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Notes -
Follow up to my question from last week looking for an emulator, I purchased a Miyoo Mini Plus. It runs games up to GBA and PS1, has a fun nostalgic form factor, and came pre-loaded with a ridiculous over-large quantity of games. I bought it primarily because I did, in fact, own a gameboy pocket and it got good reviews. While I've used emulators on my computer and tablet in the past, I valued the physical buttons and having a purpose built item for it, and getting everything in a plug-and-play package rather than needing to hunt them down online and load them on a device was nice. I'm sure I could have dug around and gotten the whole thing cheaper with a little more work, but I valued the simplicity and ease.
My question: how is it that something like this is sold openly on Amazon, with hundreds (they claim over 1000, but obviously I haven't tried more than a dozen yet) of copyrighted games on it? Why is it that Emulators and ROMs have always been so easy to find online, where music and movies and even books have always been hit or miss, subject to constant DMCA wars online?
It seems to me like an MP3 player being sold on Amazon with thousands of 90s-2000s top-40 songs pre-loaded would be taken down in days, as would a thumb drive loaded with every Oscar winner from the 90s or even a flash disk loaded with 2000s best-sellers, but the Mini Plus is sold for a reasonable price and shipped in two days. It's not like Nintendo has stopped marketing Pokemon or Yoshi, they've even occasionally marketed their own retro devices!
I've been playing around with it for a day or so, and it's pretty fun, works well, easy to use interface. Plays gameboy advance games pretty perfectly, PS1 games it performs well enough but the screen size makes it somewhat difficult for some games that were built for a TV. I've never been a serious gamer, the latest console I own is a PS2 I received for Christmas when it was the new thing. The typical amount of vidya I play in a week is zero, but every now and then I get an urge and want to play a video game, and wanted something handheld I could play while my wife watches TV, that kind of thing. I anticipate playing through Pokemon Fire Red and Sapphire, plinking around in DOOM, playing Yoshi's island.
And clearly if in my limited gaming time I'm playing Fire Red or Twisted Metal 4 on my Mini Plus I'm not going to be buying whatever version of those games they're on now. It's not going to have value for me, really, over the free version. So how is it not seen, at the very least, as competition?
I figure music and movies have large consortiums like RIAA and MPAA which can develop and focus take-down campaigns on behalf of vast swaths of rights holders, whereas there is no equivalent for video games.
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