Skip to content

A letter to "just emulate it" people

Another random rant from yours truly lol

Anytime you bring up excitement for Pokemon games coming to switch, there's ALWAYS that person that goes "I can just emulate it"

As if everyone else in the room doesn't already know that's an option.

Sure, you CAN emulate it, but that doesn't mean everyone else wants to.

Here are a few reasons why I don't always like to emulate:

1) Home Capability. For me it's such a good feeling knowing I "own" the pokemon that I am catching and can take them with me wherever I want to. Probably poor wording, but through emulation, you cannot take those pokemon with you anywhere else.

2) Sense of community. When fire red & leaf green came out, suddenly EVERYONE was playing those games again, so it was fun to all play through on switch together and discuss our teams. When you're emulating, it's often an isolated experiences.

3) Access to previous events. While Fire Red & Leaf Green were mostly the same game, they did give purchasers access to ticketed events that weren't on the original GBA cartridge by default. I'd imagine they will do the same for future releases.

4) Developers deserve to get paid for their work. It's easy to write pokemon off as a big headless greedy corperation, but the truth is, 99% of that workforce are regular people like you and I who go to work, stress endlessly, and go home. Game development is not an easy or glamorous life. While in the case of FRLG I am sure minimal work went into rereleasing these, the devs deserve to be paid for their work. I know someone would still read this and talk about how pokemon has billions of dollars, but they got there because people bought software.

5) Maybe they just wanna play on their switch. Not everyone has a back bone device & playing on a phone with touch controls is very uncomfortable. For years I knew I could emulate games on my phone but never did because that's just not how I want to experience the games.

6) Supporting official releases sends a signal. If older Pokémon games sell well on modern hardware, that gives Nintendo/TPC more evidence that people actually want their back catalog available. Obviously buying one game doesn't guarantee anything, but I'd rather demonstrate demand for accessible legacy games than have the companies conclude nobody cares.

I am not anti emulation. I own an abernic DS and have a large amount of games on there. . .but if I have the ability to play it officially id rather just do that.

Featured Replies

No posts to show

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

Account

Navigation

Search

Search

Configure browser push notifications

Chrome (Android)
  1. Tap the lock icon next to the address bar.
  2. Tap Permissions → Notifications.
  3. Adjust your preference.
Chrome (Desktop)
  1. Click the padlock icon in the address bar.
  2. Select Site settings.
  3. Find Notifications and adjust your preference.