Nintendo's goal here is pretty obvious. They are sending a message to prospective emulator developers:

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_{Nintendo said:}
Do NOT emulate our new console, or we will have your fucking ass served deep fried on a plate of gold!!

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And as much as I hate it, it makes sense. They really did lose a lot of sales on the Switch and it's games from people pirating games for Yuzu. I'm not a corporate suck-ass, but honestly I can't help but think trying to emulate a current gen console, before it's even in it's senior years is just a bad fucking idea.

ModernVintageGamer made a video discussing his thoughts on this and I honestly agree with his conclusion that Switch emulation is going to stagnate because of this, even though the source code still exists out there. It sucks to see, but I guess people will just have to be smarter next time.

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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Posted by Snowshoe

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Nintendo's strategy is to intimidate developers who actually have the time and knowledge to work on something like this, rather than go after every single fork. If any Switch emulator gains traction again and people coalesce around it, Nintendo will do the same thing. And it's not just Nintendo; Nicalis DMCA-struck a Cave Story decompilation project and it was more or less abandoned following this, despite source code being reuploaded.

It's just a clever form of brain-drain on the open source community. Companies are starting to catch on to the fact that they don't need to take it to the courts in order to shut down these projects. Even if it went to the courts, people tend to fold instantly due to legal costs and risk of astronomical copyright fines.

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There was a Cave Story decomp being worked on? Man, that would have been awesome. It sucks only being able to play that game at it's proper speed on an old freeware game stuck on Windows.

But you're right. DMCA striking anything you think will hurt your profits is just really fucking OP. Whoever is currently heading a project will probably just abandon ship immediately because fucking no one has the money to go fight it in court, much less the time and ambition, and even if you won, would you still want to continue working on it after all that? Sounds fucking exhausting.

Posted by Hiryuu

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It's a setback for sure but there is proven resilience with these things. I've seen it over a quarter century now and people will do their very best to take on these company juggernauts to their dying breath.

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Those who can endure and remain dedicated to a project even as this kind of shit flies I admire, but rarely do I see it happen. Only other example I'm aware of is some TGM related projects, and even then they never got DMCA'd, so much as Mihara got real mad when he found them, so the community just hide it away from public view and made it all hush hush, so now you just have to be in the know that it exists, and have the right connections to know who to ask. While I totally get the strategy, and it's easily one of the most effective methods to avoid trouble, I just can't help but feel that this approach just misses the mark sometimes.

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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Posted by Hiryuu

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Posted by Yuri Bacon

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...so much as Mihara got real mad when he found them...

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And now, twenty years later, they're doing their best to publicize TGM4 after stopping production of the old version of it with the thinly veiled threat of never completing the game if we continued to do what we were.

Nah, Heboris and the like weren't going anywhere. Meanwhile, the games themselves have gotten way better with or without ARIKA's help.

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Emulation and clones certainly helped TGM's popularity outside of Japan. I wouldn't have gotten into it if I hadn't downloaded a ROM of it and played it in MAME (well, I played the PSX conversion more than actually playing in MAME, but you get the idea). After all, I ain't paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy all the arcade gear I'd need to play it legit, including the arcade board of TGM itself, if I haven't had a chance to play it. There certainly aren't arcades near me, much less ones with a TGM cab (Dave & Busters is the best I get, and that's not really an arcade to me, certainly doesn't have TGM). I imagine that story is similar for basically everyone who's played the game outside of Japan before it's Arcade Archives release, and while I actually really like the AATGM releases (convenient, better latency than I usually get with default MAME on my desktop), they probably never would have thought that release worth it if it wasn't for piracy helping keep it available. It just feels evil for demonizing the community for doing what's worked when they wouldn't have even that much otherwise.

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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.