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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

It sucks, doesn’t it? Developers deserve to get paid, but I’m glad I didn’t have to wait a decade to see Breath of the Wild in 4K.

I wish there was an easier way to run legitimately purchased cartridges. I don’t know how many people ever did it, but PCSX2, for instance, has always been able to run PS2 discs right off a standard PC optical drive.

If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do.

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> If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do.

Apart from folks who have no way to perform online transactions and would have to physically visit a shop to pay using cash, piracy hasn’t been “way easier” than buying games in more than a decade.

Everybody has online shops now. On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach (or in the hands of your child or etc).

In the vast majority of cases, these days, I suspect that piracy is a lot more about “cheaper” than about “easier”.

> On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach

How? When I go to a Nintendo store page for a game I want to buy digital [1], all I get are the options "Add to Wish List", "Download demo", "Buy physical".

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll...

I don’t know what to tell you; I get a great big red “Buy digital” button just to the right of the price if I go to that page.

Edit: Australia, here.

What region are you in?

In the US it clearly gives me the option to buy a digital copy: https://i.imgur.com/dIbfnjP.png

UPDATE: I'm in Denmark (EU). On nintendo.com, I don't get a "Buy digital" button. If I go to the region-specific site nintendo.dk, the search function is broken, many games aren't listed, and there's no buttons to buy games or any login functionality at all (it seems half-baked). If I go to nintendo.co.uk (the UK site), I can log in and buy digital, hurray! What an incredibly inconsistent experience!

Sorry, I meant for emulators specifically. Buying a cartridge and ripping off the rom is much harder than just downloading an illegal copy. So 99.9% of games played in emulators are pirated copies.

It would be great if it was more like PCSX2. Not that I have any idea at all how you’d do that.

>I don’t know how many people ever did it

It's been many years, but I tried this to play FFIX. Turned out it was one of the few games that still had game-breaking issues at the time. I wonder if it works now.

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