
Ask HN: Why doesn't Sony sell PS* emulators for PC? - YeGoblynQueenne
The same goes for Nintendo and MS and their consoles and also for arcade console manufacturers.<p>The emulator scene has shown that it&#x27;s perfectly possible to emulate pretty much any console architecture on a zero budget, so it can&#x27;t be a matter of resources, either money or engineers. Sony is reselling its back catalogue emulated on PS3, PS4 and Vita anyway, so they&#x27;re already emulating their older architectures on newer ones.<p>So why not also do it on the PC? There&#x27;s bound to be some PC gamers who don&#x27;t own consoles, but wouldn&#x27;t mind playing console games on a PC. And Sony could even sell them peripherals (I for one have a PS4 controller for my PC gaming needs).<p>So there must be another reason- probably something political, or marketing-y. What is it? I can&#x27;t think of it. Help me HN! :)
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jerf
They do. They just don't sell the emulators free-standing; they tie them to
specific games.

This gives them a lot of options; it lets them assure quality by making sure
the emulator works perfectly on that game for the given platform, it lets them
do very targeted optimizations, and it makes sure that you have to buy the
next game from them as well since you usually can't just take the image out
and pop a new one in.

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DotSauce
I'm going to take an educated guess and say it's because they make a lot of
money on accessories and having the software on a PC makes it much more
vulnerable to exploitation and pirating.

