I'd argue that Nintendo's hardware strategy might well have broken the fandom if not for a couple strategic game releases and the Amiibo thing. I love to beat on the Japanese for being incompetent businessmen. Same reason they aren't in the mobile market. They are philosophically opposed to that. Rather than try to outdo them, Nintendo and other consoles focus on potential customers who just want a box with a power button, controllers, and that's it.
If you want games on the PC (whether that's in your office or hooked up to your living room TV) there plenty of choices. A smart company targets customers not being served by other companies. As mentioned, there are already loads of games available on PC platforms. Not every company wants to be everything to everyone.
Honestly, if they wanted to do something like this, it would probably be easier for them to develop some sort of toolkit that makes it easier for them to just port Wii/WiiU games directly to Win/OSX/Lin and sell through an online store.īut then again, this would just make them another Steam competing with their massive library and market presence and it would sorta defeat the purpose of their entire target market, namely people who just want to plug a box into the TV and wave stuff around at the screen or mash a gamepad/tablet. Whether potential revenues would be enough to make up for any/all of these is something I don't have the info to determine but that's my main guess.
easier to play cracked/unlicensed games for free
cost of support/development versus profits Not commenting on the validity of these or whether it would be good business since I don't know their business details but my guess is: There's a market for it, and there's fans willing to do a lot of work for free. I don't understand why nintendo doesn't sell emulators on pc (via steam or whatever) on their own. Having said that, we've got a not insignificant number of Wii Us in the world right now. As companies cease support for older systems and machines submit to time’s predations, older games stand the risk of being lost forever. Putting aside the legalities of the situation, emulators represent an interesting option for historical preservation. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before Cemu faces the same, especially considering the fact that Nintendo is still actively developing for the Wii U. Before that, Nintendo shut down homebrew DS carts, and filed complaints against a fan-made remake Super Mario 64.
Earlier this year, the company’s American arm sent a takedown request to GitHub, asking that a JavaScript-based Game Boy emulator be removed from its code repository. Delroth explained that the only thing in common between the Wii U and Wii is the CPU architecture.Įxciting as Cemu might be, it seems somewhat unlikely that Nintendo will condone its existence. While many have speculated that Cemu was based on the Wii emulator Dolphin, Exzap says it was built entirely from scratch-a fact that was corroborated by Delroth, who worked on Dolphin. Based on a thread on the GBAtemp forums, this could be attributed to the emergence of the Wii U common key earlier this year. Exzap, the primary force behind Cemu, began the project about two years ago, but cites effective development time as 6 months.