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.
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.
In your scenario, Amazon would experience a boom of workers, then experience workers x unit cost theft, and then have 0 workers.
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.
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.
If EVERYONE farmed, there would be waaaay to much food and no water left on the planet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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
Resale though is bad.