plot twist: they leave it up, collect telemetry to match and understand the data behind pirating vs. owned emulation, find it useful to open the platform, focus on services, and build their business to 10x on software almost exclusively
not probable, but that would be interesting to see
would not be possible to send the domain to 127.0.0.1 in localhosts?
Yes, but you can also opt-out to the telemetry in the settings.
Sensible, but still would add the line to the hosts file.