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I have mixed feelings about emulating current-gen consoles. I think there's a very strong ethical case for emulating consoles whose games are no longer made (de

I have mixed feelings about emulating current-gen consoles. I think there's a very strong ethical case for emulating consoles whose games are no longer made (despite Nintendo's best efforts to shut that down too). But emulating something whose games can still be bought new would tend to encourage piracy, I expect. Edit: "cracking" -> "piracy", for clarity

andy_ppp 6y ago
If people who wouldn’t have bought a Switch end up playing those games on PC who has lost out here?
- MaximumYComb 6y ago
  It's ignorant at best to argue that this is only going to be used by those who wouldn't have purchased a Switch. Once something is free then a lot of people won't spend hundreds of dollars on it.
  - capsulecorp 6y ago
    Right. Now lets ask ourselves why one would need to spend hundreds to play a particular game. The answer you will come across most commonly is platform exclusivity deals. I am happy to pay for a game, but not buy the hardware for a system I don't want, just because they leveraged their business clout to prohibit games from releasing on other platforms. In this case, I could care less about the bottom line of the console company or the game company who agreed to what I view as a corrupt collaboration.
  - witherk 6y ago
    As someone who uses yuzu to play games at 4k, I have bought 2 switches and purchased the grand majority of the games that I have played on emulator. While I think it's true that devs lose some customers this way, most people who are playing BOTW on their pc (requiring a pretty good computer) pay more money into the nintendo ecosystem than many people imagine. If anything the way nintendo treats it's competitive communities makes me feel bad for giving them too much money. But on the other hand they are one of the only devs who consistently ships quality finished games, so that should be rewarded.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      It's unfortunate that the devs are financially lumped together with Nintendo's scummy legal/business people, but at the end of the day that's the reality. Pirating games means not paying the devs for their work.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I really don’t think the group of emulator pirates who would have bought the console and games if they had not been able to pirate is a particularly large group. How many sales are you thinking are lost to this 1%?
- edflsafoiewq 6y ago
  And on this meander of the great river Utilitarianism, we find that you become entitled to have a thing for free by pre-commiting never to buy it.
nix23 6y ago
>But emulating something whose games can still be bought new would tend to encourage cracking, imo. That would be truly terrible!! Making a copy of your owned games is a capital crime.
- brundolf 6y ago
  When people refer to "cracked" games/apps there's usually an implication of "pirated". I'll edit my wording.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Good, because i make a big distinction between cracking and pirated.
ddevault 6y ago
There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right. Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. No one has lost anything when a game is copied.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > No one has lost anything when a game is copied. Suppose an indie developer working alone hires an intern. They release a game developed together for a console. Suddenly the console becomes possible to emulate, and most of the people who would have bought the game play a cracked and pirated version on an emulator instead. Because of the unexpected lack of sales, the developer has to fire the intern. The intern no longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something. My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things. If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.
  - witherk 6y ago
    Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
It sucks, doesn’t it? Developers deserve to get paid, but I’m glad I didn’t have to wait a decade to see Breath of the Wild in 4K. I wish there was an easier way to run legitimately purchased cartridges. I don’t know how many people ever did it, but PCSX2, for instance, has always been able to run PS2 discs right off a standard PC optical drive. If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do.
- Talanes 6y ago
  >I don’t know how many people ever did it It's been many years, but I tried this to play FFIX. Turned out it was one of the few games that still had game-breaking issues at the time. I wonder if it works now.
- mewse 6y ago
  > If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do. Apart from folks who have no way to perform online transactions and would have to physically visit a shop to pay using cash, piracy hasn’t been “way easier” than buying games in more than a decade. Everybody has online shops now. On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach (or in the hands of your child or etc). In the vast majority of cases, these days, I suspect that piracy is a lot more about “cheaper” than about “easier”.
  - rav 6y ago
    > On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach How? When I go to a Nintendo store page for a game I want to buy digital [1], all I get are the options "Add to Wish List", "Download demo", "Buy physical". [1] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll...
    - mewse 6y ago
joshgoldman 6y ago
Nobody cares about your mixed feelings and support for a greedy, cheating, code stealing company... people like you ruin the game industry and are just jealous
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
apatheticonion 6y ago
I think consoles are great devices to make gaming accessible to the masses, requiring little to no effort to get up and running. Where I draw the line is console exclusives. I will not purchase a console that forces me to buy hardware I do not need because they ban experiences from other platforms to try gain a competitive edge. I feel this is damaging to the industry as games with incredible experiences are blocked behind a paywall (and often restricted quality). Consoles should compete on experience and features, not exclusive games that you can't play without buying into the ecosystem. I only just got around to finishing Bloodborne (at 20-30 fps) and it's a game I have wanted to play since I saw the trailer back in 2013. It's so sad that they limit this game's IP to only PS4 owners. I would love to see the lore expanded upon in sequels (that run at an unlocked, variable frame rate), but if demon souls is anything to go by, we won't. If it were available for PC, I would buy it. If it were available via emulation, I would buy it. People who pirate games do so because they can't afford them, and there is nothing less affordable than having to buy an entire device to play a game. Emulation does complicate this somewhat because piracy is a necessity to the experience, something that could be addressed by the hardware vendors themselves.
