That's the thing, studies are mostly just non-conclusive because the corporations don't release numbers on individual product sales over the entire life of the product, reprints, and re-releases on later consoles/platforms.
Some studies indicate the opposite might be true. There is, as far as we can tell, no known link between piracy and lost sales. Someone always will do it and you can't stop them.Īgain, I'd love to see any evidence the existence of emulation and/or piracy is affecting sales in any way. I'm even more so for it when it is for preserving things that otherwise would be lost so I'm all for the dumping of games and whatnot. Yes I have a couple things out there that I KNOW were pirated but I don't consider that lost revenue because those people were never going to buy them. I've always had the stance of no options available ok sure go pirate away you weren't going to buy any way. The emulators themselves are still totally legal as they on their own don't violate anything only when they are loaded up with the firmware are they no longer in the gray zone.Īs for the homebrew thing funnily enough I legit homebrewed my wii with the only intention to have it play dvds and to this day that still is all the homebrew that is on it :p. I'm all for emulation especially with games that are abandonware or got re-released but in a worse state than before. The people doing it weren't going to buy the games anyway so in the end no sale lost. Oh yeah I am fully aware emulators are primarily used for piracy and that's ok.
Given how impossible it's been to get a PS5, it it continues for another 2 years, those game developers might have their arms twisted into releasing all their PS4/PS5 dual releases of games for the PC rather then have their lunch eaten by emulators. You can't simply plug in your external drive from the console into the PC.īut what if you could? So that's what the prospect of this generation of emulators is about. Hence the problem with the Wii/WiiU/PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XboxOne emulators is that you need to get the digital games off the physical units before their firmware gets patched. If you sell the console, the games are also gone. Which brings up a problem.ĭigital games are married to the console. Which is why emulators are often thought of as way to get rid of the physical games and the physical consoles once they're no longer available. Nobody has that much space to dedicate to gaming. A "gamer PC" in Japan or Korea is basically a non-thing. There's also a large culture component that exists regarding Japanese games that doesn't exist in the west, and that's PC games are usually weak and for adults in Japan.
People primarily use emulators for piracy, and that's just the nature of what is going to happen if you don't produce that console and it's software in perpetuity and at a price point that people can afford. Like Nintendo, despite it's overreach and anti-consumer heavy-handed message, has always been correct about it. Anyone under the age of 30 likely has no way of acquiring an original SNES and the cart (most carts on eBay are counterfeit (repro) flash carts, and not legit) so you can safely bet anyone playing a translated game on an emulator, almost certainly stole it.
In recent years, there have been "randomizer" mods for a few SNES games that reasonably operate under the same legal justification, you still need to dump the rom yourself and modify the rom yourself, just like with translation patches. It has, and has always been that you can not copy the firmware (which is software after all) and redistribute it.Ī lot of early generations of emulators also require firmware/bios dumps, and even high-accuracy emulators of 16-bit consoles like the SNES require the firmware dumps of the expansion chips to actually emulate it accurately.Įveryone who throws out the "homebrew" argument can never name any homebrew software that they need the emulator for, let alone modifying their console to play, or the flash copier for. End point.īleem did not require Playstation firmware while ALL other emulators did at the time, and thus that became the legal test for it. If an emulator requires a console BIOS/ROM to operate, it's only intended for Piracy. (the ones that don't use firmware of the consoles). The point is to get a good working emulator later down the line.Įmulators have been proven over and over to not be piracy but original pieces of software.