The video game emulation ROM scene had a "Black Friday" moment today, when emuparadise, a long standing rom file sharing site which had offered roms for free download for over 20 years, shut down all of its rom offerings for good:
It is to be believed it was Nintendo and other game companies trying to reclaim their IPs, that put legal pressure on these sites that are forcing them to shut down. A lawsuit last week from Nintendo shut down two sites: loveroms.com and loveretro.co, for example. One might assume this even won't be the end of rom sites getting shut down in this recent dust up.The site explained the bad news in a post today, acknowledging the reality that the world of retro gaming has changed irrevocably and a site like EmuParadise simply can’t continue to exist even semi-legally. So they’re removing all ROM downloads.
For those not familiar with this scene, emulators let you play games from classic consoles that might otherwise be difficult, expensive or even impossible to find in the wild. ROMs, which contain the actual game data (and are often remarkably small — NES games are smaller than the image above), are questionably legal and have existed in a sort of grey area for years. But there’s no question that this software has been invaluable to gamers.
“I started EmuParadise 18 years ago because I never got to play many of these amazing retro games while growing up in India and I wanted other people to be able to experience them,” wrote the site’s founder, MasJ. “Through the years I’ve worked tirelessly with the rest of the EmuParadise team to ensure that everyone could get their fix of retro gaming. We’ve received thousands of emails from people telling us how happy they’ve been to rediscover and even share their childhood with the next generations in their families.”
Video game companies have been so far behind the times on digital offerings, up until recently when streaming become technologically doable and is even now a growing business. Behemoths (like Nintendo) actually benefit significantly from their history being hard to play. That's not a failing on their part, it's by design. They want to force you to pay for Super Mario Bros 3 on the new Nintendo Switch again for $15.99, even though your parents bought it for you for $59.99 in 1990, and you paid $4.99 for it on the Wii Virtual Console back in 2009. Nintendo does not want any NES game to be available and easily playable; keeping those games obscure and difficult to play makes them more money and allows them to (legally and rightfully) reclaim the IP ownership of their brand and go after illegal piracy. Even if Nintendo uses a rom file they got from the internet to sell in their virtual gamestores.
Others may argue this is a slippery slope of attacking the real preservation of games digitially, as well as creative "rom hacks" done by communities who aren't in it for advertising and fee money (like some sites who offer roms do), just for the love of these games, and the appreciation of the art of the genre.
What's interesting however is that we all know ROM sites won't go away, a lot like how internet gambling didn't go away when Black Friday or UIGEA happened; or when music sharing kept going after Napster shut down because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 2005. People will go, and find, most likely riskier sources with torrents and files that could be loaded with malware and adware. No matter what the companies do, they can never stop rom file sharing, but putting pressure on rom sites in general may end up hurting everyone in the end due to stifling innovation (these "digital game stores" you see in console todays are because of emulation), bad PR for the brands themselves, and resulting in a just a shittier experience for the customer overall.
Word to the wise: download what you can now before it becomes harder to make that Retropie build.
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, I have def used Emuparadise to play many old nintendo games. That kinda sucks, the internet gets worse and worse by the year
Originally Posted by verminaard
