Two men got jobs at Amazon just to steal copies of Zelda | Hacker News Reader

Two men got jobs at Amazon just to steal copies of Zelda

kotaku.com

The two men didn't work together, and had very different motives:

Man 1) Super fan. Stole the game (1 copy) before release, stopped showing up to work and instead played Zelda all day.

Man 2) Pure theft & resale motive, including other zelda merch

I mean, I can kind of appreciate what the first guy did, with the exception of stealing a copy. A college-age kid, superfan, the game exists-- it's done-- there's just this arbitrary release date so he finds a loophole/backdoor into getting access to a copy.

It's just, you know, at 21 I hope he's dedicating at least a fraction of that energy into his future/career/education whatever.

Yup. As far as the first guy goes, the company's action was proportionate: forcing him to pay for the copy, and firing him for breaching the company's trust. A criminal charge would have ruined his life, and for no gain to the company, or (in my opinion) to the rest of society.

>A criminal charge would have ruined his life

The typical punishment for petty theft in Japan is having to pay for the item and a slap on the wrist. If you show remorse, settle with the victim, and aren't a repeat offender, prosecutors in Japan will pretty much never take it to a formal trial. Amazon gets no say in this: If prosecutors aren't interested, there won't be a trial. It's their exclusive authority.

>According to Japanese criminal procedure article 248, a prosecutor may choose not to prosecute when prosecution is deemed unnecessary considering the character, age, and background of the offender, the severity of the offense, and the circumstances following the offense.[1]

[1]: https://www.criminaldefensejapan.com/post/how-much-does-it-c...

Japan has a 99% conviction rate: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20810572

If prosecutors are sure that they have enough "evidence" or social bias (especially for people with criminal records) then they will relentlessly pursue a defendant like terminators.

It's not really a haven for justice.

The US federal government has a similarly high conviction rate, especially considering the number of plea deals (90% of defendants plead guilty). https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/11/only-2-of.... I went to Wikipedia to find more information and it seems that your characterization of it as very unjust is a common misconception:

> According to Bruce Aronson of New York University School of Law, Japan's conviction rate is misleading because it is the rate at which defendants admit guilt in the cases they are charged with. According to him, if the method of calculating the conviction rate in Japan is applied to the United States, the conviction rate of federal defendants in the United States in 2018 was also over 99%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_J...

I'm not American and I definitely do not think America is a haven for justice either, ha ha.

> A criminal charge would have ruined his life, and for no gain to the company

I'm not sure if that's being considered at all, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36127800

Yea lmao people with power protect and grow it, they don’t become public servants.

What I don't quite understand: they made him pay for the copy and return said copy?!

Law enforcement has gone TOO far!

They're making him return and pay for the merchandise he broke and stole.

Maybe it would fall under the same consideration as damaging an item in a shop? But then I suppose you would have the choice to take it home. Who knows, Japan does things different.

I think it makes sense. If the penalty for stealing is just paying for the item there's no incentive not to try it. Worst case it's like you bought the item. Pay for it and return it, there's a downside while still keeping it a slap on the wrist.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120512122454/http://www.bigdai...

> he finds a loophole/backdoor into getting access to a copy.

I wouldn’t call stealing, even a high effort one, a loophole any more than I’d call shoplifting a life hack.

Hypotheticals are terrible, but what if we change the situation a little bit. Instead of Amazon, let's have the person work at a retail store, and instead of meerly taking a copy of Zelda, they also leave payment in the till. Of course, their retail system may not allow them to run a sale on a game before the street date, so they may have to miscode it. Then it's not stealing, instead it's breaking the street date and messing up inventory. Also, let's assume there's well more than enough copies that nobody ends up not getting a copy of the game because he took it.

Would that be a loophole then?

An alternate hypothetical is he orders it on amazon, all the orders are boxed early, but not shipped and he finds his box and takes it home. Doesn't match reality, but makes a nice hypothetical.

It's still stealing to take something that's not for sale and leave money behind.

I think it's fine to have a black and white line about stealing (and other moral dilemmas), as you clearly do. It makes life easy to navigate.

It's hard to see a victim here. The kid stole for the early access, he would have gladly paid for the game.

So really the rule he's intending to break is you know, "you're not allowed to look at this until X date"

The shoplifting is a byproduct.

