
(ugh, I posted this an hour or so ago but it never appeared)
So basically as long as they arent selling them in the thousands then they're probably safe? I just feel like the companies would be wasting their time, unless they were just out to make a point.
No one should assume they are safe, there is always the chance that some sort of actions will be taken. The easiest would be if you have a website selling bootleg carts it could be shut down. Another option would be to attack the payment provider, for example if you accept Paypal payments. But there is a point to be made that some people are bigger targets than others for being busted.
Unfortunately they don't care yet, but I hope some day they will sue those bastards who makes tom of money on translations or romhacks that other people made for free.
People who make romhacks for free don't also make you nice collectible cartridges with labels and printed boxes. Making the repro itself is its own service, worthy of compensation.
1. If you release a romhack for free, you must expect that repros will be made of it.
2. Since not everyone has the time/skill/means to make a repro themself, it's reasonable for them to pay somebody else to do it for them.
Maybe you think the romhacker should get a cut of the profits-- perhaps that would be nice, but this is certainly not the expectation they had when they released a ROM for free. If they expect this, they really should perform or seek out their own repro service to distribute through instead of releasing things for free and expecting to get paid.
I'm not saying it's morally (or legally) right to take someone's translation work and sell a product that incorporates it. I'm just saying that it's not really practical to expect compensation under the circumstances.
Though, if the repro houses have a duty to pay royalties to romhackers, you know they have just as much of a legal duty to pay royalties to the copyright holders of the original ROMs too. If a translator were to put a notice with their release demanding a cut of any repro profits, they'd be asking to take a share in the criminal profits of copyright violation, ha ha. This seems a little bit absurd to me.
I don't think romhackers expect to be paid, but they don't expect anybody to be paid for their work either.
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People who make romhacks for free don't also make you nice collectible cartridges with labels and printed boxes
Because cutting some graphics on photoshop/GIMP is worth $120 while spending hours to hack bytes in a hex editor is worth $0 ?!
Bregalad wrote:
Because cutting some graphics on photoshop/GIMP is worth $120 while spending hours to hack bytes in a hex editor is worth $0 ?!
I didn't say anything about the worth of the romhack. I certainly don't expect the flow of money to directly represent some quantifiable "worth" of any given effort. I appreciate the romhack much more than the repro, personally, but just because someone decides to give away their ROM for free doesn't mean I would expect a repro maker to give away their repros for free. I don't think it's sensible to compare these things' worth by some dollar expectation.
Romhackers can try and sell repros or make a deal with a repro house if they like (and are willing to take a share in the copyright violation), but if they want to do that they need to actually
do that. If they fail to provide repros to people, they really should expect someone else to fill that void. As I've already kinda stated above, there's not really much moral difference between not paying 1 author and not paying 2 authors, the repro house is already comfortable being a bootlegger, and it's silly to expect them to pay somebody who willingly gave up all distribution control of their ROM.
Bregalad wrote:
Unfortunately they don't care yet, but I hope some day they will sue those bastards who makes tom of money on translations or romhacks that other people made for free.
Is it really any different then someone buying a Powerpak or other flash cart? In the way you're saying, buying a flash cart should be more wrong as it allows you to play any and all commercially released games. That obviously includes all hacks and translations as well.
Well, remember that there are some people here who are negative towards people who make their own homebrew games, produce cartridges of them, and sell them. There's not much you can do to resolve such a difference in values.
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Is it really any different then someone buying a Powerpak or other flash cart? In the way you're saying, buying a flash cart should be more wrong as it allows you to play any and all commercially released games. That obviously includes all hacks and translations as well.
Yes there is a difference, because in the Powerpak you pay for the hardware.
If someone would do repros and would just charge what the hardware costs to him, I would not have anything against it. Unfortunately those bastards try to pass them as original games, and makes huge margins on them, like ULTRA RARE US EARTHBOUND NES CARTRIGE $150 when anyone could just take a TKROM board, solder 2 eproms and several wires and do the same for $20-$25.
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Well, remember that there are some people here who are negative towards people who make their own homebrew games, produce cartridges of them, and sell them.
I am negative towards Sivak because he just raped us literally... basically we answered him kindly how to make his game and now he made huge profits on his sales. Not to mention the authors of the original IWBTG. Looking back it's not nearly as bad as repro-makers though in my opinion.
Bregalad wrote:
I am negative towards Sivak because he just raped us literally... basically we answered him kindly how to make his game and now he made huge profits on his sales.
Which isn't a problem at all to me. We helped someone advance the state of the art in post-discontinuation NES game development to the point where we can point to a salable product. And the demo was still released as a gratis download.
Fedora does not package NES emulators because Red Hat's legal department believes the noninfringing use for NES emulators is not "substantial" enough for a Betamax defense. Apparently the existence of a couple dozen playable NES homebrew games that one is allowed, nay,
encouraged to download and use isn't yet strong enough evidence against a contributory infringement lawsuit from Nintendo claiming that an emulator would be primarily used with infringing copies of games downloaded from the Internet.
