Sharing cracked PC games has been a thing since the dawn of the industry, yet it has continued to grow and thrive.
Console…maybe? But good Switch emulators have been around for years, yet Switch hardware and exclusive games that ran better-than-native under emulation continued to sell in record numbers, and Sony has always delayed the release of PC ports of PlayStation exclusive titles to ensure healthy console sales.
The internet sparked interest in independent music, artists had been fed up for a long time regarding earnings, and the music being made by the big labels was already pretty lackluster by this point in time.
If they actually embraced the digital era of mp3s rather than throwing lawsuits at the problem they would of been on top.
Music should be free, however these dinosaurs are stuck in tar and will continue to sue, hoard and milk their old ways restricting innovation and progress.
No sympathy for any of the wet teabags in the music industry.
Aka lost sales.
Emulators + ROM is one way to do that. Recompiling from the ROM is another. I think that for most people, your stance on if emulating is stealing or piracy, will well-predict how you feel about recompilation tools.
I swear gamers have the most insane Stockholm syndrome. It's super common to see them say that it's a problem that there aren't enough "exclusives" for a console. Like, dude, the problem is that the console sucks next to its competition. You shouldn't want product tying to try to make you buy it. They're literally all just branded commodity computers that are locked down to tie purchases (an illegal, anti-competitive practice) at this point. This was already litigated multiple times 20-30 years ago and the big companies consistently lost every case. Sega even lost a case where a company displayed the message "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" for a game that Sega had not approved because it was required for the console to boot, and they couldn't try to use trademarks to stop someone from developing for their console.
Especially when, for games of this age, we're talking about going through the secondary market, and paying potentially hundreds of dollars for a physical copy, without the creators seeing a dime of that transaction to begin with.
Anything that shows its no longer worth it will accelerate that industry using newer tools to make games faster with multimodal language models powering audio, voice, asset generation, rendering as well as agentic workflows for the manual work humans would still be involved in
right now, AAA studios won’t do it and their audiences wont want them to do it, but any dedicated indie developer that would have never hired the teams of people needed for those aspects can do it. a nearby parallel reality where AAA do it based on no ability to protect high valued IP now looks closer with the decompilation route