Consolidation always leads to lack of competition and innovation, regardless of industry. Yes, some studios are going to fail and get acquired, but it’s a very slippery slope between allowing mergers between smaller studios and allowing large ones to become larger.

And this is why:

• The FTC has been hyper focused on the concept of Microsoft exclusives through deals like this, both in terms of the games themselves and also content within those games. Essentially no attention has been paid to Sony’s grand list of exclusives they are, of course, not offering to Microsoft.

FTC: The solution for low competition is not less competition.

NVM, reading fail lol

To be fair, Paradox titles have such built-in mod support they require a built-in launcher.  It’s not *good*, but its still necessary.

*something something job creators something something*

The size makes sense; no uncompressed audio, no 4k textures.

This this this.  Force people to see what is happening.

That, and no one really wants to bring an emulation case before *this* Supreme Court, for fear of how they will rule.

But but but Console hardware is just like PCs now so porting should be easy!

Problem is too many studios are chasing trends, remaking their entire toolkits to chase whatever the latest fad is.  And frankly, there’s a ton of people like me without the time to invest in any more Open World titles; I’m tired of games that require hours of investment per sitting, what I’m looking for now are games…

Wow, someone other then me who played Crimson Skies.  They do exist.

Hey look: Jill, Chris, Claire, Leon, and Rebecca.  All we’re missing is Barry, maybe throw in Sherry, and we finally get what we’ve wanted for all these years.

“for a court to stop clean room would effectively have the court break every patent currently active because they all rely on that standard.”

PSX/PS2/PS3 disks are unencrypted; any standard CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive can read/rip them fine. GC/Wii disks, as mentioned, are encoded backwards so you need to dig up a compatible drive that can read them natively, but otherwise there’s no encryption preventing you from making a copy.

There’s plenty of ISO ripping tools out there (or .bin/.cue, or similar) that are free; I’m still using ImgBurn because *it works*. Things only get messy when applying translation patches/hacks for disc based games that assume a specific disk format (usually .bin/.cue, but it does depend).

I still remember VBA launching in a 90% complete state before the GBA even launching in the US. :/

To be fair, Nintendo likely doesn’t have the rights to anything made outside of Nintendo R&D.  Unless publishers/developers signed away distribution rights to Nintendo *forever*, it’s likely Nintendo would have to get permission first.

On the “original media” point, the DMCA explicitly allows digital backups of media to be made so long as you do not break any copy protection to do so.  While GC/Wii disks are encoded backwards to prevent standard DVD drives from reading them, they are not themselves encoded with any copy-protection and if you get a…