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Not to mention the authors of the original IWBTG.
Battle Kid is an 8-bit-style flip-screen platformer with a shoot button and a One Hit Point Wonder. What all does Battle Kid copy from IWBTG specifically, as opposed to the whole rest of the NES library?
Bregalad wrote:
I am negative towards Sivak because he just raped us literally
Well, that's news to me. I think I'd have known if that happened.
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Fedora does not package NES emulators because Red Hat's legal department believes the noninfringing use for NES emulators is not "substantial" enough for a Betamax defense. Apparently the existence of a couple dozen playable NES homebrew games that one is allowed, nay, encouraged to download and use isn't yet strong enough evidence against a contributory infringement lawsuit from Nintendo claiming that an emulator would be primarily used with infringing copies of games downloaded from the Internet
Interesting. So basically, distributing free homebrews will make emulator usage less likely to be a "piracy" act, right ? This would go well along my thoughts.
And yes, back then I over-reacted to what sivak did. It is not as bad as I painted it back then, as I wasn't even aware as how greedy the repro makers are now, which is much worse. Also it's more the way he did it than what he did that annoyed me : It was REALLY like : Hey guys wanna play my game ? You want it, you want it ? WELL YOU'LL HAVE TO PAY ME FOR IT HAHA. AND REAL EXPENSIVE.
I am not against someone selling homebrew carts, but then they should not expect anyone to help them for free.
Bregalad wrote:
I am not against someone selling homebrew carts, but then they should not expect anyone to help them for free.
So to get an idea about who you think deserves free help, I may need to consider a few more cases. Would you not expect to help me for free just because I wrote the menu system for the (long-delayed) cartridge for the 2011 NESdev competition? And Sivak did distribute the first mission of BK1 gratis.
This is a complex subject, because people learn things for free on the internet all the time, and it's not uncommon for them to use that knowledge to make money. For example, if someone learns about HTML and CSS for free are they not allowed to make web pages for money?
The problem with NES homebrews is a bit different, because developers try to sell games to the very people that gave them the knowledge they needed to make said games. IMO, getting advice from other programmers is just a little part of what makes a game. After gathering the necessary knowledge, the programmer still has a long way until the game is finished, and the small number of completed games is the proof that this isn't an easy task, so I believe they deserve some sort of compensation if they desire it. Nothing wrong with that.
However, I feel that everyone should give something back. When you release a game for free, you are helping to make the scene more interesting. If you release it with source code, you're providing study material. Everything that causes the scene to grow and release even more games is good for us. If you don't want to release your games for free because that would hurt your profits, you should do something else to help. If a person shows up here only to ask for help and later to promote the finished product you have to pay for, IMO that's a fail.
What exactly was Sivak helped with for free that directly lead to him making money? I'm just curious. If you think about it, he has to create something *worth* paying for to make any money. I don't think just technical information can alone be applied to make a game worth paying for. Battle Kid did result in renewed interest with the NES and the idea of new games being released. That part was certainly good.
The idea of being upset because sivak learned things on the internet and then made profits is pretty crazy IMO. All of his original works/hack were free. He has demos for free. And it was probably the motivation of the success (money included) of the first battlekid that motivated him and the other people he worked with to make BK2.
I'm pretty sure most of the people lending help on this forum are doing it because we enjoy spending copious amounts of time talking about something we're passionate about. The forum is more of entertainment than sharing knowledge expecting to somehow being compensated for it. If you feel violated because someone used the knowledge you willingly shared to make a profit, then perhaps you should stick to a private notepad vice an internet forum...
As for giving back to the community I think the creation of a sequel BK2 is awesome enough. I don't know to what extent everyone helped sivak here. But for me, when he posted questions about how to solve his hardware problems I was excited to chime in with the idea I may have possibly helped him in some small way. To think that he somehow owes us is just asinine... Yeah, let's poop on one of the few people in the community that finished quality homebrews. Because he's making money from a HUGE amount of his own hard work, creativity, and personal motivation, with a dash of knowledge we willingly shared/made public. That'll surely promote the community and motivate people to create quality stuff. If it makes you feel any better I'd think it's a pretty safe bet that his equivalent 'wage' from the earnings is below minimum wage...
tokumaru wrote:
The problem with NES homebrews is a bit different, because developers try to sell games to the very people that gave them the knowledge they needed to make said games.
The proof is in the pudding: plenty of people here have bought games whose development fits the above description.
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However, I feel that everyone should give something back. When you release a game for free, you are helping to make the scene more interesting. If you release it with source code, you're providing study material. Everything that causes the scene to grow and release even more games is good for us. If you don't want to release your games for free because that would hurt your profits, you should do something else to help.
