Nintendo: “you bought our hardware, but we will brick it if you don’t use it in exactly the way we like!”
Remember, when tech bros complain that Regulations Stifle Innovation, this is the kind of “innovation” they’re talking about.
They want to innovate some more money out of your pockets.
yo ho, all hands, hoist the colors high,
heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
The current management of nintendo will never figure it out. Piracy is the competition. It’s not about getting the thing for free, it’s about getting a better service. I’d buy mario 3 again (again) if that meant I’d get a rom I could run on my pc through FCEUX and enjoy all the features/enhancements that software offers. There’s a handful of gamecube games available on switch2, but all of them are better through Dolphin than what official hardware can offer. Nintendo’s refund policy is a joke. The eshop is unpleasant to use. Even ignoring all of that, the original switch only had a handful of actual first party titles, not enough to justify the console’s price tag (and each those were merely ok, not enough to justify buying a console for one game).
sega sells their games on steam, and while I don’t like the emulator they use I can at least say that I own a legal copy of sonic spinball.
When they release a new system they will probably brick them anyway
Well, their shitty attitude towards consumers is why I won’t be getting a switch 2. So they can try bricking my asshole.
i stopped buying nintendo after wii. fuck them
Nintendo, you are supposed to be the good guy company remember?
Sadly the good guys retired and left the company with the rats.
Why do I suddenly hear someone yelling “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED” ?
This was the final straw for me, I’m done with Nintendo.
better consumer protection says what
It says “Sign the Stop Destroying Videogames initiative if you can”
I have, and I have advocated for it everywhere.
Still would be EU only.
Americans can’t sign it, but the law would absolutely benefit American gamers.
If they have to do the legwork to leave the games in a playable state or pass it to the community, American gamers will be able to participate.
considers altering entire network stack to trick a Switch 2 into thinking it never leaves EU soil
“Nah, I’ll probably just not buy one. Fuck em.”
Steam Deck, nothing more than Steam Deck…
I kind of want to pick one up, but i can’t get a clear picture on if I should wait for a steam deck 2. From what I could find, they want to wait until there’s enough of an upgrade to be worth it. At one point that suggested around 2025, but more recent stuff makes it seem like they’re not even working on one, and other stuff hints that they are.
Get a Steam Deck OLED if you want a Steam Deck. Don’t wait for a hypothetical next version. I have both the LCD and OLED, and while both are excellent, the OLED is a slight improvement in a few days (lighter, less bezel, 90hz instead of 60hz, obviously you get an OLED screen, and the CPU/GPU are a tiny, tiny bit beefier).
if I should wait for a steam deck 2
there will alaways be The Next Device. There are no real hints that it will release anytime soon.
So if you’re interested in picking one up, now is a good of a time as any. You can also save some money by getting a refurbished 64GB model and upgrading the ssd yourself (takes just a couple minutes, a screwdriver and a thumbdrive with usb C to reinstall steamOS)
My cousins and I had this discussion and I’m like, “I dunno, I’m happy with it.”
It’s an indie/AA machine with 6th-gen retro perks. I’m good. That’s my niche.
they have said they’re not working on a version two because they don’t feel the need to upgrade their hardware right now.
this is a low powered handheld gaming device. i use an LCD model as my daily gaming device and it kicks ass. i am unsure what upgrades are going to make it more “worth it” beyond what they’ve already done with the steam decks they are making and selling.
it works well and plays games right now, is my point.
i advise that you stop waiting to buy the next Shiny New Thing™️ and just get one if you want one. they’re fun and life is short. enjoy yourself!
Its probably 3-5 years out, games aren’t pushing hardware enough to justify it at this point.
I picked one up a few years ago and I love it. When I have the opportunity, it’s so nice to chill in a waiting room and game instead of just doom scrolling.
Like the other poster said, I’m happy with the regular deck. Given there’s no news about the 2nd one, I’d grab it and enjoy.
Are there switch 2 emulators yet?
Switch 1 was feasible as its CPU was similar to the ones found on a $200 android tablet from 2018 so even a Chromebook can emulate that.
Switch 2 is comparable to a mid range modern gaming PC so we have to wait at least a decade for full speed emulation, if not more
Switch 2 GPU is similar in spec to a laptop RTX 2050 with more vram and better DLSS, I wouldn’t say that’s mid range gaming PC.
I’d say something decent will exist by the end of the decade if Nintendo can’t stop development of emulators.
Seriously? It’s been out for a few weeks, obviously there aren’t any. And since Nintendo spent a lot of time and money to shut down most original Switch emulators I doubt we’ll see S2 ones anytime soon. The increased S2 hardware power, also obviously, means you’d need a current or even future top-end PC to be able to handle the emulation.
Your comment is on the level of a 5-year-old asking if they can play Switch 2 on their phone or something. The answer is so incredibly obvious.
Pleasant. I suppose you never have questions about topics which are not your forte?
I get how it can be shocking that someone doesn’t know as much as you about something that seems like common knowledge to you,
But tbh I’m like pretty certain the firmware is mostly the same, and it can’t be that different if Switch 1 games can be upgraded to Switch 2 games. I doubt they went back and ported every single game to a new system if it wasn’t easy to do so. So tbh I don’t think its going to be that long for emulators to come out.
