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After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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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.