I can see a gray area. There's a lot of stupid laws painted in black and white.

One thought experiment I use for morality is "What if everyone did what this person did?"

And in that thought experiment, I think things turn out really badly. Not only is it materially bad, a lot of society's trust is burned.

I think the only reason this person's actions are "okay" is because they are washed away by the sea of good people doing good things.

Let's go down that path. If everyone fought for a job at amazon to get a copy. Amazon would finally have enough workers, they would be more reliable (can't skip days or show up late when you have a mission) and Amazon would make more money.

On the nintendo side word of mouth spreads like hotfire. Remember Nintendo gives away games to writers to generate more word of mouth more press.

Sounds like a win/win

Change that to murder and your points become more valid.

Lmao, your argument is flimsy as hell. He didn't work for Amazon as a good employee, he would've done what was required until he got the game and then quit.

In your scenario, Amazon would experience a boom of workers, then experience workers x unit cost theft, and then have 0 workers.

This assumes that Amazon's limiting factor is the number of applicants. I don't think that's the case, especially right now with all the layoffs.

> And in that thought experiment, I think things turn out really badly. Not only is it materially bad, a lot of society's trust is burned.

I also use this thought experiment (and it's what shapes my view that e.g. software piracy is in fact quite bad).

The thing is, in this case clearly not everyone could put this much effort into getting a copy of Zelda. Even if they had the free time, if Zelda was this valuable to everyone we would live in a different world (the game would cost more, there would be more games like it, etc).

This guy was just willing to go "above and beyond" for the game he likes... maybe not in the best way, but not in a harmful one.

This is known as Kant's Categorical Imperative :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Sure, but that doesn’t help determine the punishment. If everyone in Manhattan were to shit on the sidewalk life would be horrible, but that doesn’t mean we should put someone who does it in prison

Sure I agree. The thought experiment cannot give insight on the severity of the punishment. That wasn't the scope though.

GP comment said "There's a lot of stupid laws painted in black and white.". I don't think Theft is one of those stupid laws. I think it's a good law.

So is it immoral for a farmer to farm?

If EVERYONE farmed, there would be waaaay to much food and no water left on the planet.

No it is not immoral for everyone to farm.

In fact I would actually recommend, if feasible, to start a garden in their yard for staple veggies.

Just think how much energy we would save instead of shipping potatoes from Idaho or soybeans from China.

And everyone would be getting way better nutrition.

If everyone farmed a little bit, that would be amazing for our society and our planet.

It would be catastrophic. All the music, not just country, would start having lyrics about tractors.

The GMO debate would have Facebook mom experts in every phpbb corner of the net.

Farmers Only would be the number one company on the planet.

I think this is a domain issue.

Moral imperatives like this tend to apply to the domain of "duty". Is it a duty to farm? No, of course not; but that doesn't make it immoral to farm.

A hypothetical example of a "duty" might be "contribute to the economy". According to Kant, it is moral to do this as long as you'd like it if everyone did it.

> If EVERYONE farmed, there would be waaaay to much food and no water left on the planet.

This is only true if everyone had industrial sized farms. If everyone farmed the scale of the farms would naturally decrease in size. I'm not sure how one "scales" stealing games from Amazon.

> Not only is it materially bad, a lot of society's trust is burned.

Too much rule adherence, resulting in too much trust can also have undesirable consequences, e.g.

From "Traffic safety and norms of compliance with rules:An exploratory study"[0]:

"We use a simple model of drivers’ vigilance effort choice to show that drivers’ propensity to follow traffic rules has two opposite effects on road safety. On the one hand, it lowers the frequency of dangerous situations. On the other hand, it also reduces drivers’ vigilance effort as each driver anticipates that dangerous situations will be less frequent. These two opposite effects may lead to a non-monotonic relationship between compliance with road rules and the incidence of road traffic accidents. We present cross-country estimates that support the existence of a bell-shaped relationship between norms of compliance with rules and traffic fatalities." [0]

[0] https://defipp.unamur.be/wp/defipp_wp_2021_3.pdf

I do not buy this paper's conclusion.

First problem I see is that they use Road Fatalities as proxy metric for overall goodness.

