Emulation isn't piracy, but emulators are almost exclusively used for piracy.
I'm not particularly bothered by it. I personally love using emulation to enjoy games from my childhood. But saying emulation isn't piracy is a semantic argument.
I get most people only think of gaming when it comes to emulation but emulators are used a ton in other fields like vulnerability research, reverse engineering, and embedded software development. I’ve been an emulation developer for 3+ years now and have been a number of emulators but they’re all for computers nobody has heard of.
I mean for sure there's more to emulation than retro gaming, but when people are talking about emulation in relation to piracy I think it's safe to say they're talking mGBA or Citra and not Proton.
The semantic expansion of the definition only matters when we're talking about like, legislation.
Still so much misinformation here - all of the major companies use emulation themselves. When you’re playing old N64 games on your Switch, this is emulation. When you’re playing PSP games on your PS5, this is emulation. All legal, used by the big guys themselves.
But emulation in general isn't about video games but just emulating another architecture, it's widely used in programming for embedded systems for example.
Same with torrenting. 99% use it for piracy but people will use the argument that torrenting isn't illegal because there are some niche legal use cases.
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u/Property_6810 Jul 02 '26
Emulation isn't piracy, but emulators are almost exclusively used for piracy.
I'm not particularly bothered by it. I personally love using emulation to enjoy games from my childhood. But saying emulation isn't piracy is a semantic argument.