But I'm not talking about people that are pirating brand new games, or even games that are older but still for sale.

I am talking about people that are downloading forgotten titles that might have been released on the SNES 30 years ago and never since.

I download old games, and I (and many) have very strict rules that are mostly the same:

• Nothing that's not at least 2 generations old (so with Switch and PS5, that would put everything from PS2/GCN backwards)

• Nothing that is still for sale on current platforms. If the game has a rerelease on modern platforms/PC I will buy that.

Again, if the companies themselves don't care about this supposed "theft," why do you? There are huge players in the preservation scene, the sites are very public, and they have worked with employees from these companies that hate emulation, like Nintendo/Sega?

Oh right, they don't care because downloading a SNES game doesn't hurt them in the slightest. And you care because you're a corporate shill.

Do you consider it theft to play a game they stopped selling 30 years ago?

Clearly the game companies themselves don't, or they would do something about it. Emulation sites pretty much instantly get shut down when they start hosting modern games, but some of them have been running for decades and are not secret in the slightest.

You'll also notice even sites that are for the purposes of "preserving the classics," as it were, don't host anything that's not at least 2 console generations old.

Preservationists also don't need to worry about emulating Xbox really at all, because Microsoft themselves are doing a great job of cross releasing everything onto PC, where they're playable forever, or just making sure every new gen is fully backwards compatible.

If companies like Nintendo preserved their own fucking games like Microsoft does, we wouldn't have to.

Ah yes, storing ROMs of long dead games in a vault for the purpose of history is piracy, of course.

Fucking museums pirating all the art SMH.