If someone's driving drunk, and they run their truck into your living room at 2am - yeah maybe no one died, but a lot of damage and stress was caused. Not to mention just destruction in the form of minor accidents.

I simply cannot buy the conclusion - "Yeah it's a good thing we have a few drunk drivers". Call me anti science if you must

Everyone could not do it because the number of jobs at Amazon is finite. I wager if every single Amazon employee did it Nintendo wouldn't even notice a dent.

Resale though is bad.

That's the simplified question that's the basis for Deontological ethics. Further, there are other philosophies concerning ethics that help to flesh out the impossibility that that creates in modern life.

This reminds me of the story from Darknet Diaries about Xbox underground, and that one guy who, despite investing a ton of time hacking and infiltrating Microsoft and various other companies....still purchased retail copies of his favorite games and deluxe editions of the Xbox systems because he wanted to support the companies.

This video offers an alternative to a black and white perspective on shoplifting: https://youtu.be/6U6xH1gKwjI

This video argues "shoplifting from large corporations might be OK because who cares about their bottom line. Nobody I know is getting hurt."

How misguided! Not only does this perspective indicate a lack of core values, it results in retail deserts as said corporations retreat from lawlessness. You'll be directly impacted when your neighborhood Walgreens closes.

Watch this video from yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/13x3d7s/retai...

Another tidbit from the video "If I instead had 10000 Nintendos sitting in a warehouse somewhere and someone stole 1 of them, wouldn't really cause me a lot of distress or pain"

The main problem with this line of reasoning, and heck, the entire act of trying to weaken "stealing" in general, is that the overall result is that you now have more than 1 person stealing a nintendo. In fact because of the internet, things going viral, you might even have a double digit percentage of those nintendos, being stolen.

We build up and break down societies rules by things we do every single day. The more we break them down, the more we see crap happening. If everyone stole every nintendo, well, Good bye to Zelda in general. That company won't want to even make that game.

I totally agree with the part of the video that argued people so poor that they can't eat that it would be basically justified for them to steal bread at a large business. I think however it would be even better if that person tried to find as many legal options to do that instead. And in general, tried to get a job. If they're still capable of stealing, they can probably do a job somewhere. But yes, at the bottom, steal the loaf of bread, but don't stay there forever.

Those at the bottom shouldn't need to steal a loaf of bread. We have a community and government both providing a social safety net to give them not only a loaf of bread, but also a path out of destitution.

Yes but how many people that recently go homeless and poor know how to get into that. It's not like you open the front page of reddit and it has step 1 2 and 3 for how to get food.

I looked further on a google search and found a Salvation Army link on free soup kitchens, clicked California, and couldn't find any of the Counties I'm near right now.

We don't even have a class in high school to tell people what to do if they find themselves poor. There is literally no training or help.

But if every target or walgreens closed it would open the market for others. I'm okay with less walgreens/walmarts.

Who wants to enter the market of providing retail in places with rampant shoplifting?

I strongly support small business as well, but unfortunately the reality right now (in San Francisco, at least) is empty storefronts. Lots of them.

No it wouldn't. No one is going to open a store just to be stolen from.

> I think it's fine to have a black and white line about stealing (and other motel dilemmas), as you clearly do. It makes life easy to navigate.

Motel dilemma's, they're the worst. Econo Lodge, Super 8 I never know what to do...

How would you feel if a maid or technician you hired stole a game from you house? Would it be better if the thief would have gladly paid for the game they stole, but couldn't because was difficult/impossible to buy?

I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to doesn't have billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of the same copy of a game. Because I'm pretty sure they wouldn't care.

Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.

So it's okay if the perpetrator thinks the target is rich enough?

Stealing is wrong people. Retail theft is a huge problem right now, and now I understand why: I'm apparently in the minority for thinking this way.

> So it's okay if the perpetrator thinks the target is rich enough?

Yeah? When "rich enough" literally means such an unfathomably large amount of wealth that it is effectively infinite for the person that holds it (which in this case it is, since Bezos will not ever scrape away even a fraction of his wealth in his lifetime), it pretty much is okay. Infinity minus one is still infinity.

To clarify, there are plenty of problems with theft such as how it can impact coworkers, and it's totally valid to be against theft. I am just very pedantically pointing out that yes, it is in fact not nearly as bad of a crime to steal from someone who is unbelievably rich.

