Well, they'll always oversell the damage, but realistically, not much impact to their bottom line. They do release remasters and ports, but I'd be hard pressed to see it being a significant loss in the grand scheme of things for a company that doesn't need to subsidize hardware with software. Like: people would buy a hypothetical N64 mini regardless of 3rd party emulators available. Or buy old games on the Virtual Console or however it's now called on the Switch.
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
> From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.
Sort of. It's obviously illegal to distribute, and arguably using it as a reference for re-implementation in emulators or in hardware would be a derivative work, and so also illegal. This could make things harder for emulator and hardware developers who now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material. It will probably be a fantastic resource 5-10+ years down the line, when things have cooled off, but for now, it's all fairly radioactive for people and organizations that are concerned about legal action.
> emulator and hardware developers [...] now have to screen new contributors to ensure they have not been exposed to this material.
You cannot prove a negative. The most a project can do is to have people signing waivers that state they have not been exposed and/or will not copy stuff, effectively discharging responsibility on the individual.
>> "On 27 January 2006, the developers responsible for maintaining the ReactOS code repository disabled access after a meeting was held to discuss the allegations. When approached by NewsForge, Microsoft declined to comment on the incident. Since ReactOS is a free and open-source software development project, the claim triggered a negative reaction by the free software community; in particular, Wine barred several inactive developers from providing contributions[citation needed] and formal high level cooperation between the two projects remained difficult as of 2006.[33] Contributions from several active ReactOS developers have been accepted post-audit, and low level cooperation for bug fixes has been still occurring."
And indeed there is little to do except discharging responsibility:
>> all developers were made to sign an agreement committing them to comply with the project's policies on reverse engineering. Contributors to its development were not affected by these events, and all access to the software development tools was restored
Also relevant:
>> the 2004 leaked Windows source code[38] was not seen as legal risk for ReactOS, as the trade secret was considered indefensible in court due to broad spread.[39]
The emulation community seems to have never cared all that much about legality, given their relationship to the warez/cracking scene. I know WINE has been quoted as an example a few times here, but that's a slightly different case --- that's the free software/GPL community, which is far more uptight about legal issues.
Legal always claims losses in the billions, then accounting files the 10-K form and its de minimus and doesn't even show up in the financials.
This has happened in historical "hacking" cases. I remember one phone phreaking case from years ago against AT&T where the highly non-technical and non-accounting judge was convinced by the plaintiff that the defendant caused something like a billion dollars of lost revenue to AT&T and the defense argument against that damage claim revolved around securities fraud because AT&T didn't mention a billion dollar loss in their 10-K nor did they file an emergency 8-K
From enthusiast perspective - it's a boon for preservation purposes.