Nintendo's cracking down on Speedrunning and ROM hack videos

[José Mourinho]

http://www.destructoid.com/nintendo...edrunning-and-rom-hacking-videos-310152.phtml

Speedrunner PangaeaPanga was the creator of the popular “Hardest Super Mario World Level Ever” video, which had amassed over a million views while it was up. He also regularly uploaded speedruns, many of which were tool-assisted and so required the use of a ROM and emulator to play. In his own words, his entire channel has been “wrecked” by Nintendo, which has taken down multiple videos of his.



We wish to inform you that the videos in question infringe Nintendo's copyrights. As the owner of the copyright in the games: Mario Kart 8, Super Mario World, and Pokémon, Nintendo has the exclusive right to perform the games publicly or to make derivative works based on the games. By making a derivative work using Nintendo's IP, and then displaying Nintendo's IP on your YouTube channel, you have violated Nintendo's exclusive rights.

Nintendo understands that its fans are the reason for its success, and we are always happy to see people share their passion for Nintendo's games. At the same time, Nintendo's intellectual property constitutes its most valuable assets, and the unauthorized use of these assets jeopardizes Nintendo's rights. Because of this, we ask that you please remove the video in question from your channel, and confirm that you will not post any videos using unauthorized software or copies of games, distribute or continue work on the modification, or take any other steps that would infringe Nintendo's rights.

Nintendo encourages fan engagement on YouTube through the Nintendo Creators Program. Under the program, participants are granted a license to use Nintendo’s characters, games, and other intellectual property, subject to the Code of Conduct included with the agreement. However, please note that this Code of Conduct prohibits you, among other things, from posting any content using unauthorized software or copies of games. This includes videos featuring tool-assisted speedruns, which require making a copy of a game's ROM file, and running the copied ROM through an emulator. If you are interested in learning more about the Nintendo Creators Program, please see: https://r.ncp.nintendo.net/

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Nintendo Anti-Piracy Team

 

[Watcher]

I really think this is more of a sign of how out of touch both Nintendo and their marketing teams are.

Like both Microsoft and Sony are embracing how people want to produce video content from their games. Sony even has a "share" button on their controller specifically to do that.

Nintendo on the other hand seems very stuck in the 80s and 90s with regard to protecting their intellectual property. Zero tolerance to anything that might potentially be linked to piracy, or might use their content even if it gives them free advertising.

 

[José Mourinho]

And of course, our MRA Nintendrone hero rushes in to the defense

 

[WireSponge]

It's amazing how Nintendo can be a genius at making games and still be completely incompetent in so many other places. I honestly think that they just don't get it, and I don't expect them to make any major improvements at understanding the market anytime soon. Nintendo has a huge and loyal fanbase to the point where Pokémon doesn't even need to be marketed anymore. Nintendo can just announce it and the fans generate all the hype they need. With the garunteed sales from fans and giant existing bank account, Nintendo has no need to improve, and they clearly don't want to do so of their own volition. That's not to say that Nintendo will never realize that they should keep romhacks and the like up on YouTube, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it happening until at least a few more years past, and even tgen I think that's optimistic.

 

[Linako 2.0]

Get with the times, ya old fossils!

 

[Watcher]

It's amazing how Nintendo can be a genius at making games and still be completely incompetent in so many other places. I honestly think that they just don't get it, and I don't expect them to make any major improvements at understanding the market anytime soon.

I remember there was an interview some time in the mid 2000s where someone asked why Nintendo would keep producing underpowered machines like the N64 and the Gamecube compared to their competition.

I can't remember who it was that responded (it might've been Iwata or Reggie) but they mentioned Nintendo deliberately avoids competing directly with their competition. And they prefer to do their own thing and not follow industry trends.

And for a lot of people this is the appeal of Nintendo. Like they didn't follow the First Person shooter craze during the 2000s (apart from Metroid Prime. And even that controlled completely differently to something like Halo and was singleplayer focused rather than multiplayer). They still make 3D platformers and they still keep producing games for the same franchises they first created 30+ years ago.

You can most notably see this with how they interact with fans and how they design their consoles. Like the Wii was a smash hit specifically because it avoided marketing itself like other video game consoles did. It marketed itself to children and the elderly. And consequently it died very early because adopters of the console didn't really purchase games for it.

With their fanbase Nintendo very clearly views it in a very Web 1.0 sort of way. It's the manufacturer and seller, it makes the games, you buy them. That's it. Move on to the next project. But we've clearly seen over the past decade that's a very archaic style of game design. There are games now that are sold on being long term investments (Destiny with it's 10 year DLC plan), games where the users dictate the experience (Eve Online), games that sell themselves on user generated content (Skyrim), games that sell themselves on people making videos about them (Minecraft, Amnesia etc).

When you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as resembling a nail. It really is unfortunate but I don't really see Nintendo losing this mindset unless they start doing poorly financially where they need to compete and gain a grip on third party developers in order to survive.

