After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal
After shutting down several popular emulators over the years, Nintendo's top IP lawyer just admitted that emulators are legal.
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That's what I always said here. They never said emulation was illegal, but all of those emulators started making it extremely easy to pirate. Worse they openly targeted current gen consoles, so it was way way messier on "preserving old games" when brand new games were almost immediately supported. It was pretty much begging Nintendo to take action by targeting brand new games
Exactly. I do not understand people defending this. An emulator playing games that are not even released, it’s a step too far. What’s the difference with piracy?
And I say this as someone using emulators on a regular basis for 15 years. Emulation is good (and necessary) for preserving video games, but the timing is important not to cross the (thin) line between « preservation » and « piracy ».
This leads to the same kind of erosion of free and open source software as Google taking down projects like youtube-dl on GitHub. The emulator code contains nothing illegal, neither does the developer community, but that's exactly what Nintendo is targeting, because it's the most effective way to shut down any project. The way Nintendo handles these cases is the problem and they have never cared if something is actually completely legal if they want it gone enough, like modding, romhacking or uploading videos of gameplay. At this point they've burnt so much goodwill that I'm hoestly surprised there are still people left willing to insist that Nintendo only goes after actual piracy.
Nintendo would not be as aggressive if Switch emulation waited 10 years. Developing an emulator for a machine that they are still selling, running commercial games even better then their own system, and allowing to play new games that are not even released officially yet, I do not expect another outcome.
In addition to that, some people got paid for that. It’s a very different situation than any other emulator in my opinion.
Again, I am not against emulation, but the timing for Switch emulation is very bad and unethical. It’s not only about Nintendo, but also third party developers. A situation where Switch emulation is very easy (especially with all those handheld PCs) would greatly impact game sales. It won’t kill Nintendo of course, but third party on the system will just leave because they will not sell anymore (see what happened to the Nintendo DS because it was easy to pirate any game).
Why should that change the legality of the situation? Not to mention the Nintendo Switch is already quite old and emulator development (for the most part) hasn't lagged much behind a consoles release. Getting paid for emulator development also isn't illegal and I don't see why it should be. You're trying to conflate emulation and homebrew development with piracy which doesn't seem fair (and doesn't even require emulation, which you've illustrated with your Nintendo DS example).
If you see no problem when TOTK is playable on an emulator a few weeks before its official release, thanks to specific patches provided by some emulator developers behind a paywall, I cannot say anything else. For me it’s unethical to promote such thing when the console is still in activity.
I say « unethical » because even if it’s legal, it has the same negative impact as piracy, and that’s why I think it’s a problem. I have no problem with emulation when the console is « dead » (and I think it’s even necessary for preservation).
At this point I can only reiterate that emulation and piracy are not the same thing. I really cannot bring myself to give a shit about the ethical concerns of TOTK, when the only way Nintendo (and you apparently) has of protecting their intellectual property is to vanish perfectly legal software, through the power of being a big financial threat. I've been using emulators to play games since the SNES and not once have I played a video game for which I don't own a copy (mainly because I've been around long enough to own all of the necessary hardware and game copies). The idea that emulation should be illegal or locked behind an arbitrary definition of console age/inactivity is completely laughable and would open the door for harassment of various open source projects at Nintendo's whims, they won't just stop at the WiiU era because you think that's appropriate. The actions of one emulators development team or community being particularly unethical or locking things behind a paywall or even supporting piracy in any form, even if they annoy me and the rest of the emulation community, should not affect the emulator itself or the legality of the code. I'm not going to blame them for making themselves an obvious target, just because people have a weird affection for one of the most litigious billion-dollar companies on the planet.