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Comment by DistressedDrone | Hacker News Reader

It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.

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Your comment is completely wrong. There is a cottage industry of emulation developers funding their development through Patreon. There is a huge number of emulation enthusiasts who are adults with high levels of disposable income willing to fund the development of emulators they enjoy using. Some of the larger emulators get tens thousands of dollars per month on Patreon.

Checkout the following links:

https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam

https://www.patreon.com/cemu

They are not completely wrong. Crowdfunding a product is not the same as purchasing that product because often people only decide to donate because the resulting product is free. (For example, I give $5 a month to Lichess, but I am unwilling to pay for a Chess.com subscription.)

I can understand why one would want to donate if you find the product useful, but donating because it’s free doesn’t make any sense to me. Could you elaborate?

There is an argument that free chess service benefits chess community (and society in general) in a way that a paid service doesn't.

Lichess is not for profit, so donating to Lichess means that my dollar goes "farther" for infrastructure & helps subsidize the website (which has many features) for other people who may not be able to pay. The main developer only pays themselves $56k a year, when they could easily be making $300k+ in the valley.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...

Chess.com is for profit, so they have to maintain some profit margin and lock features behind paywalls to incentivize people to pay. The free experience is worse than Lichess.

I will admit to paying for Bleem! in the long long ago. I still have the CD. Frankly, it was pretty damned amazing.

The CD Key

Did burned game CDs work with Bleem? I assumed it made some check for an official disc.

I'm afraid I don't recall. I feel like it probably did if it was possible, as a defense against being called a piracy tool, but I'm not sure if there was any way for a consumer CDROM to check for the wobble groove. I owned a PlayStation and official games so I only recall using those.

P.S.: Some googling suggests that it played "backups" just fine.

I never had the PC version of Bleem, but I can confirm that a burned copy of Metal Gear Solid worked for the Bleemcast port of it.

My parents wouldn't let me buy M-rated games, so the easiest way for me to play MGS was on my Dreamcast with a copy of Bleemcast that I found used at Gamestop for four dollars with a pirated copy of the game.

Well, some emulator devs are making huge sums of money nowadays in "donations"/crowdfunding, to much chagrin of others in the emudev scene.

It seems they got the business model right this time.

I'm sure that Nintendo's Virtual Console emulator series has made them quite a bit of money.

Well, they stopped doing it, so perhaps not.

They don't offer emulated games as standalone purchases anymore (and, frankly, the idea that they charged repeatedly for games is insane to me) -- instead, now it's tied to the Switch Online subscription service.

> and, frankly, the idea that they charged repeatedly for games is insane to me

I've been curious whether Switch libraries will follow you to whatever the next Nintendo console is. They haven't done that in the past, but online purchases might be so common now that they can no longer get away with not doing it.

The library of retro games on Switch Online is laughably small and is one of my biggest gripe with the Switch compared to the Wii (U).

Not at all, emulators are also a way to keep old games alive.

Like still being able to watch that old VHS movie on BluRay HD, or listening to Swing records from 1920 in 2021.

They're also a way to help developers write new games for old platforms.

I pretty much only play emulators these days as having a load of consoles and cables under my TV is a pain in the ass.

I recently paid five dollars for redream Dreamcast emulator. Totally worth it. There's a free version that doesn't run hi Res and that's fine.

The premium Redream is definitely worth the $

My old boss used to be a game dev, and many people at is company used an unofficial DS emulator (I believe No$GBA but could be wrong) quite extensively for debugging/development purposes.

They even paid the developer several thousand dollars so that they would improve the debugger function.

This was all unofficial, of course - Nintendo had no idea and would not have been happy if they found out.

It surprises me that people think that it isn't possible to make money selling emulators.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dsemu.dras...

Over one million downloads, price £4.99

;)

You got me there! It shows the kind of market that can emerge when piracy is less practical than purchasing the software.

My point still stands though for emulators on PC where I believe software piracy remains popular.

PC software has a market too.

Well, I remember the moment No Cash suddenly had some cash after making the latest version of his popular emulator paid-only.

3dSen seems to have done a decent job monetizing - but they added a lot of value.

There are, "and always have been" commercial emulators for keeping old software running when the original system no longer exists (PDP, VAX, etc)

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