That's not the story at all. Rajan entered a voluntary agreement with Nintendo, through which his game would be distributed on their platform. He deliberately deceived them about the presence of a potentially security-critical feature, thereby breaching that agreement; Nintendo took the perfectly reasonable decision to remove his game from their platform.

There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about bootloader unlocking, sideloading and consumer choice, but this is not that debate. The issue here is fundamentally about someone intentionally deceiving a business partner.

Sidebar: There are no shortage of tablet-ish computers that will run arbitrary code. The Joy-Con controllers are class-compliant and will work with any Bluetooth host. There are open alternatives, but a lot of people buy the Switch specifically because it offers a curated experience with clear age ratings and effective parental controls.

To meaningfully contribute to the debate on walled gardens, it is first necessary to acknowledge their relative popularity compared to open platforms. If walled gardens were universally and unconditionally bad, it is implausible that they would have such broad market acceptance. In the case of Nintendo, this issue is particularly acute - many informed observers credit the NES10 chip and the Nintendo Seal of Quality with saving the video games industry.

> If walled gardens were universally and unconditionally bad, it is implausible that they would have such broad market acceptance.

This has got to be a joke.

I think that a legal fudge I would be satisfied with is where a manufacturer wants a branded store and some lock-in, that they nevertheless must allow secondary marketplaces, with the legal protection provided for both users and the original manufacturer that any secondary marketplaces can be contractually required to be clearly labelled as such.

So all one needs to do to make exploits/jailbreaks/backup loaders for switch is to get a Nintendo developer account? Sounds like a win

Apparently, getting a Nintendo developer account is pretty difficult. You have to pitch a specific game to them and follow a bunch of rules to make your game and code secure. That's also why Nintendo treated this incident as such a big deal - they are very strict about access to the platform, and this blatantly broke their rules.

Getting the account is easy.

Getting approval to develop for the Switch is much harder.

You can buy Wii U and 3DS dev kits right away, though. And boy they are EXPENSIVE.

... and buy separate devkit hardware (relatively cheap compared to Wii U days, but still), make an actual game (devkit does not play retail games, and retail console cannot install dev-signed apps), get it through TRC/lotcheck, pay the fees to publish the game, give trailers/launch material to Nintendo, never once mention its secret purpose as a jailbreak, and then secretly share it with all your friends without any bit of the hacker community finding it out. Extremely easy.

> never once mention its secret purpose as a jailbreak

The switch is completely thoroughly irreversibly jailbroken at the hardware level already. I don't think the secret purpose was to be a jailbreak.

> The switch is completely thoroughly irreversibly jailbroken at the hardware level already.

This has been fixed in hardware revisions since about a year ago. Getting a unit that is vulnerable to the so-called RCM exploit has become increasingly difficult.

(The boot9strap exploit against the 3DS, on the other hand, was never fixed. One wonders why.)

...it occurs to me that some developer could be hiding a secret Jailbreak in a retail game. But we would never know about it. :D

Consumers own their devices. You can't just assume everything a company puts into an agreement is legal, moral or enforceable. They're always trying to put one over their partners and consumers.

It's easy to continue the line of thought to absurdity, so I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

There's a few lines here that need to be drawn somewhere. Nintendo sells access to a platform to developers. It's not unreasonable that they aren't allowed free reign to control what's run; at some point one developers free reign would conflict with anothers.

Should the consumer have free control over what's running on their hardware? Perhaps. Let's for the sake of argument assume yes.

Then how should Nintendo and third party developers deal with hackers? Completely cut their access to Nintendo/game services? Now they have a brick.

The lines drawn for developers and consumers with respect to game consoles make sense and generally work for all involved.

I think your point has legs in other contexts (i.e. Apple products, right to repair, etc) just not here. If people feel differently they should vote with their dollars, but managed walled gardens will always be greener in some aspects.

Why is it reasonable to be given free reign to control what is run on their platform? this is why Apple gets away with anti-competitive practices like pulling apps that compete with newly released features, even though the apps weren't a problem before.

These are truly walled gardens. Worse, these walled gardens are monopolies that can and are abused by large companies.

Continuity. Standards and limitations keep the platform usable which makes it valuable to all involved. For walled gardens to be successful, both consumers and developers must both buy into them.

So, either people are painfully stupid or a managed platform has some appeal over free ones.