 

[MrTroll]

I'm guessing this has something to do with Super Mario Maker. They don't want people to realize that everything you can do with SMM can be done with free fan-made tools that have been available for years.

 

[Quijibo69]

Nintendo still thinks it's 1995.... for the past 20 years. There's no wonder that the Xbox and PlayStation are beating the living crap out of them. I'm pretty sure the next Nintendo system will be the last.

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

...why Nintendo would keep producing underpowered machines like the N64 and the Gamecube compared to their competition....

But neither of those were underpowered. N64's power was just hard to use due to the cartridges, and Gamecube was more powerful than PS2.

 

[Watcher]

But neither of those were underpowered. N64's power was just hard to use due to the cartridges, and Gamecube was more powerful than PS2.

The N64 used cartridges (which was what caused a lot of previously Nintendo exclusive companies like Square to leave the console entirely and make games for the Playstation). A major Achillies Heel the N64 had was it had only a 4kb texture cache. Meaning while you could display more polygons on the screen than the Playstation, the textures had to be much smaller. There were N64 games at the time that took advantage of this in unique ways, like Goldeneye 007 that just made a lot of their gun meshes have lots of smaller meshes with smaller textures to give the illusion of detail. Because the games used cartridges instead of discs (which meant that the games only had a max size of about 64 mb) you could not have the huge FMVs that the PS1 was used for. And a lot of PS1 games that featured them would completely remove them upon being ported to the N64 (one example being Spiderman. It replaced the FMV cutscenes with still frame comic book panels.)

The Gamecube was not more powerful than the Xbox (which allowed for outputting in 1080p, it featured proper DVDs, it featured a DVD player and it had an 8gb harddrive). It also had a lot of problems. They removed component support from it's early models (because apparently less than 1% of people used it pre-2005). And it lacked a proper disc drive. The small Gamecube discs were a huge problem for the console. The most graphically demanding games for the system like Resident Evil 4 shipped on two of those discs, when on the PS2 they came on one. As a result it costed much more to produce the same kinds of games for that system. And you can see with multiplat ports of games the Gamecube version was usually not as good. (I'm thinking back to Need for Speed Most Wanted where the game featured much more simple car models because they took less space).

There are other examples of under powered hardware Nintendo made and later used to justify their decisions. The best example being the Nintendo Gameboy. They stated they made it have under powered hardware on purpose (Compared to other handhelds like the Nomad which featured color and close to 16 bit graphics) because they could sell it for much cheaper and it'd consume less batteries. And it allowed them to make superior games for the system because their developers could take advantage of those limitations far better. Indeed the Gameboy was a huge success for Nintendo for that reason.

The SNES meanwhile was the better console in almost every regard compared to the Genesis (In terms of hardware and in terms of multiplats. The SNES version was usually better.) And it managed to do this because Nintendo released it two years later. It was one of the few times where Nintendo directly competed with their competition.

 

[Sable]

I think Nintendo are old fashioned in this sense, but they may change eventually.

The handheld market seems to be ok, mobile apps aside.

 

[Xarpho]

I'm guessing this has something to do with Super Mario Maker. They don't want people to realize that everything you can do with SMM can be done with free fan-made tools that have been available for years.

Or why it wasn't until 2006 until Nintendo was ready to allow a legal path to play their classics.

The N64 used cartridges (which was what caused a lot of previously Nintendo exclusive companies like Square to leave the console entirely and make games for the Playstation). A major Achillies Heel the N64 had was it had only a 4kb texture cache. Meaning while you could display more polygons on the screen than the Playstation, the textures had to be much smaller. There were N64 games at the time that took advantage of this in unique ways, like Goldeneye 007 that just made a lot of their gun meshes have lots of smaller meshes with smaller textures to give the illusion of detail. Because the games used cartridges instead of discs (which meant that the games only had a max size of about 64 mb) you could not have the huge FMVs that the PS1 was used for. And a lot of PS1 games that featured them would completely remove them upon being ported to the N64 (one example being Spiderman. It replaced the FMV cutscenes with still frame comic book panels.)

The Gamecube was not more powerful than the Xbox (which allowed for outputting in 1080p, it featured proper DVDs, it featured a DVD player and it had an 8gb harddrive). It also had a lot of problems. They removed component support from it's early models (because apparently less than 1% of people used it pre-2005). And it lacked a proper disc drive. The small Gamecube discs were a huge problem for the console. The most graphically demanding games for the system like Resident Evil 4 shipped on two of those discs, when on the PS2 they came on one. As a result it costed much more to produce the same kinds of games for that system. And you can see with multiplat ports of games the Gamecube version was usually not as good. (I'm thinking back to Need for Speed Most Wanted where the game featured much more simple car models because they took less space).

There are other examples of under powered hardware Nintendo made and later used to justify their decisions. The best example being the Nintendo Gameboy. They stated they made it have under powered hardware on purpose (Compared to other handhelds like the Nomad which featured color and close to 16 bit graphics) because they could sell it for much cheaper and it'd consume less batteries. And it allowed them to make superior games for the system because their developers could take advantage of those limitations far better. Indeed the Gameboy was a huge success for Nintendo for that reason.

