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Should retro games be legally available?

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I read a recent news article about Nintendo cracking down on sites offering retro ROMs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45169817

So clearly there's demand for playing these classic old games titles. I think they've missed a trick here. They could offer gamers the chance to legitimately download the ROMs, for a fee of course. They could even provide emulators to run them, on a variety of platforms.
I'm not really surprised that a lot of dodgy sites have grown up which are offering these ROMs. I mean, how else are people meant to obtain them? Even if you do own the game of course, it's usually on a game cartridge, and not in a usable format for an emulator.
What I'm saying is that the likes of Nintendo could continue to monetise these games, and make a good amount from them too.
 
Well, it is their intellectual property, so they can protect it as aggressively as they see fit.

That said, i was under the impression that as long as you owned the cartridge, they would sort of look the other way with emulators ... at least for those game consoles no longer in production. Maybe it's gotten out of hand with passing them around, or, if someone else is making money from it, I'd want to stop that too.
 
No. They were not talking about onwers of cartridges in that post. Nintendo is talking about phone developers using their code to make carts into apps on phones. There are lots of great apps in the Play Store for playing classic Nintendo games which Nintendo approves.
They just want their cut.
 
lunatic59 said:
That said, i was under the impression that as long as you owned the cartridge, they would sort of look the other way with emulators ... at least for those game consoles no longer in production.
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Actually, there was a Supreme Court precedent that says you can have a backup of your media whether it be VHS, DVD, music, game cartridge, or whatever. It wasn't them looking the other way.

As far as Nintendo, they are selling IMO a highly overpriced retro gamin thingy with a bunch of games on it, so protecting people from getting illicit ROMs is a business decision. This would have no impact though, on owners of cartidges using roms or emulators as those are both legal. I don't like it, but I get it and support it.

Embrace the emulator model and create its own market for ROMs. They would probably make a lot more money as an app store than selling their overpriced retro systems with a limited (Nintendo titles, not licensees) list of games.

One other aspect implied is abandonware, where developers of games are either completely defunct and no longer exist to defend their ownership or where they have moved on and offer no way to play the long abandoned software. I'm far more sympathetic to copies of these floating around.
 
lunatic59 said:
Well, it is their intellectual property, so they can protect it as aggressively as they see fit.
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Total agree, they are perfectly entitled to do that.

Unforgiven said:
Embrace the emulator model and create its own market for ROMs. They would probably make a lot more money as an app store than selling their overpriced retro systems with a limited (Nintendo titles, not licensees) list of games.
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That's what I think. Provide the fans with completely above board and proper game emulation, with authentic ROMs. They would make a fortune. There's a legion of ageing arcade fans out there, keen to take trip down memory lane. I still want to play Galaxians on any gaming device I get my hands on :)
 
Everything's legal, so long as you don't get caught.
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Suggested business model: Official emulator app, free in Apple App store/Play Store/Windows store. ROMs of games priced at $0.99 / £0.99 0.99 euros etc. there's a lot of money to be made for relatively little effort.

Or. just make the ROMs legally available to play in MAME.
 
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