“Careful who you call the bad guys. A lot of "piracy" comes from the people who spend the most money on the content they pirate.”
This is laughably, obviously false. Don’t let the Reddit bubble of all 300 people who do this, or the 1.2% of Yuzu users who actually dumped their own keys, distort your understanding of reality.
> or the 1.2% of Yuzu users who actually dumped their own keys
As a Nintendo Switch owner, if my console died or I wanted to play Zelda at 4K I would probably not go through the hassle of dumping my own keys and rip the game myself if I can download them on the internet in a more convenient/quick way.
So there is probably a much larger fraction of users that own their games legally but still use emulators.
Also as said somewhere else, the fact some people play pirated games they would probably not even play if they were not available that way is orthogonal to the fact they may still be the highest spenders in games. Same applies to movies/music/shows. People usually have a non infinitely stretchable budget. A lot of piracy is opportunistic but would not transfer in sales if prevented. When I was a teenager/young adult I pirated a lot of stuff to try out. My gaming/movie/CD budget was fixed anyway and I still spent money on them but for the most part I would not have bought more if those things weren't accessibles illegally. Some were either out of reach for my budget (softwares like photoshop or Music DAWs), other were not deemed good enough to pay for them over better records/movies/games.
And it transfers to today: while I have a totally unlimited access to 8, 16-bit and 32-bit console roms, I almost only play to games I have owned and loved at the time.
This is laughably, obviously false. Don’t let the Reddit bubble of all 300 people who do this, or the 1.2% of Yuzu users who actually dumped their own keys, distort your understanding of reality.