dumb article. emulation is not piracy.
It is astonishingly naive to decouple emulation from piracy.
Era can try to pretend otherwise all they want, but emulation is not and will never be piracy. Ripping your own purchased content for your own enjoyment in a better state is not piracy.
The emulation scene of the 3DS and Switch were mature from week one and both consoles managed just fine. Don't worry the evil pirates are not going to kill the switch.
This is literally gun control debate, only about videogames. "Does emulation hurt or IS IT THE PERSON BEHIND IT", I mean come on.
Emulation is literally the fastest and most efficient way to enable piracy. You can defend all of its fair uses -- and as someone who uses emulation myself for older consoles like the GBA, I do think there's a lot of innocuous ways to use emulation -- but to even remotely deny that the vast majority by a huge margin of people who use emulators aren't exactly playing copies of games they own themselves, is just ridiculous.
It's impossible to have a serious conversation about that until people (primarily emulation enthusiasts or emulator users themselves -- go figure eh?) come to terms with the basic facts of reality.
And while we grapple with that, publishers will keep making studios user harsher and harsher forms of DRM because they've realized by now asking us nicely isn't gonna cut it.
What consoles have been decimated by piracy? As far as I know, the current sold models of both Switch and Switch Lite cannot be hacked. And the models that can be hacked can be through a complicated process.
It's easy to stop piracy: have a better user experience, and have a better product.
This works for small transactions, not consoles. This is the Steam excuse. Steam became popular because of sales, and because of very small prices comparatively. If Steam cost 300 bucks, you bet it wouldn't have turned the PC gaming market around lmao.
Also to respond to the question more directly: The Vita had such a hilariously poor third party support because a lot of PSP's third party developers quickly realized how much their games were being pirated especially in the west, to such an extent where even just porting them would be a massive loss, so they abandoned the hardware entirely and moved to another platform. To this day there is no western release of games like Monster Hunter Portable 3rd or its HD PS3 port, despite it being the fourth best selling game in the entire franchise (and especially considering it only came out in Japan and Korea).
The Dreamcast was also notoriously easy to pirate to such a pathetic extent that it basically didn't even require any additional hardware or software and I have never in my entire life met anyone who had a Dreamcast collection of legal games that's bigger than the huge CD folder filled with burned CDs. I know people like to say that it was Shenmue's development that nearly fucked SEGA over, but anyone with a hint of reason can say it likely cost SEGA far more money to research, develop and manufacture Dreamcasts than the 70 million they paid to make Shenmue.
Piracy fucked the Dreamcast, not Shenmue.
