It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.
Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms.
This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms.
So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)
Plus, they're sitting on piles of money, so they're not exactly in a hurry.
What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app? Surely it's against their TOS?
I'm going to guess the chances are near zero. Picture the lurking possibility that Apple revokes your developer key, essentially shutting down your business, because you merely built something on your own hardware that they didn't like. You didn't distribute it, the code never left your network, you just built it. I feel that every argument for "developers will never leave iOS even if Apple does..." goes out the window at that point.
https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameCo...
So there's a future for that.
Overall I love what this team has done, playing these old games on my phono feels downright like magic. It's a shame that Nintendo won't bring these games officially to mobile platforms.
