I gave you the benefit of the doubt that maybe I didn’t grasp what you said, but reading your reply it seems like I grasped it fine.

Here’s the thing. People use emulators for piracy. That is also COMPLETELY and totally irrelevant to the discussion. The right to developing emulators is well-established, and game preservation isn’t even the most important consequence. The right to developing emulators is what allows virtualization that forms the backbone of server architecture, as well as running legacy code from old architectures on modern hardware, alleviating the need for thousands of man hours in rewriting tried and tested code. 20 years in the future, when the IoTs stupidity litters millions of homes with inaccessible, useless plastic garbage, emulation of no longer supported control units will be a panacea.

Nintendo is totally free to not like the law, but it is the law, and this pressure to shut down these projects is a flagrant violation of the developers’ legal rights, which regardless of the morality of piracy is a disgusting flouting of the legal system.

People use guns to murder, yes. But whether you or I think it’s correct or not, the law does not hold gun makers liable for the things their users do with them. We can’t just DECIDE that there are exceptions to the law and begin prosecuting or acting as if they are liable. That requires either a new law or an interpretation by a court to set a precedent - not lawyers sending a cease and desist to Smith & Wesson. That is a slippery slope to an absolutely nightmarish dystopia.

There is no justifying this in a “Well, I can see why they did it…” sense any more than in a murder case. The law is clear. The established rights of the developers are clear. The right to make a Switch emulator is NOT Nintendo’s right to give or deny like a trademark dispute or the ability to make a fan game. They don’t GET a say. The right to make an emulator is explicitly YOURS by LAW. And a giant corporation has taken their money and used it to violate established rights with threat of bankruptcy in violation of that established law. If you believe in the rule of law, no matter what you think of piracy, that should be utterly haunting.

I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development.

Your not being able to blame them is completely irrelevant. Nintendo can not like stuff all it wants. The question is if it is LEGAL. If it is, and it is, your defense of their actions is a defense of the argument that they should be above the law because they don’t like something, and that’s an absolutely TERRIBLE position to take. You don’t need to white knight for Nintendo. They have more money than God and taking up their fights for them against your own rights as a consumer is so far beyond Stockholm Syndrome that I don’t think we even have a word for it yet.

And because these are never finished projects. People can rant and rave about cloning the git all day, but without active, knowledgeable developers with the knowledge of the original dev team, these projects are dead. It’s not about using the emulators as they exist today… it’s about continuing to keep them working going forward. Anything that releases in the last year or two of the Switch’s life is now at risk of being lost forever into Nintendo’s archives.

Two reasons:

First, rather than just overseeing the most profitable game in the world, Sweeney tied his leadership at Epic to picking fights with Apple and Steam to try to muscle his way into a broader industry position. With how broken and barely functional the EGS is, it’s incredibly obvious there is no way he can muster a team to do ANYTHING like Proton, so his solution is to go full throttle into pretending Windows is fine and not a dependency with existential risk.

Second, the bread and butter of EGS is Fortnite, and the developers at Epic are apparently completely unable to engineer any kind of effective anti-cheat which doesn’t involve kernel level access. It is actually easier to save face by pretending the entire Linux ecosystem doesn’t matter than to officially support Linux and then have to explain why Fortnite isn’t available.

The ironic thing is, if he’d put the money the company wasted on exclusives and free giveaways into actual development, they could EASILY have solved all of these problems. It is fascinating, however, to watch Fortnite players dump literal billions of dollars into the company each year, just to watch it get flushed away into absolutely nothing.

Tim Sweeney (crying): “There’s no future in Linux gaming. No! Stop it! Stop enjoying the good thing that isn’t from me!!!”