matthewrobertso 6y ago
Incidentally, around 20 years ago I purchased a copy of Bleem! at a Fry's electronics and some games to play on it (playstation was still a current-gen console at the time). I would not have purchased nor played the games if I had not purchased the emulator. This was probably not a typical thing to do but I don't see it as a fundamental thing that existence of emulators has to hurt software sales for a current-gen console. I also think steam has proved that the way to beat piracy is to offer a better experience than piracy offers. I get headaches playing 3d content at 30 fps, I would pay double the cost per game to run first-party nintendo games on my PC at an unlocked resolution and frame rate.
- gambiting 6y ago
  If I remember correctly bleem! Could only play disc games so it was specifically aimed at people buying playstation games to play them on PC.
meibo 6y ago
Unfortunately, Nintendo has not made any friends within the emulation/homebrew community especially as of late(or ever), so the common consensus seems to be "we don't care, as long as you don't do illegal things on our front porch". This is purely an observation, however these things have tradition within the Nintendo hacking community and most members of the community are very passionate about their projects - the Wii is comparatively hard to emulate, which is why Dolphin is still struggling with certain things after a long time, while Switch emulators can run a lot of games nearly perfectly after less than half a decade.
- brundolf 6y ago
  My point is exactly about the emulation/homebrew community, though. They only continue to have the moral high road against Nintendo as long as they don't condone piracy. If they get in bed with those who want to do genuine piracy, Nintendo is no longer the bad guy for taking legal action. Not that a Switch emulator completely falls into the latter category, but it lies in a grey area that legacy emulators have mostly steered clear of.
  - ripdog 6y ago
    There's no grey area here, though. Emulator devs explicitly disavow using their software for piracy, and ban anyone on official forums for mentioning or linking to pirated games. That's all they have to do, really. (assuming the emulator is clean-room, of course).
    - Jasper_ 6y ago
      It's pretty well established that the market for Yuzu is playing commercial games. Just look at their home page: https://yuzu-emu.org/ https://yuzu-emu.org/ Maybe not direct piracy, but clearly adjacent to it. We aren't running homebrew software here.
      - spapas82 6y ago
        Yes but you must own and rip these games yourself before playing them: https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/ https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/
cdubzzz 6y ago
> I think there's a very strong ethical case for emulating consoles whose games are no longer made (despite Nintendo's best efforts to shut that down too). Do you differentiate between games being “made” and “sold”? If not, which consoles specifically are thinking of as ethical to emulate? Nintendo still sells NES, SNES, N64, etc. games via Virtual Console.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I personally would not emulate a game that Nintendo is currently selling in a readily-playable form (unless I owned it already). Used games don't count, because those a) don't send any money to the original devs and b) become increasingly scarce over time. The problem is that in practice Nintendo only makes a very small portion of their back catalog available for purchase at any given time. The only Zelda games from previous generations that I can play on my Switch are Zelda 1, and (soon) Skyward Sword. No others are available. If Nintendo made their whole catalog available for digital purchase (or even better, as part of a subscription) then I wouldn't emulate any of it.
  - larusso 6y ago
    You can play Zelda II and A link to the past via the online subscription. And one could count the remake of Links awakening as well. But more to the small catalog. Nintendo has not the rights to just publish the old NES/SNES catalogue as they are not the sole rights owners. Also they won’t dump all these games at once. I still wait for Windwaker HD as I never owned a WiiU and don’t want to emulate the game.
foobar33333 6y ago
These emulators are usually useless for piracy until after the console has reached its end of life. People start working on them as soon as possible but they don't work well for years. The switch is almost at the end now and there still isn't an emulator which works very well. When the competition for emulators is buying a hackable switch and running dumped games natively with 0 bugs or slowdowns. I doubt switch emulators have prevented the sale of a single switch game.
- brundolf 6y ago
  You may be right about the ramp-up time, though the Switch is only at like 50% of its lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised if the next console is a "Switch 2" or something with backwards-compatibility, given what the other console makers have done
  - cheschire 6y ago
    What you say is logical when considering things generically, however I’m struggling to remember a decision that Nintendo ever made that was based on what other console makers have done.
  - isaacimagine 6y ago
    I mean, after the success of the Wii Nintendo released the Wii 2 *ahem* U.
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    The typical lifetime of a Nintendo console is 5 years (N64 was 1996, GameCube was 2001, Wii was 2006, Wii U was 2012 because the Wii was such a smash success, Switch was 2017). The release cycles have been slowing as of recent but we're far more than 50% in.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      They've already announced an enhanced "Switch Pro" and said they hope it "extends the life cycle of the Switch platform for many more years": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/nintendo-plans-switch-model-with-bigger-samsung-oled-display https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/nintendo-...
Cypher 6y ago
We all have to make our own choices.

