Is playing Zelda Breath of the Wild on PC legal?

[vivster]

Teeqoz said:

If we're talking strictly legal, then it depends on the country obviously, but mostly, the laws pertain to HOW you aqcuire the copy. The legal issue with emulation is commonly not the actual act of emulating, but rather that many people download the game illegally to do so. It is in fact illegal to download a copy of something, even if you own a copy of it yourself (at least most places). So even if you owned a CD with your favourite music, you can't legally download those tracks from The Pirate Bay or whatever, because the act of downloading it is illegal in itself. Same goes for emulated games. However if you are able to rip the file from the disc and onto your HDD/SSD by yourself, instead of downloading it, you are free to do whatever you want.

Of course, that's just about what is legal. When it comes to ethics, I don't *really* see a problem with pirating something you already own, but if you want to be completely legal about it, you have to rip the game from the disc/cartridge itself.

I don't believe that's actually true. The act of downloading copyrighted material is in a grey area at best. You can't be sentenced for downloading some bits. The actual illegal thing is sharing copyrighted material. When you see companies going after illegal downloads it is because they used torrent for it. And with torrent every download is basically also an upload. Much like it is not illegal watching a movie on a streaming site but hosting that site is.

So to answer OP's question: Playing BOTW on PC is absolutely not illegal. It's all about the acquisition.

zero129 said:
Well since you dont own the WiiU version its illegal.
However my stance on stuff like this is once i buy one version and the developer isnt out money "Porting" that game to PC if i needed to use a different version for an emu i would.
After all the developer is not losing any money in this instance you already paid for the game, the dev is not out any money porting the game to the platform you intent to play it on (PC) its only the people who work on the emu who is out their time and possibly money.

Even if you don't own the console or the game, chances are you do not lose the developer any money because you wouldn't have paid for it anyway. That's the fallacy the many opponents of piracy fall into.