Coincidence, or Attempt to Silence?
For clymax‘s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube.
All Discord roles were removed with no communication or warning.
Is this retaliation for aiding the call for transparency by raising awareness of the Pokémon Clover incident on Retro Achievements? You decide.
Would you like such treatment after contributing nearly three thousand achievements across over forty games?
PSA: Your developed achievements are no longer your own but belong to the site, according to their Developer Code of Conduct here.
Achievement Ownership
When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time….
Is even Roblox less predatory in comparison, despite the abysmal 24.5% cut for Roblox developers? Retro Achievements pays nothing, yet you also keep none of your work. On a typical romhacking website, your work stays your own.
Retro Achievements: Apply to Be a Junior Developer Today!
Double Standards: Bending the Knee to Big Studios Like Nintendo While Giving the Middle Finger to Hack Authors
The following section is not directly addressed to Wes, tele, or suspect15, as each of them have been kind enough to take the effort to discuss potential solutions to the issue raised in this section. Neither is the following section directly addressed to any singular individual on Retro Achievements but to the organization as a whole.
Retro Achievements goes to great lengths to prevent the illegal act of game roms being shared on any of their platforms.
Where can I find ROMs?
Not here. It is illegal to host or distribute copyrighted ROMs.
At the same time, Retro Achievements has no qualms about engaging in the allegedly illegal act of mass copying and hosting romhack patches without obtaining hack author permission or notification.
If true as alleged, this not only violates the IP rights of hack authors but robs the hack author of download counts, forum members, user reviews, user engagement, and Discord members, just to name a few examples.
Robbing hack authors of what in many cases is their only tangible reward for their hard work can discourage further hack development due to lack of user engagement, and players also suffer.
In doing so, Retro Achievements also positions itself to benefit from increased membership and user engagement by making itself the one-stop shop for playing your favorite romhacks and getting achievements for doing so.
In this way, Retro Achievements does not hesitate to throw fellow modders in the retro gaming community under the bus, as long as RA stands to benefit.
Depicted: example patch downloads for the Andaron Saga mod of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA) by Mangs and Team. As of this writing, this mod is only available from an potentially adjacent Discord server to Andaron Saga. This means RA users, unlike other players, won’t need to join that Andaron Saga Discord. Does RA have permission to host this patch?
And as if the blanket “fire now, ask questions later” approach wasn’t bad enough, Retro Achievements has not provided an off-ramp for hack authors to take down these cloned patches, despite requests for them to do so.
Romhacking sites typically honor a hack author’s request to take down a romhack patch.
Ironically, even rom-sharing websites, which won’t be named here as they are illegal, honor such requests albeit to take down pre-patched roms rather than romhack patches.
So Retro Achievements, why the double standards?
Sheer Hypocrisy: Banning Legal Paid Mods While Illegally Hosting Patches
New Chapter Coming Soon
Admin Announcement via RA Discord, April 25, 2025
In light of recent events, the admin team has decided not to allow sets for paid hacks of copyrighted content. We have long striven to avoid any involvement of money in what we do beyond paying server costs, and we don’t believe the risk opened by encouraging unauthorized monetary gains based on a third party’s IP is worth the gain. We still support and encourage paid homebrew, which showcases the creativity and capability of skilled developers without invoking these concerns. Free hacks will of course continue to be supported as well. This is purely about preventing liability.
To be clear, this does not affect any sets at this time, it simply sets up policy for when it becomes relevant.
This post has been viewed 77 time(s).
Leave a Reply