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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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.
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