That seems like an unfair way to characterize what he was saying. The point is that of course emulators will be associated with piracy if publishers won't sell

That seems like an unfair way to characterize what he was saying. The point is that of course emulators will be associated with piracy if publishers won't sell ROMs, and use technological measures to try to prevent third-party implementations from being able to run legitimately purchased games (i.e. perform product tying, which is supposed to be illegal), and bankrupt commercial emulator companies through lawfare even when they know they have a losing case. Average people don't have the means or technical know-how to rip ROMs themselves, so piracy becomes the easier path. Like I don't own a Switch and I'm not going to buy a relatively expensive single-purpose piece of hardware like that to e.g. see what TotK is about. If I were going to buy a handheld, I'd probably buy something like an Asus or Valve device, which are higher performance and can run Linux. But in order to use an emulator, you necessarily have to pirate it because they won't sell it. For older games, the rights holders don't publish it at all, so again naturally over time as the old copies are discarded or damaged, only pirated copies will remain. That has nothing to do with emulation, and everything to do with the fact that the things being pirated aren't for sale. If the music industry still refused to sell anything other than vinyl, portable music players would've been associated with piracy too, but only because most people aren't going to bother to rip their own music off a record player when someone else already went through the trouble. DRM is just doubling down on this thinking. If they wouldn't sell anything older than 5 years out of their catalogue, rock music would also be associated with piracy.