The wealth of the victim is a great thing to weigh in if you want to steal. Surely you can see this.

If I steal a bums sandwich, I hurt him. If I steal Jeff Bezos' sandwich, literally nothing happens. There is no result. He never knew the sandwich existed.

Maybe you'll never have to steal a sandwich, but I hope if you do, you make the right choice.

Stealing from a retailer like Amazon just serves to fuck over employees.

What new draconian measures is Amazon going to institute now that the news has given thousands of asshats the bright idea that they can just get a job at a warehouse and walk off with goods?

I get that theft happens. I've worked in retail and my mother managed a large retail store when I was younger. So I also get that shit rolls down hill. These aren't "victimless crimes". Sure the company isn't effected that much (though, the stock prices of retailers effected by the recent thefts tell a different story), but employees get to share the pain. Managers lose out on bonuses (read: income) from this, and asshole GMs pissed off at missing targets take out their low-level employees.

I distinctly remember retail theft being a reason my mother switched careers. She'd tell me about how she just had to sit back and watch as people rolled TVs out of the store without paying for it and realizing that she'd be the one paying for it.

This is pretty much it.

It would be tolerable if it was one or two people. But as recent news have shown once people see there is little consequence in stealing up to a certain amount then it emboldens people and it happens in large numbers.

So a bunch of mouth breathers think stealing from the rich corporation is ok. It happens in numbers and then draconian measures that punish employees and/or law abiding, tax paying and merch paying citizens are enacted.

Always.

So no, this shit ain't victimless in the long run.

And the worst part is that this mentality does not stop a big retail stores. This sordid mentality that it's ok to steal doesn't prevent thieves from stealing from smaller business that cannot handle the loss of inventory as easily.

These stores pay the ultimate price by firing staff and/or shutting down.

Why? Cause thieves rarely differentiate. If you steal that's pretty much your life. And that's your thing.

I'd assume Amazon is going to institute new draconian measures on their employees because that's who they are. There will probably be lots of jobs for AI/ML people to implement those measures to ensure that the plebs are properly attending tasks anyway; theft is just another aspect they'll monitor for anyway.

The more interesting question that occurs to me is - what is the optimal item to steal from an Amazon warehouse? Nintendo games actually seem like a decent size/weight/value ratio, but I'd bet there's much better. Obviously precious jewelry is a classic, but there might already be increased scrutiny on those. I'm sure some enterprising young go-getters will figure it out.

It affects Amazon. If everything include all money, employees and relationship to other businesses were stolen Amazon would go out of business and someone else would take their marketshare.

Sure, stealing is wrong. But he paid them back for the theft. In Amazon's eyes, they just made a sale. And probably a bit of a laugh over what the kid went through

And before you say anything about losing money from training the kid or turnover or whatever, Amazon's turnover is horrible. They're used to it.

Ok, stealing is wrong. But you're taking a narrow view of theft. Amazon is "stealing" from the entire planet in the form of labor and resource exploitation. Stealing merchandise from Amazon can be seen as a form of self defense by the almost-powerless common person.

You don't think Amazon is doing anything unethical? Why, because everything it's doing is legal? Laws are not 1:1 with morals or ethics, that's why they change. But uh, I also feel the need to point out that Amazon does not operate according to the law any more than it can get away with[1]. So if breaking the law to steal value from thousands of employees/customers is ok, but breaking the law to steal one copy of a game is not... that's not a system of morality I want to live in.

[1] Amazon is not a law-abiding entity: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=amazon+broke+the+law&ia=web

> Stealing is wrong people

Amazon steals from people all the time, they just call it good business practices instead of stealing.

I don't have to imagine, I own a business that people steal from regularly.

It pisses me off, of course. I've never prosecuted anyone though.

I have things that are not for sale, like decorations. Yes, it would be better if someone left the money when they stole it.

Then they're just buying an item I don't want to sell, I guess. It's way better, yes.

It's disingenuous and intellectually lazy to equate a regular personal residence and a trillion dollar exploitative corporation.

I will always stop a person from robbing their neighbor. I will never stop a person from lifting from a mega corporation.

One of the thousands of copies I was giving away to journalist or the one and only copy?

