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Forums - Gaming - Is emulating acceptable?

 

Title

Yes 126 47.19%
 
If the game is owned 62 23.22%
 
If both the game and console is owned 40 14.98%
 
No 39 14.61%
 
Total:267
aLkaLiNE on 23 April 2017

In theory emulation is legal provided the person emulating already paid for a copy of said software.

In practice, that's mostly not the case. I'd (conservatively) wager that more than 50% of the people emulating on PC are doing so illegally through pirating without ever having paid for their own copy.

I personally see a huge problem with piracy and am of the mind that only a minority actually emulate legally (ie ripping game data from the cartridge or disc itself as a backup and then playing said back up on an emulator. All perfectly legal). But How many people seriously own the equipment to interface an SNES cartridge to a PC?

If the world functionally worked on the honor system and everyone could be trusted then there wouldn't be any concern over emulation. As it stands, an unquantified portion of people are straight up stealing money from developers/people that make their living off coding. In any medium, that is extremely gross to me. If I made a product of labor, passion and love, I'd want full control over how that's distributed. Only seems fair. Emulation allows people to bypass that step thanks to widely available files on the Internet.

I get why emulation is important. Game preservation being the biggest factor. That reason alone makes this topic tricky to handle. On one hand it is absolutely good to keep the history of gaming in tact where an IP holder might no longer be interested. On the other hand, a lot of electronic robbery takes place and the concept of emulation is widely abused. Emulation would be okay In a perfect world where it was used as intended - game preservation. That's not really the case though. I guess for me and you and everyone around us, we have to ask ourselves to use software like that responsibly.

Fwiw I have pirated as a teen without a job. That was years ago though, now I just pay for things I want.

edit: to straight up answer your question Palou, it would be legal for you to copy your Mario game and play it on an emulator. Morally, well, a forum board can't decide your morals for you. I don't think it'd be morally wrong since you've legally obtained your copy. Mileage may vary.



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Chazore on 23 April 2017

I'd ask the anti-pirate solicitors, but if you ask me I'd go with Yuri's take on it.



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Cloudman on 23 April 2017

Well, I feel it's at least better if you've at least bought the software yourself before.



 

              

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palou on 23 April 2017
aLkaLiNE said:

In theory emulation is legal provided the person emulating already paid for a copy of said software.

In practice, that's mostly not the case. I'd (conservatively) wager that more than 50% of the people emulating on PC are doing so illegally through pirating without ever having paid for their own copy.

I personally see a huge problem with piracy and am of the mind that only a minority actually emulate legally (ie ripping game data from the cartridge or disc itself as a backup and then playing said back up on an emulator. All perfectly legal). But How many people seriously own the equipment to interface an SNES cartridge to a PC?

If the world functionally worked on the honor system and everyone could be trusted then there wouldn't be any concern over emulation. As it stands, an unquantified portion of people are straight up stealing money from developers/people that make their living off coding. In any medium, that is extremely gross to me. If I made a product of labor, passion and love, I'd want full control over how that's distributed. Only seems fair. Emulation allows people to bypass that step thanks to widely available files on the Internet.

I get why emulation is important. Game preservation being the biggest factor. That reason alone makes this topic tricky to handle. On one hand it is absolutely good to keep the history of gaming in tact where an IP holder might no longer be interested. On the other hand, a lot of electronic robbery takes place and the concept of emulation is widely abused. Emulation would be okay In a perfect world where it was used as intended - game preservation. That's not really the case though. I guess for me and you and everyone around us, we have to ask ourselves to use software like that responsibly.

Fwiw I have pirated as a teen without a job. That was years ago though, now I just pay for things I want.

edit: to straight up answer your question Palou, it would be legal for you to copy your Mario game and play it on an emulator. Morally, well, a forum board can't decide your morals for you. I don't think it'd be morally wrong since you've legally obtained your copy. Mileage may vary.

Thanks for the answer :)



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archer9234 on 23 April 2017
Cloudman said:
Well, I feel it's at least better if you've at least bought the software yourself before.

Becareful with that wording. That opens up people trying to download a game for another platform. Than the one they purchased it on.



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SvennoJ on 23 April 2017
VGPolyglot said:
Legally, the emulators are legal, but downloading the ROMs aren't. You have to use the actual copy of the game or rip it yourself and not distribute online. Morally, though? I don't see anything wrong with it, especially for retro games, as they make as much money from sales of a used copy as they do from downloading an illegal copy.

That's only true in the first order. Part of the money paid for a used copy went back to the original buyer which most likely resulted in facilitating another game purchase, money returned into the game industry. Only internet providers and maybe advertisers make money from downloading.



VGPolyglot on 23 April 2017
SvennoJ said:
VGPolyglot said:
Legally, the emulators are legal, but downloading the ROMs aren't. You have to use the actual copy of the game or rip it yourself and not distribute online. Morally, though? I don't see anything wrong with it, especially for retro games, as they make as much money from sales of a used copy as they do from downloading an illegal copy.

That's only true in the first order. Part of the money paid for a used copy went back to the original buyer which most likely resulted in facilitating another game purchase, money returned into the game industry. Only internet providers and maybe advertisers make money from downloading.

A lot of games are out of print, though in the first place, so there is no way to pay for it in a way that the publisher gets the money.



S.T.A.G.E. on 23 April 2017
aLkaLiNE said:

In theory emulation is legal provided the person emulating already paid for a copy of said software.

In practice, that's mostly not the case. I'd (conservatively) wager that more than 50% of the people emulating on PC are doing so illegally through pirating without ever having paid for their own copy.