The SNES meanwhile was the better console in almost every regard compared to the Genesis (In terms of hardware and in terms of multiplats. The SNES version was usually better.) And it managed to do this because Nintendo released it two years later. It was one of the few times where Nintendo directly competed with their competition.

The lack of a CD-ROM for the Nintendo 64 was one of the things that caused them to lose market share, as consoles held a fraction of the data and were far more expensive.

The GameCube could still effectively compete with its competition, even though they had tiny discs. One of the things that the GameCube had that their competition didn't was that they were able to make money off the hardware, and the hardware was still pretty cheap (which was probably the removal of DVD for the GameCube, as the Panasonic Q, a hybrid GameCube/DVD player, was about $440 in 2001 in Japan).

The Wii was the first console that was obviously underpowered, and while it alienated a lot of people (and developers), it at least made Nintendo a lot of money, which is really what the main objective in business is.

Honestly, the SNES was one of the best consoles ever was because Nintendo was forced to directly compete with the Genesis (which, I agree, was inferior in almost every way but had a great marketing team), but those days are long gone now, and the announcement of the Wii U have sealed that. I expect nothing more from the Big N.

 

[Cavalier Cipolla]

Yes, I know "OlD tHrEaD yOu'Re LaTe", but who's gonna tell Nintendo about Dendy New Reality which also blatantly featured bootleg unlicensed Famicom cartridges from China? And of course, the fact that the Game Genie was declared legal way back in the NES/Famicom days, and that it was also pretty much ROM hacking?

Also, the Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2, or at least more efficient. It had hardware texture compression and could enable higher depth textures being used for no extra memory cost compared to lower bit depth ones. It had a 3 MB graphics cache, compered to the PS2 4 MB. 2 of the 3 MB were used for the framebuffer. 1 MB was left for textures that used S3TC. So, what on the PS2 would had required 6 MB, on the Gamecube it required 1 MB. In addition to that, the Gamecube GPU had hardware T&L, unlike the PS2 GPU. Though the PS2 did have two vector units that were used for that and some special effects. In the end the Gamecube was actually very competitive hardware specs wise with the then current gen consoles. And multiple disc games weren't an issue in the PS1 era, cost wise, so even there I don't think that was an issue cost wise. It would cost maybe an extra 50 cents or something to manufacture.

 

[Pissmaster]

Also, the Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2, or at least more efficient. It had hardware texture compression and could enable higher depth textures being used for no extra memory cost compared to lower bit depth ones. It had a 3 MB graphics cache, compered to the PS2 4 MB. 2 of the 3 MB were used for the framebuffer. 1 MB was left for textures that used S3TC. So, what on the PS2 would had required 6 MB, on the Gamecube it required 1 MB. In addition to that, the Gamecube GPU had hardware T&L, unlike the PS2 GPU. Though the PS2 did have two vector units that were used for that and some special effects. In the end the Gamecube was actually very competitive hardware specs wise with the then current gen consoles. And multiple disc games weren't an issue in the PS1 era, cost wise, so even there I don't think that was an issue cost wise. It would cost maybe an extra 50 cents or something to manufacture.

You're arguing points that mattered in 2002, so I'm gonna reply as if it's 2002:

The Gamecube doesn't have a DVD player, and only has games for children, therefore the Gamecube can SUCK IT

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

That reminds me....there was a kid who got in trouble either this year or last for either pirating or emulating .....or something. All I remember is that it was a huge case. Idk what became of it

 

[Niggernerd]

Uhhh hello based department??
Nintendo just caused 41% to go to 100%

 

[ANF]

Yes, I know "OlD tHrEaD yOu'Re LaTe", but who's gonna tell Nintendo about Dendy New Reality which also blatantly featured bootleg unlicensed Famicom cartridges from China?

I've informed Nintendo about this, they're already digging up Suponev for the court hearing.

 

[Cavalier Cipolla]

You're arguing points that mattered in 2002, so I'm gonna reply as if it's 2002:

The Gamecube doesn't have a DVD player, and only has games for children, therefore the Gamecube can SUCK IT
View attachment 2576161

Ah, yes, Resident Evil 4, my favourite game for children. Nobody I know used the PS2 as a DVD player, cause it SUCKS as one! It doesn't even have a proper remote, but you have to use the WIRED joystick! What is this, 1970s remote controls? Or it also could have been that here every movie was advertised on VHS, and even in those phone game shows you would win VHS versions of them.

I've informed Nintendo about this, they're already digging up Suponev for the court hearing.

Those Nintendo Ninjas...they won't even let the deceased rest if they were involved in copyright infringement on Nintendo's IPs...

 

[Coelacanth]

I've informed Nintendo about this, they're already digging up Suponev for the court hearing.

That's not true my uncle works at Nintendo and he told me that they're too busy purging AM2R roms from the internet at the moment.