1. Coincidence, or Attempt to Silence?
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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!
2. 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.
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.
Robbing hack authors of what in many cases is their only tangible reward for their hard work can discourage the hacks from being further developed, due to lack of user engagement, and so players also suffer.
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 to play this mod. But 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 opt out of having their patches cloned or 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?
3. Sheer Hypocrisy: Banning Legal Paid Mods While Illegally Hosting Cloned Patches
The following section is not directly addressed to any singular individual on Retro Achievements but to the organization as a whole.
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.
Interesting timing. Could these be the paid hacks in question?
In case of doubt:
The admin announcement can be seen as implying that the paid hacks are illegal or at least unethical.
This virtue signaling by Retro Achievements led to misguided backlash by the player base.
But I am no stranger to getting this kind of backlash from other gaming communities.1
Respectfully, however, the romhack patches are legally sold.
The patch contents are 100% my work and are hence copyrighted by yours truly.
The legally obtained romhack patch can only be used by a player in conjunction with a legally obtained game rom.
But am I just in it for the money?
Or am I spearheading an effort to legitimize paid romhacks? So hack authors who come after me can be rewarded for their hard work and face less backlash than I did? So players can enjoy hacks of greater quality and variety?
Those who have spoken to me may have an idea.
In this case, no one from Retro Achievements even tried to reach out to me.
Meanwhile, what do we have here? It’s the GBA Script Port to Final Fantasy V (SFC) by J121.
Mods like this have been banned, for being illegal, elsewhere in the modding scene.
Let’s set aside the issue of obtaining permission from the hack author, which was already covered in the previous section.
In the case of the GBA Script Port, the patch file still contains verbatim the entire script of game story and dialogue from Final Fantasy V Advance (GBA).
This script is a copyrighted work of Square Enix and cannot be legally distributed by Retro Achievements without a license to do so. Has Retro Achievements acquired such a license?
So, Retro Achievements, why all the hypocrisy?
4. Appendix
- Appendix on sample backlash from another gaming community (not Retro Achievements) regarding the Whirlwind Fiesta event for Final Fantasy V (SFC): ↩︎
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