Slashdot Mirror
Emulation and the Video Game Industry
bshanks writes "Use of a Game Over: Emulation and the Video Game Industry is a paper which examines the business and legal consequences of emulators. The paper makes recommendations to video game companies on how to adapt to and profit from them rather than fight them." From the paper: " A decade ago, video game emulators epitomized the cutting edge of programming technology. Ten years hence, they are the subject of a heated debate over copyrights and the video game industry's future. Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed, have become a staple among gaming enthusiasts. Several factors have contributed to the robust market for emulation..."
My all-time favorite RPG series has got to be Grandia. It's MUCH better-written than Final Fantasy (and just about any other RPG I could name except maybe Earthbound), I like the music more, the characters are works of art, and the battle system is actually fun instead of a mere punishment factor against leveling up.
Yet, my Playstation hasn't worked for years, and I went with Gamecube in the current generation, so no PS2 backwards compatibility for me. So I haven't actually been able to play the original Grandia in all that time.
This is why I was so pleased to find out about ePSXe, a Playstation emulator that can play actual PSX disks inserted in a computer's hard drive. As time passes and the motors inside of optical drives break down, ultimately this will be the only way to play these old games.
(Preemptive caveat: I know what the Sony guys have said, that the original PS format will live forever. My response is that no, it won't, there's no way in hell Sony will continue to allow themselves to be beholden to the original PS format forever, as the profit available for supporting then declines further and further they can and will abandon the old PS1 format someday, it's just a question of when.)
Sony, of course, sued Bleem!, the commercial Playstation emulator, to smithereens. Yet ultimately I think this worked against them, because the net (and debatable) sales loss from piracy was probably less than the potential sales gain from letting people play Playstation games on their computer for $50 bucks, the price of the emulator, instead of $150 bucks, the then-price of the PSX.
Interesting to note that now, five years later, I'm playing through Grandia on a free emulator instead.
I'm a personal fan of emulation. I love firing up an emulator and playing some of my favorite games of yesteryear.
The thing I like most about emulators is that you can save an assload of shelf space and wear/tear on your consoles by just putting everything on your computer. It's the same kind of thing with ripping your CD collection to MP3 and storing the original media away in a safe place.
The majority of emulation is done for older systems; ones that the manufacturers see no more income on. Same with the developers of the software. Those games went out of "print" years ago. The only sticking point is that some companies (like Nintendo, for instance) are re-releasing their older game libraries on newer systems as part of a "retro" line. The fact of the matter is that demand for these products wouldn't even exist if emulation never came to be. Emulation helps keep nostalgia alive. I know it helped me shell out money for the GBA port of Adventure of Link.
I think that emulation is just misunderstood. It's the whole scissors-can-kill-as-well-as-cut-paper argument, just with games.
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
I think it's time that copyright laws were changed. There is a wealth of wonderful old ROMs, operating systems and software that cannot be had because it is impossible to get permission to use the code, but the owners almost universally don't care. The law should require registration to renew copyrights of computer software. If it isn't renewed on a certain schedule (10 years perhaps?), it becomes public domain (or at least legally freeware). This permits those with perservering need to renew their copyright, and permits all the rest of the code to become available to the world. It is a shame that people often have to resort to piracy to continue to use some of these old systems and the emulators that derive from them.
The problem with charging any amount of money for things like ROMS, Movies, Games, Music etc. is that for the user who knows how to get these things for free, the price better be free or they won't use the service.
Because people would never pay for anything that they could find for free on the internet.
What's that? iTunes has sold how many songs? Over a hundred million? Why don't those people just download them for free from kazaa?
Seriously, though, there are a significant number of people who would be willing to pay a nominal fee (comparable to iTunes individual download prices) for convenient access to a good, playable copies of older games.
None of this "rar" or "zip" crap for files that can fit 10 to a floppy or whathaveyou. No .nfo files. Just pure ROM files that I can pop in to an emulator and play.
.zip anyway. Unzipping the rom just wastes disk space.
Hey fuzznuts, most emulators play the rom straight from the