When an achievement set is uploaded, it signals that we promote, facilitate, and reward players for experiencing that game. To many, this looks like an endorsement of the game’s content. To live up to the ideals we believe in, RetroAchievements must ensure that the content it supports remains within legal and broadly acceptable standards. This is why we do not support titles such as The Guy Game, which is illegal to own or distribute.
So this is interesting. The justification for not having achievements for Clover is that hosting achievements for it means that "we promote, facilitate, and reward players for experiencing that game." It seems like they're making a statement that for any game that is still on the site, they
are promoting, facilitating, and rewarding the players for experiencing that game. A lot of people have pointed out that they're (now explicitly) endorsing the content of games like GTA, and they're using the ESRB ratings to justify hosting those games: the ratings board has said the game is okay to play, so they'll defer to them.
What I haven't seen is any discussion of their (now explicit) endorsement for playing these games from a legal perspective. Take, for example,
Nintendo World Championships 1990. According to Wikipedia, there's something like 353 gray cartridges and another 26 gold cartridges, for a total of ~400 copies if we're being generous. However, if we check Retro Achievements, we can see that there have been 622 players. In order for all those to be legal, all of the owners of those cartridges have to have a RA account, plus about ~200 had to have sold their cartridge to someone else who also made a RA account. If I go on ebay, I can see what I assume is an authentic cartridge available for $20,000, and counterfeits for $50.
My understanding is that emulators are legal, and ROMs are legal so long as you actually own the game. If I own the game I can rip my own ROM, or I can download the ROM from the internet, or I can upload it to the internet so that other people who own the game can download it without having to rip their own. However, if I download a ROM for a game that I don't actually own, that's piracy. My understanding is that all the ROM sites on the internet skate by because they say you need to own the game to download the ROM. It's extremely easy to pirate the ROM, probably easier than getting the game from ebay even if money wasn't a problem.
So my question is this: Do the admins think people are trading around $20,000 cartridges to get points on their website, or are they promoting, facilitating and rewarding players for pirating the ROM? Furthermore, even if it isn't an airtight case, is it one that Nintendo might want to try suing over anyway? Would RA be able to afford a lawsuit with Nintendo?
