Should You Emulate Nintendo Switch Games? Is Emulation Legal?

Video game emulation has been around for years. Back in the 1990s, emulation began to grow in popularity, mainly due to the improvements in computer hardware, increased internet speeds, and the improvements in emulators in general. These days we’ve hit peak emulation and have what we would describe as the best Nintendo Switch emulator ever available.

Some video games realistically are only available for the majority of the public to play through emulation because of extreme rarity or never actually being released. And in light of recent retro game prices skyrocketing due to the pandemic as well as suspected market manipulation, lately there’s been much discussion about emulation.

For the sake of this video, we won’t be discussing ROMs of video games that are also owned by the player, but rather ROMs that are pirated that the player doesn’t also own a copy of.

I love Nintendo games, but Nintendo as a company really frustrates me sometimes. They can be quite archaic and consistently fail to read the room about what their customers actually want and are willing to spend their money on.

In recent years, there’s been much discussion in the gaming community about Nintendo’s business practices. Nintendo has done away with the eshop on the Switch and has instead released their Nintendo Switch Online service which contains a limited number of titles for the NES, SNES, and the N64.

At the time of making this video, it appears that Nintendo has no plans to offer the majority of their back catalog of classic games to players. NES and SNES games on Nintendo Switch Online has all but trickled to a stop, with little to no updates in recent months. The recent inclusion of N64 titles is nice, but the execution was lackluster, leaving many either unimpressed or just downright disappointed.

The Nintendo Switch Online N64 app’s price was met with an overwhelming amount of negativity from Nintendo fans. The app suffers from noticeable input lag, stuttering online play, and a modestly small catalog of only 10 titles currently. At $50 per year for the service, many simply don’t see it being worth it.

And I mention the N64 app primarily because I’ve seen a lot of comments being made online by folks saying that this is the proverbial nail in the coffin as to why they are now choosing to emulate Nintendo games. Back in the days of the eshop, while you did have the ability to purchase retro games digitally, these titles didn’t just automatically carry over to consecutive Nintendo consoles. Nintendo still would nickel and dime you over these every chance they got. Now in the era of the Switch, the eshop doesn’t even exist, and Nintendo Switch Online doesn’t even have that large of a retro game catalog.

And so one major argument that I see pop up a lot these days is that if Nintendo isn’t going to make these games available for us to buy or play on their consoles, what other choice do we as the consumers really have to play them?

We’ve mostly covered retro Nintendo titles so far, but what about emulating Nintendo Switch games? The Yuzu emulator is more than capable of playing numerous titles, with many Switch games being playable on the emulator before the game is even available for the public to buy. The Yuzu emulator is doing quite well, with its patreon pulling in over $22,000 per month. Clearly there is a significant demand for Nintendo Switch emulation and to assume that the majority of its use is by players who already own the Switch titles seems a bit naive.

And we haven’t even yet covered the fact that Yuzu can run multiple switch games at a higher FPS and at over 4k and higher resolutions. Clearly, a lot of time and effort has gone into the development of the Yuzu emulator and it shows. You could even argue that emulating Switch games on your PC with Yuzu is the superior experience in many cases.

Suffice all that to say, those on the other side of the spectrum really just don’t care about all those details. A good number of console players prefer simplicity and don’t want to bother with setting up emulators, downloading roms, or connecting controllers. They’d rather just use what’s currently available to them on the Switch due to its ease of access.

At the end of the day, downloading ROMs of games that you don’t already have in your collection is technically illegal.

Pirating as a form of protest for things that you don’t agree with or like is ultimately a wrongheaded approach to what is a legitimate concern.

For one, Nintendo is the publisher for the games they release, they recoup the costs spent on their games. The sooner they recoup it, the sooner the developers that actually made the game, will start to earn their share. So depriving Nintendo of money through a lost sale doesn’t really help the “victim” here. Pirating the game also sort of validates Nintendo’s policies- sure you hate them, but apparently not enough to not play or buy their games- you rather steal from them. We’re not talking stealing from the rich and giving to the poor here, we’re talking consumers who don’t wish to support a company by buying their products, but prefer to just utilize those products without paying…which is just stealing.

Look, I’d be lying to you if I said I’ve never emulated a game that I don’t own. When I was younger and didn’t have a lot of extra cash each month, sometimes emulating games was the only way I was able to play them. That doesn’t make what I was doing right, but at the time, I justified it because of my situation.

Now that I’m older and able to afford them, I like to support developers by buying their games. These days, if I really do have a problem with something that Nintendo is doing, I just simply won’t spend my time or money on it but that doesn’t mean I’ll pirate it because that kind of negates the entire message I’m trying to send in the first place. Pirating games because you don’t agree with a business’s practices, in my opinion, is kind of like admitting that you aren’t willing to go all in on your protests. And to be clear, I’m speaking solely on Switch games right now, not retro titles.

Anyway these are just my thoughts. Let me know in the comment section down below what you think about emulating Nintendo games.