| Miguel_Zorro said: Rather than derail individual threads by getting into debates about the ethics of emulation, I've decided to create a separate place to debate this. A few thoughts... these are just examples, you don't need to answer them all in a list. :) 1. What are your views on emulation? 2. What benefits does emulation provide? 3. Does it impact game sales? 4. How do game creators feel about this? 5. What are the legalities and ethics around emulation? 6. What percentage of those that use emulators are engaged in privacy? 7. Are there sources of data to support this? Let's discuss this! Keep it civil, please. |
1. It's good.
2. You can play games on other platforms as well. It's especially beneficial if you can't get the original platform easily anymore.
3. By itself, no. But the associated piracy probably does. For the most part, I would expect the impact on sales to be quite small though. There aren't many emulators for modern systems, which means that for the most part, only games for older platforms suffer from the associated piracy. But those games are often hard to get anyway, and they probably don't provide a lot of revenue for the rightsholders in the first place, so there's not much damage being done. Even if newer platforms have good emulators, they require relatively powerful hardware, which seriously limits the effect they can have on game sales. My guess is that we're generally talking of piracy rates of 10-20% at most, if emulating modern hardware ever becomes a huge thing. Currently, we're probably talking about much, much less.
4. It probably varies but to be honest, I don't really care. They're not entitled to their games being limited to certain platforms. If someone figures out how to create another platform to run a game, there's not much you can do about it, and in my opinion, there shouldn't be anything you can do about it. If you don't want people to emulate your hardware, make it harder to emulate (which, obviously, shoud have drawbacks as well).
5. I think my answer to 4. answers this pretty nicely. I'd like to add again that emulation and piracy are to different, albeit often associated, things. Piracy is often bad (although not as bad as people claim it is), and there's nothing wrong with emulation itself.
6. Probably a pretty big percentage. That said, the numbers could be improved by officially and properly supporting the platforms where emulators run (typically PC and mobile devices). A lot of the damage done by piracy back in the 2000s was mitigated by making getting games better in a lot of ways. Similar actions should help with emulation-related piracy.
7. Nope! I've been trying to make sense, so I'd expect most of the things I've said to be correct. I've also tried to indicate uncertainty where there is any. Feel free to counter my claims with actual data if you have any.
I was going to post a short answer because my stance is pretty simple, but your questions practically begged for more text!
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