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NEWS: Nintendo Blocks Fan Remake of Super Mario 64

ikillchicken wrote:

These threads are always so stupid because they basically amount to one camp of people screaming "They have every legal right to do this!!!" and another camp of people screaming "This is totally unnecessary and they shouldn't have done it!!!" I mean, you guys get that these two statements are perfectly consistent with one another don't you? Or do you somehow actually think that "this is legal" entails that "they should do this" or conversely that "they should not do this" entails that "this must be illegal"? Or maybe you're all just really determined to scream at each other.

They have the legal right and the business PREROGATIVE. Turning this into a question of arbitrary morality as you have done is far more stupid then actually calling this as is: i.e. standard business practice.

I'm wondering how they can file a copyright claim on the "computer program" aspect of it when this guy seems to have coded everything himself. I don't suppose he hacked into the system and got the source code and just upped the animation quality, but I could be wrong.

I suppose all he really has to do is just deform the characters a little bit and he's free to continue on...

I am not fan of Nintendo (look in my room all you want, you will not find any purchase that has given them 1 cent nor there is any pirate plushie of mario or similar), doing what you say would entail that I care and it is quite the opposite, I will dance on Nintendo's grave or throw tomatoes at them once they become a shadow like sega.

You seem to think that fan and fanatic are synonyms, No, they are not. So I stand by my words, any entertainment company needs its fans to exist, they are nothing without them. Nintendo have pissed of their fans, yet not all of them but their grasp on their fanbase grows dimmer by the day (more people play on iOS/Android devices than on Nintendo/s, Nintendo is the new blackberry), so it is just a matter of time and then all the fans they will have left will be the fanatics, which are too few for a company of their size to retain relevance of the level they have enjoyed for decades.

p,s, Ms Presley can sue all she wants, there still is no money to be made there, she is only wasting her time and money.

In any case, a fanbase can only sustain you so much. However, fans, being experienced users of a particular thing, have pretty different desires than the ordinary consumer. Fans make up a minority of people, so for any business, the wisest decision, if the intent is to remain in business, is to please people outside of the fanbase. And since the fanbase is the minority, if a company had to pick between one or the other, the right thing to do is to pick the mainstream. Listen to the fans too much, and all you'll produce are Funzos.

Apple is a company that pisses off its fans constantly, and yet each time it does so, it grows ever larger. This is because it's a company based around innovation and reinvention. Each time you change something, you're going to annoy some of your fans. Apple, however, ignores them each time to make something that the casual consumer would like, and their clout gets bigger and bigger.

Another example: What do you think the people who liked eating noodles from Samsung Corporation thought when World War II happened and they transitioned to making electronics, like TVs?

Or how about people who liked going to Warner Bros. movie theaters before United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. happened and they decided to make movies instead of screening them?

Xerox was a company with some very gifted engineers, collectively the Palo Alto Research Center. These guys came up with the GUI (the graphical user interface, an icon-based way of using computers that most consumer computers use nowadays), the computer mouse, the desktop computer, and the prototype of the Internet. When these engineers pitched the ideas to the top brass at Xerox, they were all turned down--Xerox's fans were happy with it being strictly a company that does photocopying. The PARC engineers sold their ideas to Microsoft and Apple, at that time new upstarts, and the military, and Xerox's future was henceforth stunted big time.

Even the Internet itself is an entity that would've been stunted by its fans. If the initial fans had their way and blocked Eternal September from happening, it would still be niche, nearly inaccessible (and perhaps made intentionally that way), and incredibly specialized in its usefulness.