The latest casualty in Nintendo’s War On Piracy is an emulator for the current Switch console, but this had the side effect of also taking a 3DS emulator with it due to coming from the same development group. In a press release reading like it was written at gunpoint or just by a random lawyer, the consideration that people would download ROMs from wherever and run them was supposedly a shock and they’d somehow fight to protect the IPs of whatever companies make games. It’s all a bunch of non-committal templated garbage really and they’ll likely hide in a random country with whatever cash they could scrape from what’s left from closing their Patreon accounts after Nintendo took pretty much everything I’d guess. Apparently they also focused on support for getting a leaked copy of the latest Zelda game running well, which that in itself seems a bit concerning in regards to the aim of an emulator project which should be for keeping games accessible. This also brings to mind the Switch hacking project that was charging money to enable custom firmware or whatever that was.
Of course there is another Switch emulator currently up at the time of writing, which also has a Patreon featured, and the question now is if that one’s going to be taken down voluntarily or at gunpoint or lawyerpoint or whatever. The strange thing is that the Switch is a current console, and is still planned to be for at least another year according to the people who keep speculating about a successor console, so coming up with an emulator that soon is a bit weird, but in the name of games preservation any head start would be useful, given how long it took to get certain emulators working at all. The Xbox family comes to mind since I feel like any non-Microsoft development in that field stagnated for a while before picking back up at some point. If all the Switch emulators get taken down, will there be someone taking the risk to get one working, perhaps a decade later, around whenever Nintendo shuts off the servers for it?
Then there’s also the question of how to get another 3DS emulator working well given that the one taken down had a fairly high compatibility rating compared to others I’ve seen listed, and also not have it get taken down as well. The first step would to not tie it to any risky projects like emulating current consoles. The next would be to avoid making a fuckload of money from it. Then there’s the minefield of DMCA concerns where any encryption could cause issues if certain companies are made aware and see money in cutting it off.
This also leads to the question of if there will be a panic for high profile emulators or homebrew hacking projects for defunct consoles to go into hiding, or if they choose not to, if receiving a lawsuit would cause them to do so. And that would actively harm games preservation efforts, given the cost of out-of-print hardware and games putting this out of reach for a lot of people otherwise. And where do clone consoles end up in this?
Given emulation does have protection by legal precedent, if a case does go into court proper instead of taking “the poor coward’s way out” due to exorbitant legal fees being the norm, would that hold up? Given the history of certain rulings being overturned years later, it’s not the most solid defense, and enough money and lawyers could completely change the rights of people overall. With enough of that, it could escalate into actual warfare, depending on the rights being violated and how those can add up. With certain threats at hand, access to emulation could be the least of concerns if things run a particular way.