Or you know... people who are introduced to Melee may also get a copy of Smash Ultimate for the Switch. I think you might be ignoring that possibility. I can’t imagine how simple that would be getting more players to your products by simply watching a tournament of an old ass game. Marvel, Capcom, and SNK allow tournaments of these old games. Are they bothered? Nope. They don’t care of the more superior games. To activity that you’re not even selling and distribute the game, it shouldn’t even financially effect Nintendo. If there was full on piracy, then yes I understand. If there is any code ripped from the game, then the takedown is reasonable. I don’t see how a mod of Dolphin, a 100% legal emulator to begin with is how promoting and encourages players distributing roms to being with. I’m not sure where you get “the lack of Melee so people pirate it” from. What are you talking about? I mean it’s obviously not like you can go on Amazon or eBay buying a used copy. People that will pirate the game, you can virtually say the same for any other game. People will find a way to pirate game hard to find or not. A tournament organized by a well funded organization shouldn’t even have this problem allowing or promoting players pirated the game being part of the tournament. What the organization is doing, that’s how you do any online tournament. It’s Nintendo being Nintendo. Holding back the Smash community not just Melee. The same guys that make a limited release during a pandemic and force creators to share profit their profits with them. It should be obvious at this point that they don’t really care supporting their communities. I’m sorry but from your post, it seems that you’re a bit biased against the Melee community.
Again, these are not comparable events.
There are different games where the hard focus isn't is "everyone's here, buy only this product", which is 100% how Nintendo does things. They don't try to promote old versions anymore.
There is no good reason to believe they'll constantly get good sales for both when they can't even figure out how to properly sell Melee without it dipping into Ultimate sales while it's worth their money.
You lost me as some kind of a good idea the second you said an organization should be okay with pirated content being promoted. Hell no. That's not okay. Absolutely inexcusable in every way. There is no justification for promoting of pirating. Nintendo already made it clear they will not tolerate it. That's not even a contest to how bad the thought is. They're 100% justified in stopping pirating in the first place. Let me clarify that I might've misread what you meant on pirating, though. Are you trying to justify it, or don't think it'll matter? I think it always matters because that's people not getting money for what they worked hard on. In every case. Pirating, get this, affects everyone. Even if employees are paid poorly, they lose more money with every pirating, as it was not money given to the company, which would still get them money. It actually does count.
What those people need to do is not promoted pirated content if they want to actually host streams for money again. Nintendo isn't fine with hosting stream(for money) about hacks either.
Mods of any program distributing without authorization is 100% illegal and grounds for lawsuits or more. Dolphin is an emulated GameCube, which is an actual hack alone of Nintendo's own program. The emulation itself is already dubiously legal(actually it isn't. Nintendo can easily take down any emulator they want, but they choose not to). They already lost that battle a long time ago and cannot legally win this one. They are distributing a modification of Nintendo's software too. Did you not realize that's what all emulators are? Nintendo doesn't go after them because they don't sell emulators. They do however go after roms, because they outright sell those. The closest is the "Classic" systems, and they don't have them up all the time due to being impossible to sell consistently, along with needing to license 3rd party games. It's not a market issue for them. Any modified rom(or rom in general) cuts down on their profits. Keep in mind even if a lot of people "properly" buy it, any tiny sale lost due to a rom being distributed does actually affect them. I won't pretend it's a legitimate issue even then, of course. They make enough money(whether or not the employees do is another issue that I can't say how well it's being handled).
There was no way Slippi stood a chance. The only thing Nintendo will at most allow is emulators as long as they don't clearly affect their business. So far, none do as long as it's not online, which actually can affect them. As they are not selling Melee anymore either, they also don't want any game to compete with their own game. Slippi actually makes it so Melee heavily competes with Ultimate, not just the slight bit back when people played it on their own systems. Both legally they can take it down, and now that they can see business-related problems, it was a clear thing to expect at this point.
For the record, I do think copyright law is outright ass and at best it should only matter if you make sales off a modded product(note that if it's a parody, and actually redone enough to be its own thing, it's treated as legal), but sadly that's not the case.
Melee, if remade, is such a massively competitive game, that it will absolutely affect Ultimate sales. Reality is there's enough purists that won't buy a game if it doesn't play exactly how they want it to. Hell, I'm even that way. I'm not going to pick up FFVIIr cause it's massively changed the battle system. Or was the case, as they did fix it so the classic way to play is plausible.
