The average person doesn't want to set up emulators. You've been able to play Pokemon Fire Red on your phone for like 15+ years. Didn't stop the same game from being one of the best selling games on Switch for the past year, even at $20.
If Sony released Bloodborne officially on Steam even next year, that shit is still going to go triple platinum and print money. People are always going to prefer the convenience of an official version they can buy on Steam, and play without having to do any additional setup like pirating the game and configuring these fan-made ports.
I noticed that a lot of the less tech-savvy people are also just content not interacting with the media at all if it's not easily avaliable to them.
Makes sense considering we have so much media on every platform now. Unless you're jobless or something, it's simply far more likely that you don't have time for vast majority of series. And you'll only engage with whatever is most accessible.
A lot of my friends didn't use Steam until Dota2 beta and nowadays have dozens, some even hundreds of games in their accounts that they will never open
Ive played firered on emulators multiple times and when i saw it on the nintendo store yesterday i did consider getting it just to play it on an actual nintendo hardware (the switch was my first genuine Nintendo console).
I appreciate emulators and their usefulness but i would much prefer to play native if possible.
That is also true, but it’s still important for the companies that there isn’t another way to play the game, whether through piracy or emulation.
That is why they spend so much money and resources chasing emulators (in Nintendo’s case) or paying for DRM to prevent piracy.
I do think that if the product is good and fairly priced, people prefer to buy it, and I don’t think piracy has that much impact sales between people who can actually afford to buy a game. But if the company never releases the game, and I have the choice to play it this way (through an emulator or an unofficial port), I will do it. And I probably wouldn’t buy an expensive game that I’ve already played.
I didn't say emulation shouldn't exist, or that emulation was a bad thing. I love emulation and I agree, for preservation's sake it's important that there's other ways to access these games.
My point was that this subreddit for the past month has been acting like this emulator is going to kill Sony, or that the PS5 is dead now, or even that GTA VI is going to bomb because everyone will emulate it instead. Emulation has never been a serious threat to these companies, in fact they've leveraged it multiple times. Casual gamers will never want to deal with the hassle of installing/setting up emulators and sorting through sketchy piracy sites to find the game, they're going to go play it legitimately on their PS5.
This is just a neat project that'll allow some cool things on PC, but it's never going to end consoles.
Is not going to kill Sony, but is going to hurt them in some way. Saying that nothing is going to happen is the same as saying is going to bankrupt.
Breaching their game, systems at this point IS a SERIOUS thread, not because this unique game, it is because is going to be worse in a lot of ways for them, same as leaks, system vulnerability, etc.
I agree with you about the exaggeration about the impact on Sony with emulators or even piracy, I already told you that for me, piracy isn't that impactful. BUT you are not understanding what is happening with this AI thing and how BAD for a company is to be so vulnerable by a random group of people, the releases of unofficial things, the mod of consoles, etc. This is beyond a "just a neat project". But you are right that is not going to "end consoles", nobody says that, at least not me.
It's not that big of a deal to them because they've already patched the exploits.
The recent explosion in activity for emulation was only made possible because firmware version 13.60 had a major exploit that people found. Previous exploits were extremely difficult, needed specific firmware versions, and sometimes needed hardware. The 13.60 exploit was possible on ANY PS5 on 13.60 and below, and all you needed was to open a web browser on the console. AI helped crack the exploit open wider then previously seen, but at the end of the day it was just an exploit.
However, Sony patched the exploit a month ago. New games like GTA VI specifically are going to require that newer firmware. Nobody's managed to exploit that firmware, and I doubt that's gonna change for a long while, considering how rare PS5 exploits have been so far.
They had a major exploit, got taken advantage of, and fixed it. We'll see in the long term if that actually has an impact on them but right now Sony hasn't shown any signs of panic or distress, they're carrying on like business as usual.
Is not the point. Is not about an exploit, is not about a patch, is about the tools available nowadays, we are living a change of paradigm, some people see it right now, happening, some people are going to see it in some time when it finally happens.
And companies DO CARE about piracy, about emulators, about ports and about tools that do reverse engineering WAY FASTER than before. This is a BIG problem for companies right now. Is not a "a neat project that'll allow some cool things on PC".
And no, is not going to kill consoles, I didn't say that, you did.
