I recently saw an article about how people are racing to perfect Tears of the Kingdom emulator.
I know Breath of the Wild has been emulated for awhile and there’s entire consoles worth of games being emulated. How and why do companies allow this?
Is it because they don’t expect to make any more money on a Dreamcast or GameCube game from 20 years ago so they just allow it?
What about when they remaster the game?
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They absolutely do.
It’s very comparable to film piracy.
Now, just to be clear, if it’s something you can buy off a shelf, odds are that the games were properly licensed thereby making it completely legit.
But all the rest… how do you fight it? If you’re too draconian about it it becomes a PR nightmare and fans will turn on the company. (Nintendo, btw, is famously rigorous in their defense of IP.)
Too lenient, and it turns into bad business that hurts your bottom line.
It’s all about picking and choosing which battles you actually want to fight on the basis of it being worth it while not casting you in a poor light.
They absolutely do break copyright laws. Well, the emulators themselves don’t – it’s the ROMs (the game files) that do. And even then, it depends on how the law is written and whether the people downloading the ROM own a copy of the game.
There are plenty of instances of companies going after emulators and ROM distributors, but it’s a bit of a murky situation.
You see, if I own the game, and I own an emulator, and I find a ROM of the game so that I can play it on my modern computer…
Have I broken my license agreement? Maybe.
Have I violated the spirit of copyright law? No.
Is the company likely to win a lawsuit against me? Probably not, depends on how the law is written.
Am I likely to have enough assets for the company to justify its legal costs? Probably not.
Really, it all comes down to that last one. There really aren’t a ton of people who will go through the trouble of finding emulators and ROMs of older games. Most of them who do, already own a copy of the game. So the company has already gotten money from them, and the people who are doing that are some of the most ardent fans of the games. So why would the company spend money to go after the limited resources of its biggest fans?
It’s ultimately a business decision. They judge that the cost of enforcement outweighs the benefits of recovery.
The emulator is legal. That’s a bit of software that someone has written and isn’t owned by, lets say, Nintendo. Where it becomes illegal is when you download the games to run on the emulator. That’s why most emulators will not have any games and stipulate you must get the game discs yourself.
Copyright restricts the use of creative expressions, not ideas or functionality (like patents do). The emulator implements the *function* of the consoles, but without copying or making a derivative of any code from the console operating system. It’s not copyright infringement to write a different program that does the same thing as another program that already exists.
When people make ROMs of console games and distribute those unlicensed copies, that’s usually copyright infringement. But almost all copyright enforcement is civil, so it only matters if the copyright holder wants to sue you for it. Most companies that own video game copyright don’t because there is limited benefit to it: it costs legal fees, it often doesn’t compete with their existing products, the defendants would have limited ability to pay any damages awarded, it might make the company look bad, and it wouldn’t be effective at actually stopping the mass distribution of ROMs.
A lot of the older ones fall into a weird legal gray space known as abandonware. You can’t get the game anymore or the system to play it.
And although they would probably win a copyright suit, it would cost more money than its worth.
As far as newer games go, they may file lawsuits but often those are going to be cease and desist because it’s hard to figure out who to blame.
Cant exactly take xXxDemonSlayer69420xXx to court.
They do. But most emulators I’ve seen are free so the owners of said games most likely don’t even care to shut it down since they aren’t even doing it for profit
>How and why do companies allow this?
They don’t, if they can help it. Companies like Nintendo go after them to the extent possible under the law. They do not like them.
>How do video game emulators not break copyright laws?
Copyright laws are generally about copying, and intellectual properties. So making your own emulator is ok. It’s like making your own CD player- there’s nothing inherently wrong with making something that can interact with a piece of media. Just because Sony made a CD player doesn’t mean you can’t make one. You just can’t copy Sony’s code/design.
It would be illegal to just copy Nintendo’s media playing software/hardware, but Nintendo would have to prove that you copied them, and didn’t just make your own.
Typically copyright protection comes into play with the game/ROM itself. You can’t legally just copy/rip the game. You (arguably. Nintendo doesn’t think it’s legal. And if it has DRM it may not be) make copies of a game you already own.
This is why these days, you’ll notice that many emulators don’t ship with the actual game files, and say you need to provide your own.
Enforcement is also tricky. Legal battles are expensive, so there is a limit to how much time a company will spend. They might go after big sites hosting game files, but it’s generally not worth their time chasing down every single person who downloaded a ROM. Often as long as they can make it “hard enough” that it doesn’t drastically impact sales, that can be good enough.
>How and why do companies allow this?
They don’t allow it. they prosecute whenever they find the people.
Most of the websites where the downloads are from are in different countries that are hard to shut down.
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