Also. I think it's kinda stupid for people to be giving out emulation information on this site. Public forum and all, but that kind of stuff i don't think helps the reputation on of the site. Since it is illegal.
However, you can't say someone pirating games is costing developers money as well as other places.
Piracy as a whole does, but not all people who pirate games do. That's why music and game companys don't get nearly as much sympathy on piracy as they should. They treat every act of piracy as if it was a lost sale, which obviously isn't the case.
The studies show there are three kinds of piracy.
Some people do own copies of the CDs. However this is still illegal as far as I know. Backups via emulation are legal but i'm fairly certain that the Rom in question needs to be copied from your particular cartridge or CD. This kind doesn't cost sales. This is the rarest kind of piracy.
The second kind of piracy are people who would buy a game but have instead decided to pirate it. These are the kind that hurt sales.
However the most common form of piracy is from people who just wouldn't buy the CD or Videogame anyway. For example someone who might get an old NES emulator, but if given the choice between not playing NES games, and going down to the store corner and buying an NES they would choose to not play the NES.
A Harvard study has shown that music piracy had almost zero effect on CD sales.
While all people who download roms and emulators are criminals the amount that are actually costing comapnies money are as the study put it "statistically indistinguishable from zero."
Basically if sales were a giant bowl of rice, the amount of money actually lost to piracy would be 1 grain of rice. It's an issue of morals. Not an issue of costing someone money because in nearly all cases it doesn't.
There have been studys done that have shown the opposite but these studies often compare what a person downloads and what they buy on the individual level, which is pointless since that is using people as a "Control", which would assume that all people would buy the exact same things for the exact same price.
Or worse... just saying that every act of piracy is a lost sale.
