Nintendo, ROMs, piracy, and the lack of legal alternatives

Nintendo recently won a $12.2 million lawsuit against a married couple who ran LoveROMs, a site for downloading vintage console games. Over the past year, the company has hit many ROM sites hard, with many opting to just shut down over fears of similar suits. 

The whole subject of ROMs and emulation is probably the most controversial topic in the gaming community, with heated discussions on the differences between piracy, abandonware, and preservation. It’s one of those things that’s considered taboo in message boards, but everyone does it. 

A big part of the problem is that, much like with music in the early aughts, there’s no legal alternative to purchase and download most vintage games. 

Of course Nintendo did have one for a time, in the form of the Virtual Console on the Wii. It had robust game support for a wide variety of classic systems, including many non-Nintendo platforms like the Genesis and TurboGrfx-16.

Over time, the company drastically scaled back content releases for the VC, until eventually scrapping it all together with the release of the Switch. In its place, the company offered to release a couple of random NES games a month provided you signed up for their online service. Which is fine if all you want to play is NES titles, and don’t care what you get. 

While Nintendo does have their “Classic” mini consoles, those only cover a handful of the most popular games. For everything else, you either have to track down original hardware and cartridges, which is easier said than done in the case of rarer titles, or resort to emulation. 

To this day, the Virtual Console remains one of the most requested features for the Switch. However, Nintendo keeps stubbornly dragging their heels, completely oblivious as to why people would want such a thing. Keep in mind this is the same company that thinks $7 is still a reasonable price for Mario Pinball Land.

There is one solution that has been tossed around quite a bit. Do for classic gaming what Netflix and Spotify did with TV and music. Create an affordable subscription service that opens the door to an all-you-can-eat buffet of vintage video games with a robust library across a variety of platforms.

In fact, one company has already done this: Sony.

PlayStation Now, while pricey, allows people to stream a wide variety of PS2 and PS3 games to more modern systems. Of course it helps that PS3 emulators still need a lot of work before becoming viable. However, it shows the company is at least more forward thinking than Nintendo when it comes to monetizing older titles. People will tend to select the fuss free legal alternatives over piracy, if one is available.