I personally see a huge problem with piracy and am of the mind that only a minority actually emulate legally (ie ripping game data from the cartridge or disc itself as a backup and then playing said back up on an emulator. All perfectly legal). But How many people seriously own the equipment to interface an SNES cartridge to a PC?

If the world functionally worked on the honor system and everyone could be trusted then there wouldn't be any concern over emulation. As it stands, an unquantified portion of people are straight up stealing money from developers/people that make their living off coding. In any medium, that is extremely gross to me. If I made a product of labor, passion and love, I'd want full control over how that's distributed. Only seems fair. Emulation allows people to bypass that step thanks to widely available files on the Internet.

I get why emulation is important. Game preservation being the biggest factor. That reason alone makes this topic tricky to handle. On one hand it is absolutely good to keep the history of gaming in tact where an IP holder might no longer be interested. On the other hand, a lot of electronic robbery takes place and the concept of emulation is widely abused. Emulation would be okay In a perfect world where it was used as intended - game preservation. That's not really the case though. I guess for me and you and everyone around us, we have to ask ourselves to use software like that responsibly.

Fwiw I have pirated as a teen without a job. That was years ago though, now I just pay for things I want.

edit: to straight up answer your question Palou, it would be legal for you to copy your Mario game and play it on an emulator. Morally, well, a forum board can't decide your morals for you. I don't think it'd be morally wrong since you've legally obtained your copy. Mileage may vary.

This is the best answer we will get in here.



SvennoJ on 23 April 2017
aLkaLiNE said:

In theory emulation is legal provided the person emulating already paid for a copy of said software.

In practice, that's mostly not the case. I'd (conservatively) wager that more than 50% of the people emulating on PC are doing so illegally through pirating without ever having paid for their own copy.

I personally see a huge problem with piracy and am of the mind that only a minority actually emulate legally (ie ripping game data from the cartridge or disc itself as a backup and then playing said back up on an emulator. All perfectly legal). But How many people seriously own the equipment to interface an SNES cartridge to a PC?

If the world functionally worked on the honor system and everyone could be trusted then there wouldn't be any concern over emulation. As it stands, an unquantified portion of people are straight up stealing money from developers/people that make their living off coding. In any medium, that is extremely gross to me. If I made a product of labor, passion and love, I'd want full control over how that's distributed. Only seems fair. Emulation allows people to bypass that step thanks to widely available files on the Internet.

I get why emulation is important. Game preservation being the biggest factor. That reason alone makes this topic tricky to handle. On one hand it is absolutely good to keep the history of gaming in tact where an IP holder might no longer be interested. On the other hand, a lot of electronic robbery takes place and the concept of emulation is widely abused. Emulation would be okay In a perfect world where it was used as intended - game preservation. That's not really the case though. I guess for me and you and everyone around us, we have to ask ourselves to use software like that responsibly.

Fwiw I have pirated as a teen without a job. That was years ago though, now I just pay for things I want.

edit: to straight up answer your question Palou, it would be legal for you to copy your Mario game and play it on an emulator. Morally, well, a forum board can't decide your morals for you. I don't think it'd be morally wrong since you've legally obtained your copy. Mileage may vary.

Not quite

So you can't play Kirby's Adventure anymore, even though you paid for it in 1993?

Not legally, no. What you bought twenty-something years ago was a game cartridge, not a right to always have access to the game that was stored on it. And as horrid and draconian as that sounds, there is - sort of - an argument for why that should be the case.

"From an IP perspective, you are seeking to consume content which you can't have any other way, and that's understandable from a consumer perspective, but that's not a privilege consumers own," Purewal says.

"Consumers don't have the right to enjoy content for free just because the content isn't available in any other way. Now, from a practical perspective, the fact that there's no-one there to enforce those rights may be an indication that no-one will come after you in reality. But that's just down to how things work in practice; it's not a legal defence.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264


I've pirated tons of games too as a teenager. I could actually afford to buy (some) games yet I spend all my money on blank media, a gaming PC and partying in the weekend. Why pay for games if you rather spend that money of something else right?..  It was wrong, yet it seemed to be the norm back then. Frequent copy parties, swapping games at school, try out a dozen games an afternoon, buy more 3.5" disks for the next batch.

When I got a job in the software industry I quickly changed my habits, never pirated again. Then I got to deal with the software I made getting pirated and dealing with the hassles of drm during development.

Ofcourse emulating is not automatically piracy. Yet emulators are often used to facilitate piracy. I applaud the efforts of pscx2 to require actual game disks. Too bad that's not practical with cartridge or any pre CD era based games. Yet it seems Sony and Nintendo are doing their own work to preserve older games with ps now, virtual console, mini nes / snes, compilations. There really is no need to emulate Mario games for preservation, they're safe, really.



SvennoJ on 23 April 2017
VGPolyglot said:
SvennoJ said:

That's only true in the first order. Part of the money paid for a used copy went back to the original buyer which most likely resulted in facilitating another game purchase, money returned into the game industry. Only internet providers and maybe advertisers make money from downloading.

A lot of games are out of print, though in the first place, so there is no way to pay for it in a way that the publisher gets the money.

Depends if the publisher is still in the business. The business as a whole still gains something from used copies, yet gains nothing from piracy. If the games are so old that they're out of print and the publisher is out of the business, they likely won't cost more than a dollar either. How cheap can you be :)

But yeah, I know, it's easier to google a download instead of waiting for it to come to GoG, mini Nes/SNes, VC, PS Now, Remasters, Rare replay or other collections. It's funny how the games that are always featured on emulators are never the ones in danger to disappear in obscurity.