Nintendo's behaviour seems to be very much anti hacker and even anti-consumer in cases like this one. Anyone else have any strong feelings about this?
Most Nintendo cartridges will function a decade from now. Many discs for other consoles don't even have the full game on it... and many can't function without connecting to a service. I'd prefer the system that is possible to preserve (but gets aggressive with monetization) then the one that's impossible to preserve.
Points to xbox for doing well with backwards compatibility and carrying libraries forward. But that could change in future.
The other platforms have also way less exclusives. The PS5 has a grand total of 12 exclusive games listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga... . Why even bother?
For example for PS4 only games there's a decent amount more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_4-only_ga...
I'm pretty disappointed in the PS5's library but for someone who never had a PS4 the PS5 is absolutely worth it. Maybe by the time they get through the backlog of good PS4 games there will be something worth playing on the PS5
Personally, I paid for a copy of Tears of the Kingdom when it came out, but only because I had a Switch I could borrow from someone to play it on - if I hadn't had that option, I wouldn't have bought a Switch just to play one game, and I just wouldn't have bought the game at all.
Had they released the game on PC as well as Switch, I would have bought it for PC, but that's not an option. As it stands, either you have to own an overpriced and underpowered console, even if you only want to play one Nintendo game, or you can pirate the game and play it on PC, and have a much better experience than on a real Switch. Nintendo is somewhat bringing this upon itself in my opinion and I don't feel much sympathy for their lost profits, real or imagined.
Considering that the Steam Deck is more expensive than the Switch, arguably every SD player using Yuzu is several lost sales for Nintendo.
Nintendo is somewhat bringing this upon itself in my opinion and I don't feel much sympathy for their lost profits, real or imagined.
This is why they are going after Yuzu in the first place...Because Yuzu makes it easy to pirate Switch games and the pirates feel entitled to play those games on a more expensive device than the device they claim is too expensive.
And Nintendo is okay with that. If you're never going to be a paying customer, they don't care what you think.
Regardless of that particular commenter, many paying customers of Nintendo have the same attitude that they will only emulate switch games.
I think “many” is probably a bit much.
Given this discussion started around whether to boycott Nintendo or not, it seems that you're not a Nintendo customer at all. So I'm not really sure what you would be boycotting?
As for releasing games on PC, I don't see any reason why they would? Developing for PC is much more difficult than a single console, when it comes to handling the variety of hardware, anti-cheat, etc. TOTK and their Mario games are system sellers, with the former even releasing alongside a special edition console and pro controller. Delaying the release of these games to add dev time for a PC port is never going to be worth it.
>Yuzu impacts their bottom line in a way that Dolphin doesn’t.
Dolphin could emulate nearly all commercial Wii games by April 2009.
That was sooner into the console's lifespan than where we are now with the switch. (29 months since the Wii's release vs 83 months since the Switch's release)
Maybe more people have gaming-grade computers sitting around now than they did 15 years ago?
You don't need a very powerful computer to emulate a Switch. My M1 Mac Mini w/ 8GB of RAM (~$400) has been able to play every Switch game I've been interested in with equal or slightly better performance than the actual console.
> That was sooner into the console's lifespan than where we are now with the switch.
I don't have any insight into why they didn't go after Dolphin in 2009, but I do think it explains why they're going after Yuzu now.
Contrast that to the Switch where most system sellers can be played on a standard controller without a gyroscope, the threat to their bottom line is much higher.
I have nothing against a Switch emulator existing at all, but making it conveniently easy for the masses to pirate games, condoning it in private spaces you manage, and profiting off the demand for the emulator due to that piracy are all against the ideas of preservation.
If you include DRM circumvention with the emulator, then there's an argument that it's developed specifically with piracy in mind.
Nintendo themselves don't disdain historical preservation. They preserve their code, assets, games, etc themselves.
Reality (and the courts) disagree with you.
1: "Gary Bowser, 52, a Canadian national of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, pleaded guilty in October 2021 to Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices, and Trafficking in Circumvention Devices."
The leak that exposed that information showed it was part of Nintendo's larger 5-step plan to bully and silence the homebrew scene.
[1] https://www.technadu.com/nintendo-spying-3ds-hacker-neimod-t...
Copyright and patents are an artifact of the government being easily corruptible by media companies who make insane amount of money.
Until we get rid of the government we'll always have laws which help the rich steal from the people.
This is a bad attitude - every system can be gamed - social/market pressure is an important mechanism for shaping outcomes.
It's pretty simple: don't target people who aren't doing things that are morally reprehensible, even if it's a systemic threat to your company (cue the laughter from the capitalists who can't understand anything beyond industrial machinations). Evolve and adapt to include them in your assets, or die while the fitter companies do. Someday, someone's going to have more money than Nintendo and they will force Nintendo to do whatever they want them to. I'm just hoping its sooner rather than later. They've earned every second of their demise. Fuck any company that thinks lawfare is excusable as 'might makes right'.
As far as I'm concerned, this is an issue of the DMCA more than Nintendo itself. In the strictest sense, devs really don't care about this and lawyers are only doing their job.
Boycotting Nintendo may make sense in a moral sense, but not one that will change how the DMCA works.
>Nintendo's behaviour seems to be very much anti hacker and even anti-consumer in cases like this one. Anyone else have any strong feelings about this?
Anti-hacker, sure. 99% of companies are anti-hacker.
Anti-consumer... First, I really think this is the worst modern cliche of modern media discourse. Just to remind people of the definition:
> Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society.
I don't really see how luxury entertainment can ever meet the true philosophical meaning of the term that halts social progress and suppressing the flow of money to the populace.
With all that said, the closest I feel Nintendo has gotten to anti-consumerism is the "vault" strategy done with Mario All Stars. Which they seemingly only did for that game and a few of those "100 multiplayer" style games. It's a strategy making use of false scarcity for a product that can be infinitely reproducible (and requires no servers on their end to operate) in order to increase urgency to play/buy said work. Not only is that morally repugnant, I'm not even sure if it's a financially sound decision for a company who's products are known for having a long tail in sales, unlike most video games.
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in the colloquial sense of:
>not favorable to consumers : improperly favoring the interests of businesses over the interests of consumers.
every business technically strides to be anti-consumerist. The act of charging money for a product is anti-consumerist. I don't see how Nintendo differs here, nor how they are the worst, in a world where almost every AAA company in the west is trying to rely on psuedo-subscriptions with battle passes and every company in the east are making millions on mobile off of the lootbox model.
Nintendo seemed to dip their toes in indirectly a few times (reminder: they do not fully own any of the remaining IPs using Lootboxes) but mostly have pulled out, even removing the gacha from a few of their games. So they for the most part simply profit from an online service with "free" games and one time purchase of other console games.
There needs to be a way to fix the system so that both sides of any court battle are on (fairly) equal footing, and having significantly more resources than your opponent doesn't tilt the field in your favour in any practical way.
And the target audience is still kids/family. Playing games doesn't need to be PC first or mobile first and it hinders quality.
Nintendo has the same right as Sony and ms to sell their system.
I would love to have it for PC, don't get me wrong, but families don't play games in front of a PC.
I don't think this argument is fair.