Interestingly, this rash of DMCA takedown requests is apparently related to the Garry's Mod DMCA strikes from a while back. Apparently, copyright protection companies have started using some kind of automated AI service to mass flag and DMCA hosters of infringing material. This is why it's all so haphazard and the emails full of spelling errors
ROM sites have always been illegal, video game publishers just haven't bothered to do much about them outside of some very specific cases. If the thing about AI is accurate, I think it's just a case where publishers, or rather the companies they've hired, have finally figured out a way to scan the internet and spam DMCA takedown notices using cheap automated tools without needing to pay employees to do it for them, lowering the threshold significantly. I expect a lot more shit like this and the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop takedowns in the future
They wouldn't need AI to automate this lol if that was really the issue then mass DMCA would have happened 10 years ago. Either way sucks all this to protect IP they refuse to sell hoarding a pile of nothing.
I'm waiting for the day microshit starts distributing stuff to remove roms directly from your PC
People are also speculating that Apple allowing emulators on the App Store played a part in this. A big part of why Nintendo went after Yuzu was that they were spooked about Android emulation eating into their handheld business. Now hundreds of millions of people can easily access Nintendo games on non-Nintendo devices they already own. Apparently people on TikTok were making viral guides about how to download roms from places like Vimms which probably didn't help either