this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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honestly though, most game companies are pretty chill about the existence of emulators. Sure there have been lawsuits about Switch rom sites and Switch emulators - which are about currently-selling consoles, just as the post concedes.
This is half true. Japanese culture even considers mods as piracy, so emulation is radical by comparison.
However, American companies (and US branches of international companies) are full of gaming nerds who emulate games all the time. I knew a guy at a major company who even had one of those keychains with a working emulator on it he'd play during breaks. He ended up at Riot, iirc.
Nintendo of Japan doesn't file lawsuits against DS emulators either. Sony is a Japanese company; they sued Bleem and lost but that was more than 20 years ago. There are emulators for PS3, PS Vita, and PS4 - all platforms for which Sony still hosts network infrastructure and operates digital storefronts - and AFAIK none of them have been subject to legal threats.
Oh yeah... I remember Bleem. That was so so so long ago, lol.
Anyway my anecdotal evidence is just from three developers plus what I've heard from others who have worked at various companies. Still, I believe it when a Japanese dev friend is my wife practically went white in the face when I talked so publicly about my love of emulators, lol.
Didn’t Plasticman get sued for distributing old roms?
I'm not familiar with Plasticman, but all the rom site lawsuits that I know about from the past several years involved sites that were either charging money or running ads to make money from pirate downloads. I could be mistaken on that front.
Plasticman.org definitely ran ads. It was one of the biggest sites in the late 1990/early 2000s on the english language parts of the web.