I'm sorry but I cannot accept this.

Yes, Japanese business culture is different, but it boils down to far more customer-hostile. They make their games unavailable fairly deliberately, and insist that selling games at a low price (such as when they have had their first few years of sales behind them) is unacceptable. The result is they simply kill them off rather than take the profits by keeping the medium alive.

Yes, rom download sites are certainly infringing on copyrights, but the point is if Nintendo simply offered a virtual catalog of their back library with profit sharing for popular platforms, everyone would make bank without all that much effort. Instead they waste more money on legally attacking these gray markets. It's just a misuse of funds, and hostile to the medium. It may come out of Japanese business culture, but that is just a black mark on Japanese business culture.

Thanks for the warning and for the editing .

Then vote with your wallet. Let's be absolutely fair, here: it's OK not to agree with their culture. It's OK to criticize their culture (unlike what some people would say). However, it's not very wise trying to wage war with their culture. Instead of demanding access to their games, quit it. Any company practicing what you're suggesting is on a warpath to remove any trace of their own existence, which is probably best if that's the case, right?

After TeamNinja/TK screwed me over on a game, blaming brand new hardware for faults in their own code (stuff that i bought quit working), and refusing to give me either a refund or fix the code, or even at least an admission of fault, I'm not buying anything anymore that uses the system that broke (DLC). If I buy a game from them, now, it must not have DLC. I'm not going to pirate it or anything else: the code was broken and they were at fault. Odds are, at this point, i probably won't buy any non-dlc containing games from them anymore (assuming they'll ever have any), because I'm hesitant to believe they'll support their product instead of blaming me (and others) for their shoddy support. Do they really care about a handful of users leaving? Well, given the bug came from purchasing everything they put out, then probably.

But, that's why it's really important to know for sure who brought this on emuparadise. I understand we're not all angels, and that's no excuse for our behavior, but if a particular company has the rights to make themselves disappear from history, why are we stopping them? Sure, we could enjoy the content, but clearly they don't even want the positive credit for it. Move support to the companies that do like the positive credit and their history preserved, if that's really what you want to do. Whomever's behind this will get their own, in the end.

Maybe it's an American thing... like not accepting Dinosaurs or a round(ish) earth. :-P

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Uhh...

You said we have to take into account what Japanese business culture is like. But that's just not true. That isn't important. What's important is the action is hostile to the medium. I don't accept that I have to take the history of Japanese business culture into account, and I don't.

Understand now? (Trying to be less rude than you, but not sure if it's working.)
If I read this correctly, you were screwed by a fragile pay-for-extra-content system. I've found that *many* of these systems are very fragile. I could point to endless discount and mobile vendors where the paid extras vanish if you reinstall, for example.

At this point I don't really trust that DLC or extras will work unless they come via a medium I trust, such as Steam, and there I expect (perhaps incorrectly) Steam will let me refund if the DLC just doesn't work.

It is a minefield for sure. Many of the developers just aren't trying that hard to see if their mechanisms are reliable.

I do think the current news is not clearly presented, but Nintendo does have a history of being extremely litigious about their back catalog. I don't think we really know it's them, but it's plausible.

I was frankly surprised emuparadise kept the Nintendo catalog up as long as they did. I kind of wish someone doing one of these sites just did all the other consoles so they would continue to exist.

And heck, I wouldn't even *mind* if Nintendo was this aggressive but actually made VIrtual Console more broadly available (including, for example, on windows) and released a larger percentage of their catalog.

As long as customers don't sue or boycott, there's no incentive.

My case specifically was, and i'm ashamed to admit, i basically had a sort of completionist attitude towards the game's DLC, as i always have (even on GOG), and i got bit for it. Ultimately, the DLC was managed by keys, and after you have so many keys, your game starts to slow down. What happened, more specifically, is that the game timed out or something while trying to read all the keys. I bought that much DLC, which was entirely cosmetic, and that ultimately taught me a lesson: if you want to be completionist with content availability, don't buy games with alot of ineffectual content. While there is a slight competitive edge to cosmetic DLC in a fighting game, they were already doing cheap ports of the game to other consoles, and refused to support content that they were still selling. I was careless with my money, wasting it for a competitive edge that, in the end, I never used. Let's not even get into how much money they got out of me because i callously followed that completionist attitude instead of doing something much, much wiser with it. Right, but usually everyone's pretty clear cut when it comes to Nintendo. If it was nintendo, however, you'd think they'd only worry about nintendo content, right? I'm thinking what really happened here is that someone independent of Nintendo started something and they become weary of how fragile they really are under the law. Nintendo was pretty good at finding stuff it wants to remove, and clearly has been tolerating emuparadise for a long time. It was going after other targets which were much, much smaller (so it had more than enough knowledge of emuparadise for sure) and targets much, much larger (showing that it wasn't a thing of only going after the small fries), but let emuparadise go. I feel as if Nintendo even likely appreciated them, to some extent, but i have no more evidence of this than the people blaming nintendo.

The thing that gets to me, though, is "why now?" Everyone knew about it for so long, so why right now? Why hasn't emuparadise named the company after them, when everyone nintendo nailed before had no problem pointing at nintendo? It's also really bad timing on part of Nintendo if it was to promote that new virtual console tragedy i keep hearing everyone talk about. Could a really bad pranker have pulled a false-flag and emuparadise over-reacted? Was it a smallfry that was told to keep their mouth shut on who ordered the C&D under the condition that if they didn't they'd sue retroactively? Was it in response to some recent legislation in the hosting country or the country of the domain provider? I mean, there's talk about the EU going so hardcore copyright protection that they plan on trying to tax links, so could that have had something to do with it? This isn't the usual response we see when Nintendo makes a hit on someone. Or maybe emuparadise handled it weirdly compared to everyone else, but that, too, would seem strange, right? So, what gives?

EDIT: Oh wait, looks like we do have nintendo's MO from a previous situation. So nintendo didn't even have a motive, anymore. So, who did it? Clearly Nintendo had no reason to.

I believe a certain ZONE just went down now. Like within the past 30 minutes. Seems the site is there but no more ability to download as the one mentioned in this thread. Two biggies gone now?

Fuckturds

From a legal perspective I can understand them. On the other hand, morally I was always a bit less inclined to defend companies that do not sell old stuff or if they sell it then only for a much too high price. It's difficult to accept that some companies do not want to sell everything they have. Some of these old games are pieces of art and an endangered species at the same time.

Finally, is it really possible to remove content from the internet with all the peer to peer file sharing possibilities or does this step just make it a bit harder to get these ROMs?
If you say it like this then piracy also is simply a fact. :)

At least in this case it hardly means lost sales.

Did they give any breath on who it was? The more i read, the less it looks like Nintendo's doing. I think it's only fair that if nintendo is treated harshly for when they act, that it's spread to the real zealots this time. Who is it?
How do we know? How do we know it's not some company that does offer what you ask? It's probably not nintendo.

As far as I know they just moved to another website.
I already heard rumors about that being planned months ago.

If only there were some other business that went through this issue and could act as precedent - where some entertainment product was seen as incredibly overpriced but could be offered cheaply online for individual downloads or a subscription based price...

There were 2, actually, and they had completely different outcomes. Music and movies. Now days, music is still regularly pirated, but now via something that downloads stuff off youtube, and movies are distributed across multiple services and still get pirated via the now less active movie pirating methods, which also include youtube, but it's much better managed than music. On the flip side, no one's hating on the music industry, anymore, while everyone's all over the movie industry.