You are right about the processing power part but your comment is a bit too harsh considering the switch 2 has shared the same firmware with switch 1. And possibly very similar hardware
I am not a emulator dev. though. But I am speculating it would be easier to develop emulators for switch 2 compared to a brand new console (or compared to generational leaps of other consoles)
Because in the US, you guys aren’t really consumers (which would give you a status), you’re merely walking and vaguely sentient (hopefully enough to click on “add to cart”) wallets that the corporations pluck money from at every opportunity. This is your legally enforced reality.
We are not even people anymore.
Common European W
Lol, why even buy such a piece of shit then? Even when in the EU, the fact they do this is enough.
Because Banana!
But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.
That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.
And yes, I do own a Switch 2.
Same for veganism. Taste is always king :/
It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.
Luckily I don’t have kids and hence don’t have to buy them such crap 😁
But yeah sure, I’m all in for regulations. But voting with your wallet is still the most basic way to say “lol no”. If I’d be hellbent on gaming on-the-go I’m sure there are alternatives that come close at least. If not, the I guess I’d carry a laptop around for that
No it is not.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed. If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
Yea, distribution and creation of art has to be separate. Only way I see against enshitification.
Like, there must be a choice between ad spreader datahoarder low price offer and premium low data no ad offer. There must be no monopoly over distribution of a specific art piece if it is no unique art form, like a hand drawn picture. (Like music, games, movies, series, trading card game, tabletop games, apps etc.)
Meaning, nintendo, netflix, apple, disnay and similar would have to offer distribution licenses according fair market rights and not limit those licenses to themself as self distributor.
At least, that is my opinion
Seriously! Just buy a used 3DS and hack it to run every game, emulator, etc. You can actually play DOS games and ScummVM games on it!
Sounds fine to me. But I bet there are a handful of “nice” exclusives.
You can’t play Donkey Kong Bananza
Because I have no intention of playing pirated games so I’m at no risk? Also I’m in the EU so I’d be fine regardless?
It’s already happened that Nintendo remotely bricked a switch 2 because its owner bought an used game, but that game was dumped by its previous owner.
You also have no intention of buying 100% genuine original, but used, games?
I have no intention of buying used games, no. Never bought a used game for the original Switch either. I always buy my shit on launch because I want it fast. 🙂
Which is fine until the piracy detection system has a false positive and you lose your Switch. Or you buy a second hand copy of a game the original owner made a copy of and continues to use and your switch gets bricked. I understand you’re in the EU, but this kind of nonsense would definitely put me off a system that’s already inordinately expensive.
To each their own. 👍 I hear your points. Surely the false positive should be refutable and able to be appealed. At least in the EU? 🙃
How does Nintendo know if someone makes a copy/dump of a physical game card?
If you’re offline only, they can’t afaik. In the case of online I’m lead to believe each individual cart is signed with a unique certificate so they can tell if that cart has been used in more than one console. If there’s two instances of the same thing online at the same time it must be pirated.
In terms of reversal - I’ll work from the premise we agree that it’s unacceptable a customer loses access to a device they purchased and own because the company doesn’t like it. But let’s say it happens, how much hassle is it going to be to undo it? The console is bricked so it’s presumably not running/able to go online? Do I need access to a PC to fix it? Do I need to send it off to Nintendo? Go to a game store?
Fwiw I like tinkering with consoles and devices - not necessarily because of piracy, I just like running weird software on them or making them do things they weren’t meant to. It’s not a common use case, but it’s valid enough. Why should Nintendo control that.
how much hassle is it going to be to undo it?
Yeah, I bet it would be a bitch, no doubt.
I like tinkering with consoles and devices. […] Why should Nintendo control that.
Agree completely. They shouldn’t.
Pirated games can be one or several of the following:
- a means of participating in a chosen culture when players can’t afford/justify the price tag (one Nintendo game now costs the same as a week’s worth of groceries for two people where I live)
- a form of archive because game publishers are notorious for killing games
- a form of backup because things happen to disks/cartridges
- a form of backup because servers go down
- a form of backup because not everyone’s internet is reliable
- a means making the game more accessible by adding features (eg. the option of infinite lives/health for someone with muscular dystrophy)
- a form of protest over ever-increasing prices at the same time as ever-increasing layoffs, and ever-decreasing quality.
More directly relevant to you: the money you give Nintendo goes to their legal teams, to continue to find loopholes around the protections you have. They’re the ones fighting the “Stop Killing Games” movement. Nintendo recently won a lawsuit against 1fichier in France for hosting emulated games. It has been marked as a “significant” win against any level of piracy in the EU. Nintendo is continually working to make sure that despite living in the EU, you won’t be fine regardless. Your purchase directly funds that.
Maybe you have no intention of playing pirated games, but I hope you can appreciate that this is larger than just some teenager feeling powerful because they stole something?
Definitely a balance between funding their legal team and just wanting to play the games they put out, indeed. Currently I just want to play. We’ll see if I take the high road later. Having too much fun with my kids at the moment though.
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