andy_ppp 6y ago

If people who wouldn’t have bought a Switch end up playing those games on PC who has lost out here?

MaximumYComb 6y ago
It's ignorant at best to argue that this is only going to be used by those who wouldn't have purchased a Switch. Once something is free then a lot of people won't spend hundreds of dollars on it.
- capsulecorp 6y ago
  Right. Now lets ask ourselves why one would need to spend hundreds to play a particular game. The answer you will come across most commonly is platform exclusivity deals. I am happy to pay for a game, but not buy the hardware for a system I don't want, just because they leveraged their business clout to prohibit games from releasing on other platforms. In this case, I could care less about the bottom line of the console company or the game company who agreed to what I view as a corrupt collaboration.
- witherk 6y ago
  As someone who uses yuzu to play games at 4k, I have bought 2 switches and purchased the grand majority of the games that I have played on emulator. While I think it's true that devs lose some customers this way, most people who are playing BOTW on their pc (requiring a pretty good computer) pay more money into the nintendo ecosystem than many people imagine. If anything the way nintendo treats it's competitive communities makes me feel bad for giving them too much money. But on the other hand they are one of the only devs who consistently ships quality finished games, so that should be rewarded.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    It's unfortunate that the devs are financially lumped together with Nintendo's scummy legal/business people, but at the end of the day that's the reality. Pirating games means not paying the devs for their work.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I really don’t think the group of emulator pirates who would have bought the console and games if they had not been able to pirate is a particularly large group. How many sales are you thinking are lost to this 1%?
edflsafoiewq 6y ago
And on this meander of the great river Utilitarianism, we find that you become entitled to have a thing for free by pre-commiting never to buy it.