Continuity, ease of use, various warranties/guarantees make walled gardens attractive. If consumers have free reign and brick their device, it's hard to expect the manufacturer to have/honor any warranty. If developers have free reign there's no guarantee another application won't break theirs or that they won't break someone else's... or that it'll work with whatever the consumer is doing.

Yes, an obvious counter point is *nix systems, but there is some authority in that ecosystem which keeps most things working. It's still not painless to setup/use which prevents it from effectively competing with windows/Mac OS.

Simply put, the price of admission into a walled garden comes with some perks/guarantees/warranties which aren't readily available elsewhere.

Windows and Mac OS are not walled gardens in this way, although both Apple and Microsoft have shown signs of wanting to make them more so. Despite Windows not being a walled garden it has better continuity than any platform Nintendo has ever made, and ironically not only for Windows (and DOS) software but for most Nintendo platforms too via emulators.

Fair point, that was a poor example/counter example on my part.

What I had in mind was more a long the lines that windows/Mac OS isn't transparent and the consumer has limited control over what it's doing and how to implement things. Furthermore their official app stores are a walled garden of sorts.

Consumers/developers have a good deal of freedom on these platforms and with that comes breakage in various forms. Malware, instability, etc. And to deal with that you have repair shops/programs. System resets, fresh installs etc. Maintenance becomes a responsiblity of the consumer.

Like I said, the lines can move based on context. Moving the needle further towards freedom for developers/consumers gets you *nix systems - which is harder for your average consumer to maintain/use. Moving away gets you iphones/consoles, etc which "just work" and flaws in software/hardware handled by the manufacturer.

Very off-topic, but I've seen this twice this week already: it's free rein (as in horses), not free reign [1].

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15276/is-this-us...

But since "free reign" has been about since 1834, there's about a 40/60 split between "reign" and "rein", and both make the same sense, I don't think anyone except daft old prescriptivists would care now, do you?

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/26/rein-or-reign...

I'm not sure I buy that argument - according to the article it's a 20/80 split between "take the reigns"/"take the reins" with about the same number of samples. In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong, and I question either the statistics or the sampled population.

> In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong

But still understandable with the kind of context - "take the reins" and "take the reigns" would be imply "take control", no? (Sure, it's clunky, but that's English for you.)

It is understandable and doesn't "effect" my comprehension, but that doesn't mean that the net "affect" is equivalent or desirable. :)

You, the customer, are allowed to do anything with your device. What they are doing is blocking a developer that makes money on their marketplace for not following rules. They wouldn't allow anyone to sell pornography, malware, defective/broken software etc. either.

It is okay, just don't buy anything made by Nintendo unless you're ok with Nintendo's restrictive 'nanny console' TOS. You can run Linux and play GTA and Mortal Kombat on other consoles. Nintendo is geared towards people who like Nintendo.

I think the "Just don't buy it" mantra has been applied too broadly. It implies that people have no right to complain about a company, which I completely reject.

The ability to complain about companies is a fundamental right, although it's I important to understand that no one at Nintendo is listening. I personally hate Nintendo and despise the way they prevent young people from modding/hacking their consoles and playing GTA games. Those are the two things I want out of a gaming console, so I don't buy anything Nintendo makes.

Sony removed the ability to run Linux many years ago, after it was determined that it was impossible to prevent a jailbreak as long as the second OS feature existed. I’m not aware of Xbox ever supporting this.

Two comments on that A) its impossible to prevent jailbreaks no matter if a second OS option exists or not and B) the Linux option was removed since it was seen as an unneeded expense. Its function for Sony was to keep the people motivated to jailbreak a console from doing so. After the removal of the Linux option the PlayStation was jailbroken.

OtherOS was officially removed due to security concerns. I'm not sure how to find this offhand but my recollection is that OtherOS was used to facilitate jailbreaking the system. Its function wasn't to prevent jailbreaks but to get people interested in programming for the Cell processor.

A significant portion of the skilled hardware hackers cracking consoles do it because they care about homebrew, but they dislike piracy.

By providing something like OtherOS, you remove the incentive for that group to crack your console.

It is fairly telling that the PS3 was only cracked after OtherOS was removed.

A news article talking about George Hotz's original PS3 hack was released January 25, 2010. The PS3 software update that removed OtherOS was released April 1, 2010.

As I recall, ultimately Hotz managed to compromise the device's root key, and Sony determined that it was impossible to protect the key (after replacing it) as long as OtherOS continued to exist.

