Even If Piracy Is Wrong, Nintendo Will Be Just Fine
Metroid Dread has already fallen victim to piracy, but it will take more than that to sink Nintendo.
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Over the weekend, a video games website landed itself in hot water after reporting on how crafty players have already managed to get Metroid Dread running on bespoke emulators with performance and visuals that usurp the original console release. The site in question, a video game news site, reported some news from the video game world. This, for some reason, was seen as not only a controversial thing to do, but as support for the very act of theft itself. I’m talking about Kotaku, but considering we reported the same story at the same time as Kotaku, pre-everyone shitting their pants, it might well have been us.
Anyway, that people are emulating Dread already is a cool discovery, and exciting for future preservation of the medium, but you still might argue it was pretty silly to promote emulation and champion the act of piracy mere days after the game’s release.
Metroid as a series is famously known for failing to reach the sales figures of Mario or Zelda, with its highest selling entry shifting just shy of three million copies. Those aren’t huge numbers in the grand scheme of the triple-A world, which explains why Nintendo is often hesitant to greenlight massive projects surrounding the iconic bounty hunter. While Metroid fans are dedicated, they’re also fairly small in number. Knowing that reputation and continuing to report on emulation so soon after its launch was met with polarizing reception, and expectantly so, but the conversation goes deeper than ‘piracy = bad’ and we’d be silly to dismiss its nuance.
Nintendo is famously terrible at preserving its own history. In previous generations the Virtual Console has allowed us to purchase a number of classic games and play them for a first, second, or third time – with the retro visuals and gameplay mechanics being maintained for a new audience. However, you’d need to purchase them again, meaning your initial ownership of the physical release is now defunct, so you’d need to build up your libraries again and again simply to have the pleasure of playing games that have been around for decades. It’s grown tiresome, and now even that standard is failing to be met.
The Nintendo Switch Online Service provides a growing slate of NES and SNES games for active subscribers to play, encompassing a number of legendary titles at your fingertips. But you can’t own them, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult with the rarity of physical versions and the closure of digital storefronts. Instead, it’s merely a perk of buying into the company’s ecosystem, one that is fully aware of how selective it is being with a library that spans thousands of games and several generations. Young gamers are being robbed of the medium’s history, and adding Nintendo 64 support while upping the asking price isn’t going to fix that. Knowing all of this, defending Nintendo from piracy when it isn’t even willing to acknowledge the value of its own vault of classics feels laughably hollow. Nintendo knows how much these games mean and will let us play them, but it’s like they’re being held hostage in a twisted game of cat and mouse.
Besides, even if a few rebellious idiots decide to pirate Metroid Dread (which, for the record, they absolutely shouldn’t as it’s a new game that is readily available), the critical reception and initial commercial sales figures hints towards a title that could be the most successful in the series’ history. It’s a glorious return to form while also modernising the life and times of Samus Aran in so many compelling ways. It’s going to do just fine, and so is Nintendo, and there’s nothing more tiresome than seeing people side with giant corporations who are willing to take advantage of your monetary generosity time and time again even if it will happily pull the rug from under you at the most inopportune moment.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars is the perfect example of this. Instead of releasing these classics on virtual consoles or as cheaper individual products, it decided to bundle them together into a full-priced offering with slight visual upgrades and a funky soundtrack option. Better yet, it was only on sale for a limited time so the company could conjure up an aura of artificial scarcity surrounding the game on both physical and digital storefronts. It’s gross and completely unnecessary, especially when this model of drumming up sales hasn’t worked because you can still get hold of them with little difficulty. The whole thing is gross, more so from a company that trades on whimsy in a similar manner to Disney. I’m not suggesting you rob a game store at gunpoint by pointing out that Nintendo’s business practises are shady. There is a middle ground here.
Nintendo has also sued ROM sites and similar places to the sum of millions for breaching copyright and profiting from its IP. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I can’t help but feel it’s positively rotten when the company itself isn’t willing to address so many of the issues surrounding its back catalogue that only fans are seemingly aware of. Even when you consider the rights and wrongs from a legal perspective, behind the adorable nature of Mario, Zelda, and Animal Crossing sits a company that is more than willing to stamp out any who dare stand in its way, and it’s just a shame that this often aligns with an ignorance towards its own legacy.
I love Nintendo, and I wish there were modern ways to play titles across the GameCube, Game Boy Advance, DS, and so many other platforms that didn’t involve forking out silly amounts of money for fancy remasters. Demonising people for pushing forward with emulation in a medium that will inevitably leave traditional hardware and games behind feels oddly counter intuitive, even more so with a company that is in an economic position to take creative risks (*cough* Wii U *cough*) and come out of the other end relatively unscathed.
To be perfectly honest, if the company provided more accessible ways of backward compatibility or purchasing older games then we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place, but it continues to approach the industry from such an archaic perspective that it’s unavoidable. But it’s Nintendo, so we’ll keep letting them off time and time again. I’m still waiting for Twilight Princess and Wind Waker HD to arrive on Switch with an inflated price tag, knowing full well I’ll fork out pennies for the privilege. Hey, maybe I’m part of the problem. Either way, piracy isn’t going to doom a company like Nintendo to financial oblivion, and we’d be foolish for ever entertaining the thought. Now, go and play Metroid Dread. On your Switch.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/nintendo-piracy-metroid-dread/