nix23 6y ago

>But emulating something whose games can still be bought new would tend to encourage cracking, imo. That would be truly terrible!! Making a copy of your owned games is a capital crime.

brundolf 6y ago
When people refer to "cracked" games/apps there's usually an implication of "pirated". I'll edit my wording.
- nix23 6y ago
  Good, because i make a big distinction between cracking and pirated.

ddevault 6y ago

There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right. Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. No one has lost anything when a game is copied.

bscphil 6y ago
> No one has lost anything when a game is copied. Suppose an indie developer working alone hires an intern. They release a game developed together for a console. Suddenly the console becomes possible to emulate, and most of the people who would have bought the game play a cracked and pirated version on an emulator instead. Because of the unexpected lack of sales, the developer has to fire the intern. The intern no longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something. My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things. If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.
- witherk 6y ago
  Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

It sucks, doesn’t it? Developers deserve to get paid, but I’m glad I didn’t have to wait a decade to see Breath of the Wild in 4K. I wish there was an easier way to run legitimately purchased cartridges. I don’t know how many people ever did it, but PCSX2, for instance, has always been able to run PS2 discs right off a standard PC optical drive. If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do.

Talanes 6y ago
>I don’t know how many people ever did it It's been many years, but I tried this to play FFIX. Turned out it was one of the few games that still had game-breaking issues at the time. I wonder if it works now.
mewse 6y ago
> If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do. Apart from folks who have no way to perform online transactions and would have to physically visit a shop to pay using cash, piracy hasn’t been “way easier” than buying games in more than a decade. Everybody has online shops now. On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach (or in the hands of your child or etc). In the vast majority of cases, these days, I suspect that piracy is a lot more about “cheaper” than about “easier”.
- rav 6y ago
  > On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach How? When I go to a Nintendo store page for a game I want to buy digital [1], all I get are the options "Add to Wish List", "Download demo", "Buy physical". [1] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll...
  - mewse 6y ago

joshgoldman 6y ago

Nobody cares about your mixed feelings and support for a greedy, cheating, code stealing company... people like you ruin the game industry and are just jealous

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

apatheticonion 6y ago

I think consoles are great devices to make gaming accessible to the masses, requiring little to no effort to get up and running. Where I draw the line is console exclusives. I will not purchase a console that forces me to buy hardware I do not need because they ban experiences from other platforms to try gain a competitive edge. I feel this is damaging to the industry as games with incredible experiences are blocked behind a paywall (and often restricted quality). Consoles should compete on experience and features, not exclusive games that you can't play without buying into the ecosystem. I only just got around to finishing Bloodborne (at 20-30 fps) and it's a game I have wanted to play since I saw the trailer back in 2013. It's so sad that they limit this game's IP to only PS4 owners. I would love to see the lore expanded upon in sequels (that run at an unlocked, variable frame rate), but if demon souls is anything to go by, we won't. If it were available for PC, I would buy it. If it were available via emulation, I would buy it. People who pirate games do so because they can't afford them, and there is nothing less affordable than having to buy an entire device to play a game. Emulation does complicate this somewhat because piracy is a necessity to the experience, something that could be addressed by the hardware vendors themselves.

matthewrobertso 6y ago

Incidentally, around 20 years ago I purchased a copy of Bleem! at a Fry's electronics and some games to play on it (playstation was still a current-gen console at the time). I would not have purchased nor played the games if I had not purchased the emulator. This was probably not a typical thing to do but I don't see it as a fundamental thing that existence of emulators has to hurt software sales for a current-gen console. I also think steam has proved that the way to beat piracy is to offer a better experience than piracy offers. I get headaches playing 3d content at 30 fps, I would pay double the cost per game to run first-party nintendo games on my PC at an unlocked resolution and frame rate.

gambiting 6y ago
If I remember correctly bleem! Could only play disc games so it was specifically aimed at people buying playstation games to play them on PC.

