Or to pirate games in general. 99% of the Steam library is trivial to pirate but that's doing just fine.

The Switch is on its last legs anyway, and the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

> 99% of the Steam library is trivial to pirate but that's doing just fine.

I think part of it is that Steam offers more than just games; it's a platform for mods, you have friends, there's the Steam community, early access Steam games, Steam cloud, etc.

I think you're right that most people just don't even bother with the effort to pirate stuff in general, though. When I've been asked to, I've shown family members multiple times how to pirate media using a torrent client, but they end up forgetting and don't bother to do it by themselves.

> the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

It is possible, but in the past Nintendo didn't reset.

Wii-U, 3DS and Switch share some parts in common still.

You can't emulate 3DS on the Steam Deck, apparently it's either not powerful enough or 3DS emulators don't work well with AMD drivers. The games are too slow, I tried it with Link Between Worlds.

I expect the next Switch to be powerful enough to make emulation difficult, but we'll see.

> You can't emulate 3DS on the Steam Deck

Its's just less work has been put into 3DS emulation atm, nothing else.

Some of the 3DS citra emu devs went off to focus on Yuzu iirc, but lately citra is more active again.

> The Switch is on its last legs anyway, and the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

Jailbreaking yes, but emulation? I wouldn't be so certain, it's still the fundamentally same, mainstream CPU/GPU family just with more beef.

The most pressing challenge is getting game cartridges to a point where they can be decrypted.

I suppose, but as you say jailbreaking is a prerequisite to emulation since we need to extract the games, and possibly the firmware. In the absence of a "god mode" hardware exploit like the Tegra X1 bootrom bug that's also a moving target because newer games will need newer firmware to decrypt, requiring a steady supply of new exploits to keep breaking open those new firmwares.

the hits that were released for the previous one however will still be pirated.

especially at normal speed, if that's what we're doing I'll just play it on the switch.

When I'm able to significantly speed the game up, then I'll consider emulating it.

The problem is that I often play games like RPG's that like to make you sit and wait on load screens and animations, speeding it up allows me to experience the game in far less time.