Charging for a game allows you to devote more time to working on the game, rather than doing other work for money. If charging money gets in the way of contributing back, then like you say, that doesn't fit in with a community like this. At this point, even a game whose developer makes no further posts once it's released is still contributing back in many ways. Primarily, they're showing what's possible, which might raise the bar in many people's minds and cause them to strive to do a lot more. Their game gives lots of good insights into how they designed it and what one might do to make a successful game in this day and age. Personally I'm thrilled that the Battle Kid games have been such a hit and shown that homebrew games can really be in the same league as games back in the day.
But hey, I love the free market and the value it creates for everyone through entirely voluntary trades that leave both parties off better than before.
blargg wrote:
Charging for a game allows you to devote more time to working on the game, rather than doing other work for money.
Yeah, we talked about this before in various topics about
homebrew complexity.
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At this point, even a game whose developer makes no further posts once it's released is still contributing back in many ways. Primarily, they're showing what's possible, which might raise the bar in many people's minds and cause them to strive to do a lot more.
Hence
my current project that I'm prototyping in Pygame before I port it to the NES. If it worked for Streemerz, which was prototyped in Multimedia Fusion 2 and then ported to Flash and then ported to NES, it could work for me. Send me a PM if you want to see what I've been doing lately.
I don't think they sold that many copies of Battle Kid to make crazy profits from it. I'd guess under 1000 units sold.
The only issues I have with Battle Kid are the plagiarized music from RushJet1, and the lack of purchasable ROM image. Besides those issues, it's a seriously awesome and uber-challenging series of games, and I'm cursing my ass off every second of the way, and enjoying it. I'm guessing no ROM file to prevent savestates.
tepples wrote:
Hat's legal department believes the noninfringing use for NES emulators is not "substantial" enough for a Betamax defense. Apparently the existence of a couple dozen playable NES homebrew games that one is allowed, nay, encouraged to download and use isn't yet strong enough evidence against a contributory infringement lawsuit from Nintendo claiming that an emulator would be primarily used with infringing copies of games downloaded from the Internet.
By the way, Microsoft authorized Snes9x for the Windows RT app store.
Dwedit wrote:
The only issues I have with Battle Kid are the plagiarized music from RushJet1,
I wonder if that's the only instance of it. There's
this and
this, but maybe I'm looking too hard. I'd never played FF3, but I just heard Battle Kid during that section of the song when a cover was posted.
The price is not outrageous for Battle Kid. The manual, cartridge, chips, board and distribution do cost something, especially in a low print run. Sivak's time and opportunity cost must be considered. I would suggest that of the $30 asking price, he may make $20 in profit per copy sold. Say 1,000 copies are sold, he may make $20,000.00 for the game. Consider how many hours he, one man, put into programming it, designing the graphics, composing the sound, debugging and playtesting it, he probably spent 1,000 hours. $20/hour is not a bad wage, but its not like he was trying to get rich of the retro-community.
Great Hierophant wrote:
I would suggest that of the $30 asking price, he may make $20 in profit per copy sold.
I'd say almost certainly not even that much. Carts aren't free. Even assuming bunnyboy worked totally for free, and Sivak made 100% of what was left after buying parts and printing manuals I don't think it'd be $20 per. Bunnyboy might buy in enough volume to to get his costs down really low, but even then he spends time putting it together.
Doing carts shows you do it for the love, because selling a rom would be easier, the price could be cheaper, you'd reach for people, and you'd probably make more.
You're also leaving out the tax man's fair share of the profit.
I think the FF3 resemblance is a stretch because the songs are in different keys. FF3 is in a major key, Battle Kid is in a minor key. Also FF3 has much more accompaniment.
Great Hierophant wrote:
I would suggest that of the $30 asking price, he may make $20 in profit per copy sold. Say 1,000 copies are sold, he may make $20,000.00 for the game.
More like $7-8. And I would be suprised if he sold 1,000 copies.
Hardly squeezing the fan base is it. He could make more money hawking newspapers on the street or turning tricks in Thailand.
This repro thing makes it sort of aggravating to see the high prices "rare" games go on ebay; it wouldn't be that hard to change a more common NES game into a bootleg copy of Little Samson.
I think it's pretty cut and dried: You create the content, you get to do what you like with it. I know there's a thread or two where Sivak asked about implementing ice, but come on now. The same could be said for 6502 tutorials and NES hardware docs.
In principle, I agree it wouldn't kill Sivak to share his technical knowledge. But most of what he knows has probably been covered here or somewhere like Nerdy Nights. Putting it together is a different beast from sharing a few algorithms.
Did you try writing Taito and asking when the company plans to bring it to Virtual Console?
strat wrote:
In principle, I agree it wouldn't kill Sivak to share his technical knowledge. But most of what he knows has probably been covered here or somewhere like Nerdy Nights. Putting it together is a different beast from sharing a few algorithms.
From what I've seen, Battle Kid is mostly hard work designing a game, creating lots of levels to explore, and making it a buyable cartridge that's not a net loss to produce. That is, less NES-hardware-technical.