That’s not how Nintendo would view it though. The GP is absolutely correct that this would be seen as inviting people to leave Nintendos ecosystem. The only way this would work for Nintendo Would be if the “dongle” cost as much as a Switch, but then who’d want to pay that much for an emulator?

It’s also worth noting that Nintendo don’t have an issue with emulation per se, several of their commercial products are based on emulation. But I’m every instance where they support emulation it has been looked into their hardware ecosystem and the “emulation” word is never spoken publicly.

It changes the situation deeply. Switch piracy is not easy. You need to get an emulator, get a key dump for a Switch, torrent the game, setup everything. For a console you need physical modification or some tinkering shorting pins if you have a first gen console.

That’s a high bar to cross for Nintendo main market which remains families. Plus at this point the Switch is mostly a money printing machine between the old hardware and the store.

If you’re pirating you would probably also pirate the keys and you wouldn’t need to do the console exploit (as far as I understand it anyway)

That’s not at all equivalent to just plugging a box sold by Nintendo however which was the point I was making. Pirating is an involved process. The fact it exists doesn’t at all make a business case as the parent comment was implying especially considering that PC gaming is already a niche market.

It is really not that much of an involved process. Reading a wiki page and downloading a few files from the first hit of a Google result is probably similar effort to setting up whatever potential product you have in mind.

Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish. The people who go out of their way to pirate always will.

Does it work on an M1 Max yet?

> Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish

That's beside the point. What matters is that Nintendo believes that piracy must be opposed at all costs. It's not about sales, it's not about money, it's not about logic, I don't think it's even about the actual law. It's about attacking piracy, as an end unto itself.

Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited. So it doesn't cost much to Nintendo to maintain pressure on piracy.

And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right (and I'm a free software zealot :-)).

> Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

> Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited.

Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

> And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right

Well no; when I say that I don't think it's even about the law, I meant that their idea of what is and isn't okay seems to be more aggressive than the actual law. Contrast:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190329045404/https://www.ninte...

> Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?

> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.

vs

https://web.archive.org/web/20230428020356/https://www.copyr...

> 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs55

> (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

[...]

> (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

Now I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I struggle to read that as anything but Nintendo very confidently refusing to consider that a person could copy a game for any reason other than illegal piracy, while the actual law appears to allow for backups. Further up the same page they likewise are overwhelmingly confident that emulators only exist for illegal purposes, because nobody could ever want to play a legitimately-purchased game on anything except for original hardware.

> Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

They don't lose much because some difficulty is maintained by them pursuing it aggressively.

Once piracy become as easy or easier as buying the games, yes it becomes a problem for them.

The same way Napster became a problem at some point for the music industry. Before Napster, getting music for free was about copy cds or cassette tapes from friends or library, a rather slow and limited process, or wait for the tunes to pass in the radio and hit the record button quickly to record it in a cassette at a lower quality than CD. And you didn't have the full deal (with cover and lyrics and stuffs that mattered at the time). When it became easier to just look for music in Napster's builtin search engine and start playing it even before the tune was downloaded completely it became a huge problem as it was a much seamless process than both the original illegal and the legal way which involved either to go to a store and hope the right disc was available or go to one of the very few music online music shop available at the time, enter your credit card details (something very few people were still comfortable with) and wait for the disc to be delivered. I think there were already a few digital marketplace available but you usually had to wait for the full download to be completed, the UI wasn't as easy and you couldn't just browse another user shared library to discover new stuff and get suggestions.

this doesn't make sense. take it to it's logical conclusion and say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

> say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

Say that this site is user-funded and actually buys a copy for every click. Still think piracy is lost sales?

“What if reality were different in a way that I’ve concocted specifically for the purposes of this discussion?” is a fun game!

Sure piracy isn't necessarily a lost sale, but would there be more sales if people could not pirate the game, as with say a ps5 game? Especially in the case of rather widespread piracy in the weeks preceding release where even normal platform users may pirate because it's the only way to play. To what degree I couldn't tell you, it's most certainly not a 1 to 1 like the companies would like to argue, but there's almost certainly at least some amount of loss.

You can never stop motivated people from dumping the memory of hardware they own and making it easier for everyone else.

Piracy can never be stopped and they waste a lot of effort trying.

They should optimize for being lower friction than privacy, like Steam.

Microsoft and Sony have been quite successful at curbing piracy on their last couple of systems. Jailbreaks for the PS4 and PS5 are few and far between, and have limited capabilities because they've never been able to escalate all the way to the root of trust. The Xbox One and Xbox Series have never been jailbroken in any meaningful sense. Early Switches were permanently compromised by a bootloader bug, but there hasn't been a jailbreak that works on systems with fixed bootloaders for over five years now.

Hacking consoles has become steadily more difficult and we're approaching the point where it's just not feasible - Microsoft is already there with the Xbox.

They are successfully competing with piracy, but not by being lower friction but by being more reliable and trustworthy.

Nintendo are highly focussed on a market where the person making the buying decision isn't the person playing the game.

Buy your 11-year-old son a Switch for Xmas and you know that a) it will work out of the box b) there will be a several family-friendly games with name recognition for any child that age (Mario, Pokemon, Zelda) and c) no one in his class will have a more expensive version or one that works better.

Contrast this with trying to get something to work on a PC with a 'switch emulator dongle'. You have to plug it in yourself, you will end up spending more than you planned in the computer store because each component comes with sucker upgrades, and game choices will be much wider and trickier. Then the game which looks great on your son's friend's machine will play like sh*t and you'll feel guilty for having cheaped out, without necessarily knowing what the operative constraint is.

It would be pointless: piracy already happens so dongle stops nothing ,and dongle costs extra.

Just make PC ports like everyone else, it's free money (compared to risk of making new game) at this point

The dongles for high end CAD software don't work either. Iranian, Russian, and Chinese pirates are very very good at cracking them (and some even provide support contracts and bugfixes). It's an interesting side effect of sanctions. If you get a proxy in Iran, you can find cracks and even cracked updates and custom bugfixes of basically any CAD software you want.