Even if you're right, they're still losing a good amount of money by not doing so either earlier or at all (but especially if it's the later). And that adds up to the bad publicity they're getting as a whole and the bad name they'll carry onwards. Not that it's going to bankrupt them, but surely not good either.
Why not, get her on skyrim or something. There's a precedent.
The point is that the average person isn't as technically slick as we are, and every step in the installation probably reduces the people willing to follow it by like half
True but it won't be hard to make an accessible installer and frontend. The difficult part I guess for some people will be finding where to download the games.
I "download" a lot and I'd happily buy BB on PC if it was available just to give FromSoft more support. It isn't so I'll use bbhost or equivalent, but even for us on the high seas we sometimes buy games even if we've downloaded them already. I also download things first as a demo and buy em after lol
Always worth supporting studios that are doing good work. You also get a host of useful benefits like easy updates, multiplayer access and cloud saves.
With Pokemon games there is a legit reason to do both though. Emulation allows tons of mods. Getting it legit is one of the few ways to get Deoxys in your collection right now. IIRC it's the only way to get a legit Deoxys without importing one from the 3DS.
Yup, I tried the new build which is executable without an emulator, 5 minutes in the whole world glitched and my fps tanked.
I uninstalled it shortly after, I could've probably got it to run after tweaking the settings for 45 minutes, but I determined it wasn't worth the effort, which is the case for most people who just want to plug and play.
Firstly, Bloodborne is by all metrics a very very good game, even if some people think it's overhyped. Regardless, nowhere in their comment did they discuss how good the game was. The fact of the matter is it's been 11 years and people are still asking for a PC release just as fervently as when it first dropped. This game would sell.
No man, it's not "brainrot Nintendo worshippers", they're casual gamers who just want to play their games without going through hoops. They don't want to spend 10-20 minutes reading instructions, finding copies of games through sketchy websites, and doing the setup process. They want to buy a game, and play it with ease.
Emulators have posed very little threat to the existence of consoles for decades now. Bleem was a commercially released PlayStation 1 emulator that allowed you to play PS1 games on PC, and even a select few on the Dreamcast. Guess what, it didn't hurt Sony and they're still around.
People on this sub vastly overestimate just how many people actually play these emulators. At best most people download it as a novelty and don't seriously play through multiple games this way. The average person just wants to play their games with convenience, it's the entire reasons consoles have been so successful despite PCs getting easier and easier to get into.
That has been the case for decades. Many countries haven't been able to get certain consoles at all. A company in Brazil still sells officially licensed SEGA Master Systems in 2026 because other consoles are so expensive to get imported.
Regardless, that hasn't changed anything. PlayStation 5 still sold 100,000,000 units, and Switch consoles continue to dominate. Enough people still want consoles, and convenience, and they're not going anywhere just because an emulator shows up.
Tears of the Kingdom was emulatable days before the official launch because a copy was leaked. Game still sold over 20 million copies anyway.
I think most of this subreddit is in for a very rude awakening when GTA VI launches and still does insane numbers on PS5 because people still just want to play that game without any hassles.
Emulation also isn't going to get you playing online with your friends -- you know, the thing that really got GTAV copies moving. Not to mention future updates and content.
And you're focusing too much on the specific examples and missing the big picture.
Many gamers, of different tech knowledge levels, don't want to deal with the hassle, no matter how small, of going to github (many don't know what it is) to download a decompiled game.
The whole reason steam basically ended piracy is due to ease of use and ease of mind
You severely underestimate the convenience involved. I've been emulating stuff for decades alongside a legit Switch library of thousands, and Nintendo titles, for all my appreciation thereof, make up a modicum of both domains. I've also been enjoying Bloodborne the most among FromSoftware's stamina management sims so far (although my priorities in the subgenre still lie with inspired followers from Code Vein and Lies of P to Nioh and Ender Lilies), and I'd invest in a Deck-compatible port for sure. Assuming no region locks, of course.
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The average person doesn't want to set up emulators. You've been able to play Pokemon Fire Red on your phone for like 15+ years. Didn't stop the same game from being one of the best selling games on Switch for the past year, even at $20.
If Sony released Bloodborne officially on Steam even next year, that shit is still going to go triple platinum and print money. People are always going to prefer the convenience of an official version they can buy on Steam, and play without having to do any additional setup like pirating the game and configuring these fan-made ports.