Last week Nintendo sued two long-standing emulation sites: LoveRETRO and LoveROMs. It’s not the first time emulation’s come under attack, but it was noteworthy in part because of
the absurd damages Nintendo cited: $2 million for illicit use of their trademark, plus $150,000 for
each Nintendo game hosted.
It's ridiculous. Those amounts have no basis in reality. Like the days when the MPAA went around suing random torrenters, Nintendo levied the sort of threat designed to make sites immediately genuflect and then beg for leniency—and that’s exactly what both sites did, removing all Nintendo ROMs and in the case of LoveRETRO shutting down completely.
Now it’s spreading, with EmuParadise
announcing this week that it was
preemptively pulling all ROMs from its site. Immense damage is being done to an old and well-established community in a short period of time, a community that's almost singlehandedly kept game preservation efforts alive for decades, and for what?
Emulation saved these games for decades, and nobody’s stepped up with an alternative. Not Nintendo, not anyone. If emulation persists, it’s because of a failure on the part of the actual rights-holders, not the audience. Movie and music piracy dropped after the advent of Netflix and Spotify. The convenience of GOG.com wooed countless PC pirates, including myself, from downloading what we used to call “abandonware."
But GOG.com still covers a mere sliver, and only PC games for the most part. You won't find old NES or SNES games there—not to mention platforms Nintendo doesn’t control. The company that currently calls itself Atari is happy to put out collections of certain top-tier games, but again it’s the core one percent of “classics” people remember. And what about games for the Vectrex? The TurboGrafx? No corporation is saving those. No corporation is bothering with reissues.