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?
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 day ago
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.
victorz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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?
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 day ago
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.
victorz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I bet it would be a bitch, no doubt.
Agree completely. They shouldn’t.