Eeeeeh, I give a lot less credence to that then I did when I was in college - back then it seemed like everyone was pirating everything (because, facts) but now a days a major consumer for video games is the millennials that have passed the cash vs. free time tipping point of piracy being attractive.
Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstrung and limited it was - now I use spotify and like... why even bother pirating music now?
Sure occasionally pirating a big title from Ubisoft out of spite alone is pretty attractive but I mostly just nab things off Steam and leave it at that.
Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying. Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire. Most of this anti-piracy stuff is just lowering the value to the end consumer anyways.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. If you're trying to claim that piracy has no value proposition, then you're missing a market of people who maintain these torrents/sites with the hopes of archiving them for the future.
> Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying.
Because they don't make money on the Switch. In fact, in the first few months of selling it, they were losing about $30 on every unit sold because of how expensive shipping was. Even today, the Switch runs a pretty thin profit margin, if any. Same goes for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, which gives you a pretty good idea of why these companies are so keen to keep an iron grip on software distribution.
>Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so
why not try and make your platform not annoying.
because the console makers make little (or more often lose) profit from each system, so the draw is to make up or it by selling software. first party software or 3rd party software they get 30% of sales from.
>Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire
Tell that to the poor PSP. The reality is that 1% use it to run emulators or make homebrew and 99% use it to run free games. To the ordinary consumers, these aren't general purpose computers to tinker around with, they are toys to entertain themselves with. They have computers and phones for the former.
It's certainly not for lack of trying. Fail0verflow, one of the largest and most successful CTF teams in the world, spent nearly 2 years trying to reverse engineer the bootloader, and ended up never finding any real security exploits in the process. There were warmboot attacks (see Fusee-Gelee) that involved code injection, but even then the machine would still recognize it was running in debug mode, and block the user from access to certain functions. Besides being a great anecdote here, the history of Switch hacking is really interesting, and well worth looking into if you have the time.
