Nintendo has been on the warpath with the emulation community. This year, they shut down two major Switch Emulators and issued DMCAs to any YouTuber or Streamer who showcases their IPs in the wrong manner. It doesn’t stop there, now Nintendo is claiming that even linking to an Emulator is illegal.
Now emulation is a contentious topic, it’s a grey area. Emulation as a practice is not illegal in so far as legal precedents seem to extend. However, downloading and playing digital copies of games you don’t own is considered Piracy. The easiest way to play those games is usually with an emulator of some sort. Hence Nintendo’s efforts to stamp out emulation.
There are several very real use cases for emulation. If you are trying to pre-empt the degradation of your game’s hardware by emulating the games you already own. You may have a collection of rare games. A console that is no longer working. Perhaps parts aren’t available. Maybe it can’t be connected to modern TVs etc. In those cases emulating the games you own is a very real and easy solution to the problem. A game collector who wants to play the games they legally own, on the go, would use emulation. All of these are legal and moral justifications for emulation. At least in this author’s opinion.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has come out and stated that linking to a Nintendo Switch emulator is a “trafficking offence”. It seems like an absurd claim, but if it is allowed to gather steam it could have far-reaching implications. It’s ironic as Nintendo utilises emulation for several games on the Switch. Many of the Gameboy Advance ports use an emulator to run as well as the Nintendo Online games. The Sega Genesis games also run through an emulator. So there are ethical and legal use cases for emulation. But in Nintendo’s mind, it seems that privilege doesn’t extend to the consumer.
This all falls into part of a bigger picture. Digital ownership and the right to repair are strands of a larger rug. If companies are allowed to dictate how we use our devices, games and software, then there is the potential for them to become autocrats that dictate our usage and even the lifespan of devices.
If you’d like to read more on this topic check out this piece from Tech4Gamers. Nintendo sent 8535 DMCAs to emulators. Find out more here. If you’d like to follow the conversation NeoGAF has an open thread here.