Sony did technically 'remove it', although it's still something that can be done if you're really interested in doing it. Nintendo seems to prioritize jailbreaking above everything else and for most of their consoles there's literally nothing interesting that can be done outside of using them to play Nintendo games.

> outside of using them to play Nintendo games

Small nit - you probably mean "outside of using them to play Nintendo-approved games" since there's only 2 Nintendo games on the Switch here and 6 non-Nintendo games.

> You can run Linux and play GTA and Mortal Kombat on other consoles.

I don't know what you mean here. You can play the latest Mortal Kombat on the Switch, too.

He means that if you don't like Nintendo's restrictive policies, you're more than welcome to play the vast majority of the games on the other consoles/platforms they're available on.

Nintendo gets a pass on a lot of crap other companies would get torched for by the internet community, DRM, DCMA take downs, etc. Nostalgia is powerful

It's not just nostalgia.

Nintendo keeps providing excellent gaming experience that no one else does. Super Mario Odyssey is awesome not because it's the same old Mario guy from NES, but because it is just a great game.

Nintendo games are not polluted by the games-as-service and free-to-play monetization mindsets as badly as other platforms.

I don't like a lot of their rigidity, such as takedowns or still not getting rid of having stuff segregated by regions, but I appreciate what they contribute to the world of video games.

> providing excellent gaming experience ... not polluted by the games-as-service and free-to-play monetization mindsets as badly as other platforms.

But why does this have to do with draconian lock-down rules? Presumably, allowing homebrew code is not gonna affect the above at all.

The fact that they are so strict in a very real way keeps a lot of crapware and annoyances (that I do see on other platforms, more or less linearly following the openness) off of the marketplace. I go from liking it to hating it more or less on a yearly cycle, but I have never hated it enough to stop owning their devices.

When I want something with solid gameplay that doesn't just sell because the graphics are so good (or whatever marketing flavour of the month is in vogue at the moment), a Nintendo console is what I go to.

The quality of software available on the nintendo store has nothing to do with how locked down the hardware is! Of course nintendo (or any other platform holder) would like you to believe otherwise, because by controlling the platform, they are able to maximize the profit extraction. Hardware lockdown and quality of the curated store has nothing to do with each other. Nintendo can (and should) continue to curate their store.

But if i want to produce homebrew for my own machine, I'd have to get permission from nintendo. I also have to pay for that priviledge, when the hardware is something i have purchased.

> The quality of software available on the nintendo store has nothing to do with how locked down the hardware is!

You say this and there was certainly a time when I would have agreed with you. Sadly, the reality doesn't match that belief so I no longer think that is the case.

>Super Mario Odyssey is awesome not because it's the same old Mario guy from NES, but because it is just a great game.

See that is nostalgia talking.

My Mario history is SMB2, then Super Mario Odyssey. If you think I like SMO because of some nostalgia for SMB2, you might want to take another look at both games because there's an astonishing world of difference and very little in common apart from the name "Mario".

That's a bit of a silly argument. A games console is specifically sold as a device upon which you can play games, and nothing else. If you want to be able to perform other computing tasks and/or write your own programs you buy a general purpose computer not a games console. Your argument is a bit like saying "why can't I fry burgers with my fridge?"

Uh...not at all similar. Refrigerators don’t have the capability to fry burgers, and if someone came along and figured out a way to do that, the refrigerator manufacturer couldn’t say “your banned from making any modifications to our refrigerators”.

If nintendo didn’t put DRM, publishers would avoid the platform, as they would see it as insecure. Blame the laws allowing this.

Sure, just like developers never make games for Windows PC.

Or like they already don't make them for the Switch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SwitchPirates/comments/9lspva/compl...

Switch piracy is massively easier than on PC. You just have to hack the console once and now you have access to every game. Also the games are signed by nintendo and the piracy installers verify that no one has modified the game since nintendo verified it so there is no risk of malware

Developers who make games for Windows PCs tend to fill them with so many "DRM" and "anti-cheat" measures that they might as well just sell them as a prebaked rootkit.

They are prebaked rootkits. They're marketed as such and I think they never pretend otherwise. The truly sad thing is the amount of people that still send money to people who knowingly compromise their entire machine. Then they are thankful for it.

DRM is typically sold by a third party vendor. It is typically not effective against software pirates.

You are overstating its use, however.

I was thinking of the Sony rootkit, and the Starforce and VAC exploits.

The Sony toolkit debacle was its own thing. In addition, that rootkit was on music CDs.

I worked for a game division of Sony at the time, and we were furious at the mothership for that incident.