Is there any irrefutable evidence that early emulation hurts sales in a significant way?
Are we gonna wait until a foolproof evidence coming out before we stop? Countries like mine had long been experiencing the downfall of gaming business because of piracy. Sure they would be more interested in the console (for so called homebrew purpose). But the blow to the industry was really hard, because people just doesn't care about morals when things are free.
I was one of the prominent game online reseller in multiple online marketplace in my country (even frequently took trip to JP for special orders), and we had a huge community and forums going on to support gaming enthusiast, selling games and consoles with affordable prices, much much better than skyhigh retail price. We had our own black market, but most of us got our deals from legal suppliers, as we really hope going through the right route will thrive the scene itself.
I'm one of the pro Nintendo sellers, and I remember 3DS system being so popular during year 2012. Orders are going wild, so many games were being sold even if most of the games were famous ones like MH, Pokemon etc. It was an honest market through and through. But late next year of 2013, Gateway was produced, sales of the system are booming, but all games just bombed hard. Things got worse when CFW become common in 2015, almost all games were unsold, no transaction whatsoever, no preorders or anything. At the end we just drop the orders from suppliers. The cycle of piracy had turned around, and we knew what was coming, but the situation was really embarrassing. The most sad thing that happened was after the high spike of system sales due to piracy being common (Gateway and NTR being introduced), it was confirmed a short term revenue, system sales growth were pretty much the same before and after (with the short spike exception), even until now. Game sales were lost into oblivion. Piracy become an unspoken term in all of customer's dealings.
At the end gaming is still a niche interest, an expensive hobby, which not much people would be so enticed in harboring it. And people who do would absolutely grab anything that can save their money, with the price of industry's growth. Some people would try so hard to deny the claims, researching unbalanced and unfair data with bizarre terrain selection, but this had become the reality long ago. It may be an obnoxious claim at your country but surely not my country and tons of others. Go check all the traffics in ROM sites and forums, the visits rate are ridiculous. Getting Freeshop to the scene are not helping, as there are more than 100K of unique IPs to the main website monthly, and that was without the numbers from external downloads in multiple sources.
Is this a good thing or people just being hypocrites?
