tendoboy1984 wrote:
THANK YOU! Someone who gave me a thorough, well thought-out answer.
If modding console games infringes on a company's IP rights, then what about people who mod PC games? Like I said above, Valve allows people to mod their games [especially Half-Life].
Most of this comes down to intended and unintended 'interchangeability'(and that's probably a much better way of explaining it than my larger previous post really). All of the examples you gave, cars, PCs, PC Software mods, they're all a matter of changing things out for something else. Cars are made so that you can replace parts that break down, but it's also fine to replace those parts with something 'better' as long as it's still street legal. PCs are made so you can replace parts, but you can also replace those with something better.
PC games, like most PC software, is made up of many resources placed in different folders, and sometimes those resources can be either manually or by use of a program automatically switched out with other resources. I did it all the time when I was younger - I'd take the Chip's Challenge's folder, rename the real MIDI and WAV files, and replace them with video-game MIDI and WAV SFX files. If I was a little more savvy, I probably could have hacked my way into the EXE(because I think the graphics were not a separate resource, but either way), found the tilsets for the graphics, and modded those too. And while BACK THEN maybe they could have had a problem with it, the PC side of things has pretty much acknowledged that their resources are just sitting there in a folder, and some of them can be easily swapped out with different resources, so they just kind of go with it now, I suppose. They just make disclaimers telling you they're not responsible if you add in copyrighted characters/scenarios/etc, and I'm sure they have a right to delete such things server-side if it gets added there.
Console games, permanently stamped discs(or maybe even a WiiWare/VC game good enough to warrant being modded for whatever reason) being played in a controlled environment...those require a little more security-breaking to get into. Some were mistakenly left open, like the Twilight Princess save-file hack, and from what I hear, Brawl's code in combination with the SD card capabilities(because I hear you can use those mods without a modchip and even without the homebrew channel). But even those involve taking advantage of copyrighted code to make it do things they didn't intend it to do, and as I mentioned before, it usually implies or leads up into pirating. Maybe if the Brawl-community was a little quieter about it, and weren't attached to so many other Wii/DS-hacking-projects, maybe they could have gotten away with it just fine. Most everything else for modding on Wii requires either the Homebrew Channel, a modchip, or emulating the Wii on a higher-end PC.
In short(whoops, it wasn't), it more or less boils down to the fact that Nintendo is very sensitive to pirating, and any attempt made against its game code is probably offensive to them. They've been in the business almost up to when it first started, and they've had to combat piracy almost the whole way. For other console companies(if they care as much), I'd say it comes down to the fact they've created a controlled environment in which they can hope to prevent code from being compromised, and they don't like it when people turn around and do that anyway. That's the best guess I can make, is that they made it so it can't be compromised in order to prevent piracy, and here people are compromising that code to 'only make modifications', but as the programmers, they probably see that their methods are only a few steps away from compromising game code anyway.
At the very least, as much as Nintendo prides itself on basically being an artist in terms of making games, they're probably also a bit upset that people would be bored or tired of their designs enough to go to the trouble of replacing those things; image-artists don't like their art being modified by someone else and then being reposted as their own image, Nintendo probably doesn't like their games being modified and then being reposted as a better design. That's all just a guess, of course, but as far as I know, there aren't any clear-cut reasonings on why Nintendo-especially dislikes simple modifications like what the Brawl community is doing, so that's as close to a guess as I can get anyway.
