SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Retro game repository EmuParadise says it's finished distributing ROMs
Nintendo has had enough of pirates and the websites that enable them, like EmuParadise. After shutting down a handful of sites and a Game Boy Advance emulator on GitHub in July, the publisher has seemingly done the work to convince EmuParadise to shut down. This massive online library of downloadable old games started 18 years ago, and up until this moment it hosted nearly complete libraries of games for various consoles that you could download and play on emulators.
Playing ROMs, as these game files are often referred to as, on an emulator exists in a legal gray area, but distributing these copyrighted works for download on the internet is obviously and clearly illegal. But Nintendo and other publishers have mostly avoided investing resources in tracking down and enforcing its legal right in many of these cases over the last couple of decades. For Nintendo, however, something has changed, and it is cracking down. And EmuParadise has confirmed that it is going to do what it must to avoid facing legal action.
"We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games, but you won't be able to get your games from here for now," reads an EmuParadise blog post. "Where we go with this is up to us and up to you."
Also at Kotaku and TechCrunch.
Previously: Nintendo Sues ROM Sites
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:56PM
Not sure I agree with that, for the most part the older ROMs are tiny when compared with the size of modern online storage. And given that these are digital assets we can duplicate them perfectly and preserve them from degrading almost indefinitely.
The real problem is Nintendo's greed and the need for them to ensure that their franchises are kept in order and in house. Now that they've seen the popularity of retro games, as in the SNES Classic, then you can be sure that many of their old titles will be available locked into their current platforms and for a super high retail price for us all to repurchase them again soon.
Vote with your wallet and stop funding Nintendo's greed; they should only be rewarded for innovation and not simply repetition and regurgitation.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.