Well, they aren't selling it to me, so why should they care?

Saw a recent video from The Completionist called Companies Don't Want You Playing Classic Games, and the video is about sharing a new study that found that 87% of games made before 2010 are commercially unavailable. By "commercially unavailable" they mean that the remaining 13% includes digital ports and virtual console and all its variants. That number sounds bad, yes, but keep in mind that that's for all games. I don't think Ghost Rider on Game Boy Advance is going to be preserved or released digitally. I was originally going to make a comment on that video saying my feelings on the situation but I realized that whatever I type would be too long for a YouTube comment. Hence why I'm here!

That 87% number doesn't include remakes such as the PS4 version of Shadow of the Colossus or any variant of Chrono Trigger after the SNES so let's create some hypothetical scenarios. Let's say I want to play the SNES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. The game has not seen any digital re-release whatsoever. So my only legal option is to get a copy of the SNES cartridge (which costs around $40-50 right now) plus a Super Nintendo to play it on and pray that both of these still work after 30 years. OR, I just hack my SNES Classic and put the ROM on there.

Speaking of the SNES Classic, I put a lot of value in the fact that I'm able to play fanmade translations of SNES games exclusive to Japan on a device I play with an SNES controller. Same goes for other systems ROM translations. I think it's important to be able to experience these games when otherwise speaking there's no way for someone to play them unless they know Japanese. The morality of emulation almost always boils down to "Well, they aren't selling it to me, so why should they care?"

For someone like me who was not born before the 21st century, buying old games that people care about is not something that's viable. I've been playing a lot of the Dolphin emulator recently entirely because Dolphin has Bluetooth adapters that allow real Wiimotes to be connected. Besides NES and Genesis/Mega Drive games, it's pretty impractical to play any emulators on a keyboard. I do it out of necessity for some games, but I would hardly call it ideal. But with Dolphin, the only thing I can't do is play games that require me to point the Wiimote at the screen at move the controller (since that requires a sensor bar). If I can play with the classic controller or play the game with the Wiimote on its side, then I can play the game near identically to the original.

I think game preservation is something that's going to take a very long time to make happen and I don't really want to pirate games currently being sold. But I'm not going to feel guilty for emulating a game not being sold to me in any fashion other than impossibly high secondhand prices.