this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Last I checked, no company wants any of their games to be played for free.
And yet there's an incredibly high demand for playing old Nintendo games. When Nintendo occasionally sells emulated old games on newer consoles, they tend to sell pretty well. The NES and the SNES mini were much sought after and best-sellers.
So imagine if Nintendo offers the games in their entire retro library (that they are licensed to offer) with an official emulator for people to buy. That would evaporate the piracy of retro Nintendo games pretty quickly.
However, Nintendo doesn't want that. They like completely manufactured, artificial scarcity. And so there's piracy. A lot of piracy.