Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing...
Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it’s trivial for Nintendo to show they’ve enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.
Whereas if you do everything for free and don’t even accept donations, they’d have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.
The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from… So how do we compensate the devs?
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Same as any other type of internet piracy. I don’t give money to some guy ripping his movies or games.
The only way to do things like this is anonymously for the shits and giggles. A Patreon to make it their job is one thing, but the fact that they can pay $2.4million shows it went beyond that.
We don’t, that’s kinda the point. If you want to compensate the developers, you should buy their games.