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CladInShadows on 04 May 2017
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SvennoJ said:
CladInShadows said:

However big you think the number is, it's likely MUCH MUCH lower.  But whatever.  You people seem to have it in your head that all people emulating are a bunch of dirty pirates and nothing is going to change that.  It's getting tiresome.

There are actually some numbers out there

In the latest stable release of Dolphin, the development team added an opt-in statistics gathering dialogue that users encounter when they first run the emulator, asking to collect anonymous data. Obviously some users will decline, but Bourdon told me their numbers indicate around 50,000 daily users. For comparison, Nintendo sold around 20 million GameCubes and 100 million Wiis. If half of Dolphin's users opted in, that's still less than one percent of the console audience. http://www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/

50k or 100k daily users is still a significant amount for an average selling game. At what number does it become a problem?

There are easy things for cemu to do to show they care about piracy. For example, since they already have drm and register their users through patreon, they could release a tool to copy the original disc that digitally signs that copy with the patreon user ID and make it so the emulator only accepts signed isos. Works for their drm and adds a hurdle that encourages people to have the actual disc and do it the right way. (Ofcourse it will be hacked, yet you risk some nasty virus using hacks) People are far less likely to illegally share their game if their name is on it.

Directly running from disc is even better, but that seems to have performance issues in emulators. Digitally signing while installing the disc would be a great way to discourage piracy and distance emulators from being associated with piracy.

I think that number is much higher than the number of people who aren't just curious about it and can actually run it.  Also, that's for an emulator for the Wii.  Which is based on the Gamecube, which is 16 years old. 

I'd be all about emulator developers being able to institute some kind of way to discourage piracy.  I just think that they'd need the cooperation from companies who are unlikely to be willing to work with them.  If they could do it on their own (and that goes for ANY emulator developer), I think it would be a great thing.  It would certainly be able to curb the "HURR DURR Emulation = piracy" folks.