Exhibit B: Emulators

by kapowaz, Thursday, March 21, 2013, 01:56 (4274 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Imagine another scenario:

A perfect Xbox 360 emulator is released tomorrow. You buy Destiny and try to play it. The emulator has the capability to communicate the same way as an xbox, but since consoles individually identify themselves to the server, there is no way MS would allow the emulator to connect. Thus, they are again restricting your access to the game.

Emulators have long been an ethical and legal grey area. There are two main sides to the story: gamers want to be able to continue to play games long after the hardware has stopped being made or is easily available, whereas publishers want to continue to enforce their IP rights. A smaller number of players want to play current console games on PC hardware for some reason (possibly to hack around with it, possibly because they don't want to buy the hardware).

Usually what's happened is that emulator developers have gotten around IP rights by not distributing anything that could be construed as the original console maker's intellectual property — for example the system ROM for a given console. Obviously these are available fairly trivially via torrents and warez sites etc, but the emulator projects themselves can keep their nose clean. However whenever the console being emulated is still being sold and is readily available, the console maker quite rightly sees this as an attempt to circumvent their control and potentially to get in the way of their own sales too. Remember Bleem!?

Taking all this and applying it to Destiny we're clearly not talking about old, dead hardware so the first set of considerations don't apply. But on top of that, the game itself relies upon Xbox Live, and — almost certainly — Bungie's own server system to both be up and running. Witness the end of Halo 2 multiplayer — that's Destiny's fate in probably no more than 15 years’ time. The same will happen to World of Warcraft someday, too. Emulator or no, there will be a point in the future where there is no server part of the equation around to play Destiny any more. And that's not DRM.