What would you do if a maid picketed up a penny? Probably wouldn't notice

But what if they stole it for their 7 year old cancer ridden son, who only wants to be happy once before he dies.

If my house had 1.5 million employees it's hard to imagine how I would notice.

Your name probably doesn't even start with "A" so how could you possibly even relate to this circumstance?

The court system traditionally does care what your motivation is for doing something. See the difference between manslaughter and murder, which is entirely based on your intent at the time.

This was entirely premeditated theft. He had to apply to the job, interview, etc. Even still, I believe a slap on the wrist is appropriate punishment as it's just not that serious of a crime.

Yeah, to reduce the severity of the intent by default. Plotting a scheme to steal when it has more value is not that. Or in your own terms, the difference between 3rd degree and 1st degree murder.

Lots of thefts, hacks, etc involve exploiting loopholes in a system. It doesn't have to be either/or, it can be exploiting a loophole, and also theft, which this was.

In some US jurisdictions, theft below some dollar value is considered not worth prosecuting, i.e. legal.

It is not as though Amazon is really going to miss one copy of Zelda, so it's morally not too bad.

> I wouldn’t call stealing, even a high effort one, a loophole any more than I’d call shoplifting a life hack.

I sort of agree with your equating these, except I think they are both valid.

In fact it costs more money to catch someone.

I'd call it fraud.

What if you live in san francisco?

I kind of don’t understand how someone’s gonna go through all that work, and not realize that someone on the Internet is going to leak the game and you can just play it on a hacked console or an emulator.

I suspect that for him, possessing a real and/or physical copy carried additional symbolic value.

This reminds me of some people who have been getting jobs recently as security for huge arena's in the USA just to see Taylor Swift live because the ticket prices were outrageous. haha

[1] https://www.insider.com/taylor-swift-eras-tour-nashville-res...

[2] https://fun107.com/a-new-bedford-woman-went-as-far-as-landin...

I have a friend who is a cop, off duty he will do security for concerts. He said it was well worth it, because he (a) never had to pay for concerts and (b) would let other friends in for free (which I assume he'd get kick backs for from their roles in life).

Honest question. How do you stay friends with someone like that? Your friend holds a position of public trust, but he's openly corrupt at his side job. What are the odds that he's completely ethical and upstanding when he's on the public's time?

lol have you ever met a cop...? They're all human and most of the time "corrupt". And yet everyone calls them to help every day and more often than not they help.

"Friend" was probably a strong word here, he's someone I know, chat with and am on friendly terms with. I'd help him change a tire. I'm sure he'd help me out if I needed it. I'm sure he'd write tickets, make arrests, etc.

But let's tone down the self-righteous indignation for a bit...

Here's an example where a cop doesn't enforce the law: "A 14 year old is driving home their drunk dad". What do you do as a cop? Legally, you should be writing a ticket / booking them for jail. In reality, the cop 90+% of the time will let them off.

Another (real) example, a cop at a local church pulls over his pastor for speeding. He tells the pastor "Pastor! Why were you speeding!" then lets him off with a warning and sends him home. For the next 10 years he always minds his speed (at least in that area) because the embarrassment was far more than the ticket.

IMO cops, security, etc are just people. They subjectively enforce law and rules, most view their purpose as keeping people safe first and foremost. Not squeezing their neighbors to ensure the state, corporations, etc get their cut.

Back to this particular case, would I confide in him? No. Would he let his friends off with a warning, instead of a ticket -- sure. Would he let someone who didn't pay into a concert, 100% (he does). Of course that's pretty normal, if you know anyone in security. Not to mention, they often get free tickets to this stuff if they aren't working, depending where you work.

Which is to say he's doing kind of shit security, no? I'd have guessed one of the points of security is to keep people who didn't pay, out.

Not to worry, he's simply creating jobs by making it necessary to hire security for the security team. It's all for the sake of bolstering the economy and is just good business.

What a good take. Never seen it like that, but yes.

There are lots of theaters in NYC where you can work as a volunteer usher to see a show for free. I've got one friend who saw probably 20+ things over a couple of years that way.

Reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman cannot wait any longer for the (Nintendo Wii?) to be released, goes and freezes himself in a glacier. Nowadays he could just get a job at an Amazon warehouse, win win

In the long run, the person who got a job at Amazon, stole a copy of Zelda, and spent all his time playing it will have about the same experience as someone who waited until release day, or even much later. Years from now, the extra few days he got to play won't matter at all. In fact, that's probably already the case now that you can just buy the game and finish it whenever you want.

I've never gotten hyped for a product launch, followed the news religiously, waited in line to buy it, and later in cold blood concluded all of that was attention well spent. I can think of plenty of times when it wasn't: why did I wait in line for a Wii not once, but three times? Why did I take off work to play Cyberpunk 2077?

I wonder how much of fan hype is genuine excitement for something you love, and how much of it is just falling for the marketing. I'm not saying not to love the things you love.

> Years from now, the extra few days he got to play won't matter at all.

While I agree in general with the sentiment that time is fungible, I think the story about getting a job to steal a video game might make the whole experience more memorable. "I found a video game on the street and got to play it early" is one thing, but "I got a job so I could steal a pre-release copy of the game" reflects a lot about the character of the person.

The early days playing the game won't matter, but the days spent PRIOR to playing the game will be a treasured memory.

>reflects a lot about the character of the person

That his values are really messed up and they're probably not trustworthy, right?

If your goal is to acquire an unreleased video game, they may be a very trustworthy person. But probably not the type of trustworthy you want to manage a store.

The "steal from your employer" angle isn't so great, but "working around the system to accomplish your goals" is an ethos widely lauded here on HN. If the person had placed a pre-order through Amazon and found a way to mark their order as "delivered" when walking out the door with it, I'd have no problem with it.

While what you are saying makes sense the reverse is also true: In the long run would I be happy that I stayed at work that one extra day instead of playing Cyberpunk 2077? Years from now would I conclude that extra day at work instead of having fun was worth it?

There's enough room in life for short term immediate reward. The most obvious example is having a nice meal. You don't need to spend time cooking or pay a lot for a fancy restaurant, and in hindsight none of it is really worth it since you could have subsisted on nutrient paste and water, yet the food industry continues to thrive regardless.

You sound like...a drug addict in heaven talking about drugs.

I wonder whether they would have been caught if they had actually quit, rather than simply stopped showing up.

Yeah especially for the superfan who just wanted to break the release date embargo to play the game. He got the game so that's it, mission accomplished. But he had no escape plan. And it's Amazon, he could probably have gotten himself fired by taking 4 or 5 bathroom breaks in a single shift.

Oh, come on! They aren't that quick to fire. Of course you first get a Performance Improvement Plan that specifies you are not allowed to use the toilet outside of your manager assigned breaks for the next 365 days and are given a handy plastic bottle to help with compliance. They can't possibly be THAT cruel.

Also they're hiring at the nearby warehouse if anyone's interested!

"What do y'all think about this union idea?"

Hard to unionize when the average employment length is 30 days

> I wonder whether they would have been caught if they had actually quit

Probably not. Which is to say, I'm sure other people have done something very similar, but because they didn't draw attention to themselves by stopping to show up, they didn't get make the news.

Can you ‘just quit’ in Japan? Many places require a notice period.

I've never known a company pursue legal action for not honoring a notice period - it's going to cost them far more than it's worth to pursue it legally than to just stop paying you for not turning up.

Unless he grabbed the game more than 12 days before the release date, it was all a waste of time because the game was already leaked online by then...

Which assumes he has the ability and necessary tools to acquire and play the leak.

I have a modded switch, and it is a giant pain in the ass. It’s in my opinion atypical from any other console hacking scene, it’s difficult and very poorly explained.

However, the emulator is about as difficult as double clicking.

How is it a pain in the ass? There are tons of simple guides online that explain anything you'd need to know.

Quick, without going through four guides written by 14 year olds, tell me how you would convert a pre-patched module with AutoRCM and SX Pro dongle to Hekate and Atmophere. Heaven help you if you haven’t looked at things in two years, good luck even getting it to boot correctly.

I’ve been modding consoles since mods existed. This has been the worst of any experience. Some combination of highly skilled by possibly autistic programmers and a clientele of teenagers that recommend things like “FORMAT IT IN FAT32” is a solution to why an update isn’t showing up.

I don’t know why it’s bad, it just is.

