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..."

Comments

Emulation != Evil

[sc0ttyb]

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.