meibo 6y ago

Unfortunately, Nintendo has not made any friends within the emulation/homebrew community especially as of late(or ever), so the common consensus seems to be "we don't care, as long as you don't do illegal things on our front porch". This is purely an observation, however these things have tradition within the Nintendo hacking community and most members of the community are very passionate about their projects - the Wii is comparatively hard to emulate, which is why Dolphin is still struggling with certain things after a long time, while Switch emulators can run a lot of games nearly perfectly after less than half a decade.

brundolf 6y ago
My point is exactly about the emulation/homebrew community, though. They only continue to have the moral high road against Nintendo as long as they don't condone piracy. If they get in bed with those who want to do genuine piracy, Nintendo is no longer the bad guy for taking legal action. Not that a Switch emulator completely falls into the latter category, but it lies in a grey area that legacy emulators have mostly steered clear of.
- ripdog 6y ago
  There's no grey area here, though. Emulator devs explicitly disavow using their software for piracy, and ban anyone on official forums for mentioning or linking to pirated games. That's all they have to do, really. (assuming the emulator is clean-room, of course).
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    It's pretty well established that the market for Yuzu is playing commercial games. Just look at their home page: https://yuzu-emu.org/ https://yuzu-emu.org/ Maybe not direct piracy, but clearly adjacent to it. We aren't running homebrew software here.
    - spapas82 6y ago
      Yes but you must own and rip these games yourself before playing them: https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/ https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/

cdubzzz 6y ago

> I think there's a very strong ethical case for emulating consoles whose games are no longer made (despite Nintendo's best efforts to shut that down too). Do you differentiate between games being “made” and “sold”? If not, which consoles specifically are thinking of as ethical to emulate? Nintendo still sells NES, SNES, N64, etc. games via Virtual Console.

brundolf 6y ago
I personally would not emulate a game that Nintendo is currently selling in a readily-playable form (unless I owned it already). Used games don't count, because those a) don't send any money to the original devs and b) become increasingly scarce over time. The problem is that in practice Nintendo only makes a very small portion of their back catalog available for purchase at any given time. The only Zelda games from previous generations that I can play on my Switch are Zelda 1, and (soon) Skyward Sword. No others are available. If Nintendo made their whole catalog available for digital purchase (or even better, as part of a subscription) then I wouldn't emulate any of it.
- larusso 6y ago
  You can play Zelda II and A link to the past via the online subscription. And one could count the remake of Links awakening as well. But more to the small catalog. Nintendo has not the rights to just publish the old NES/SNES catalogue as they are not the sole rights owners. Also they won’t dump all these games at once. I still wait for Windwaker HD as I never owned a WiiU and don’t want to emulate the game.

foobar33333 6y ago

These emulators are usually useless for piracy until after the console has reached its end of life. People start working on them as soon as possible but they don't work well for years. The switch is almost at the end now and there still isn't an emulator which works very well. When the competition for emulators is buying a hackable switch and running dumped games natively with 0 bugs or slowdowns. I doubt switch emulators have prevented the sale of a single switch game.

brundolf 6y ago
You may be right about the ramp-up time, though the Switch is only at like 50% of its lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised if the next console is a "Switch 2" or something with backwards-compatibility, given what the other console makers have done
- cheschire 6y ago
  What you say is logical when considering things generically, however I’m struggling to remember a decision that Nintendo ever made that was based on what other console makers have done.
- isaacimagine 6y ago
  I mean, after the success of the Wii Nintendo released the Wii 2 *ahem* U.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  The typical lifetime of a Nintendo console is 5 years (N64 was 1996, GameCube was 2001, Wii was 2006, Wii U was 2012 because the Wii was such a smash success, Switch was 2017). The release cycles have been slowing as of recent but we're far more than 50% in.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    They've already announced an enhanced "Switch Pro" and said they hope it "extends the life cycle of the Switch platform for many more years": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/nintendo-plans-switch-model-with-bigger-samsung-oled-display https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/nintendo-...

Cypher 6y ago

We all have to make our own choices.