>Quick, without going through four guides written by 14 year olds, tell me how you would convert a pre-patched module with AutoRCM and SX Pro dongle to Hekate and Atmophere. Heaven help you if you haven’t looked at things in two years, good luck even getting it to boot correctly.

Delete the files you have on your SD card and copy some new ones. What part of this did you have trouble with?

Excellent way to get a boot.dat error, thanks for playing that stupid game.

boot.dat error means you're still using the dongle. Don't do that.

The only prerequisites to play it on a real console are:

- A hackable/hardmodded console (plenty on ebay if you don't have one)

- A computer

- An internet connection

- Basic reading ability

Maybe they were the leakers?

This reminds me of the guys in the warez/music scenes back in the day. One well documented example was Dell Glover. Interesting reads. Kind of a halfway point between the motives in the story.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dell+Glover

Comments are focusing on legal aspects, but I believe not enough attention is paid to gaming addiction as a mental health issue.

Many decades ago I had some friends dropping out of college because of it, and myself, I quit cold turkey more than quarter of century ago when I realized how much gaming negatively affected my well-being.

I cold turkey quit gaming shortly after first xbox came out. All my college buddies/roommates were skipping classes and playing nonstop. I was excited about it and played a bit but quickly realized I just didn't have time to do that and focus on other life goals (don't remember details but probably after getting a bad test grade or missing something important); like finishing college at the time.

Since then, a lot of them haven't really made progress "in life". I'm sure they're happy and all, I don't know really, but I know I wouldn't have been happy doing what they've done. (Eg. playing a ton of games while maintaining bare level of income/sustenance in order to devote majority of life on gaming)

Artists, musicians, gamer, hopeful pro athletes and parents all make sacrifices in the rat race.

The game of life is what all of us have been feed.. seems to work for some.. maybe there are other paths for others. Who I am I to judge?

Yeah it's no judgement really just a self-realization that "I know I wouldn't have been happy doing what they've done" and breaking out of a fairly strong force of inertia

You might have been more happy than you are now. Hard to know until you walked the path.

Maybe. I'm consider myself somewhat self aware though and believe otherwise.

Ironic cause the game leaked 12 days early on emulators

I don't understand, TOTK hasn't come out yet, it's not out until 20 June .. which coincidentally is the day after my eldest finishes his exams!!

Are there similar types of fraud occurring at Amazon warehouses / fulfillment centers?

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-manager-fac...

If they don't have strong security and a lot of cameras watching their stocks of trading cards they do. Those things are basically like cash to the right criminal. I know MTG has seen quite a few scams where people buy boxes brand new only to discover someone has removed all the good cards and almost perfectly sealed it back up. Often it's a rogue supply chain or retail employee involved.

To leave the FC each associate has to walk through a metal detector and empty their pockets. No bags are allowed in. These guys must have stuffed the games down their pants or something.

Also, there are cameras everywhere. Mostly to figure out what happened after the fact - not constantly monitoring.

Nintendo Switch games are very small memory cards, maybe 1.5cm among the longest edge and 2.5mm thick?? I imagine you could easily stick it to the back of a belt buckle or under an insole (in shoes there's is sometimes a metal stiffener between the heel and midsole) or secrete it on your person ("prison pocket"!) without it setting off a metal detector.

I remember when I was a kid and someone's mom worked at a book store when Harry Potter came out...

This is what happens when you have no loyalty to staff. If they had treated workers like humans people would stay and long term employees are less likely to steal because they count on their job. The average length of employment is a month.. no surprise

I understood this level of fanboyism when I was twelve and looked forward to only one or two games a year. I don't understand how you can care that much about games in 2023 without also having a backlog big enough to occupy you until future releases.

my only question is why… the game leaked over a week prior to launch

As for man #1, that's some dedication. Let the man play.

There's something to be admired about people who put a lot of effort into planning and doing something, even if it is a bit petty.

I'm not sure whether there was much planning involved here. I mean they hadn't even a good escape-route. They just stopped coming to work, instead of terminating the contract, or call ill.

> a good escape-route

This, especially. You'd think, as a video gamer in an Amazon warehouse, the choices would be ~endless...

https://youtu.be/Ecbjqk5COY0

True, but this is not that.

But to work at an Amazon warehouse ???

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