I started pirating my Nintendo needs last generation and it runs so much better. Never buying from this anti-consumer company again.
When they release a new system they will probably brick them anyway
Nah, they can, but likely won’t risk it w/European owners’ litigation.
Change the headline a little bit.
“litigation” is not really how we usually talk about consumer’s rights in Europe though. As the article clearly states:
the legal framework in Europe is much more protective of users. The corresponding laws understand that disabling a device for unauthorized access to software is an excessive and illegal measure.
Edited, and quoted, because I can see European states arbitrarily litigate rights.
That’s … not how it works. If they did brick the consoles Europeans own they’d likely be breaking EU wide laws, which at the end would end up with the highest court in Europe - the EUCJ.
There’s nothing arbitrarily about this. Our consumer protection laws are quite strong.
I believe Nintendo has been rewarded enough lobbying budget by folks who keep buying their 🚮
It’s the same with my American friends who does not understand that we have house loans, not mortgage. They still call it mortgage, but that’s a completely different setup altogether!
Interesting, I’ve never heard about that… What is the difference?
It’s less about rights and more about “consumer protection”
I secretly hope they screw up and brick all the switch 2 devices by uploading a bad update, and are forced to send replacement units, potentially crippling finances of their company.
Doubt it’ll happen, and I’d feel bad for people and kids just wanting to enjoy some Mario and stuff on their weekends (which makes me sorta hope it doesn’t happen at the same time), but… Nintendo needs to be hit very hard for their constant BS.
Or some “bad actor” will figure out a way to upload and push the bricking update. Forcing probably a recall and/or a costly class action. Maybe that will make them think about putting a kill switch on there in the first place.
In 2008, someone did the math. Just from 2 years of Wii sales, just the hardware, not the games, Nintendo could stay afloat for 163 years based on the ecconomy at the time.
So, lets adjust for inflation that we know it is today, and call it 110 years.
I don’t think it’s been 110 years since 2006. I could be wrong though. Covid screwed up everybodies internal clock.
Hmm… How to use Switch 2 from behind a VPN so they think I am in Europe?
Some routers will let you configure a VPN onto a VLAN or SSID. Set that up and configure your Switch to use it and you’re golden.
From the other comments, I am not sure if they understood my question or maybe they are assuming I know how VPNs normally work; could I just run the VPN on any PC on the network and it works for the whole network, or does the service need to run on the device itself? Because I can’t do anything directly with my ISP managed router and my personal router is too old go support my gaming setup (it doesn’t have WiFi 6 or 5GHz and I do VR).
I’ve never used a VPN before, so I really don’t know. 😅
No. Well, you could, but it would be super complicated. You’d need a wired connection from the Switch to your PC and know how to configure a network bridge (kind of like putting a phone into hotspot mode), and your PC would need to be up (not sleeping) for it to work at all. You could do the same with a Raspberry Pi and a WiFi dongle, but again, you’d need to know how to configure it.
It would be much simpler to buy a decent router to put in front of your ISP router, or replace it altogether (you probably can, but I’d need to know more about your ISP to say for sure). I use a Mikrotik router without WiFi and a separate WiFi access point, and the Mikrotik router supports setting up a VPN. They’re not all that expensive (maybe $100), though they can be a bit daunting to configure because they have a million features. Basically, it takes all traffic from connected devices and tunnels it through the VPN, so that computers aren’t aware that it’s connected to a VPN.
Basically, a VPN sends traffic over an encrypted channel somewhere else, kind of like a digital ethermet cable. Most applications aren’t aware of it at all, and the VPN connection is only available on that computer. The only way to share a VPN connection is to connect the device to a machine with the VPN configured and tell that computer to send all traffic from that connection to the VPN.
I hope that makes sense, I’m happy to answer any questions.
I actually would know how to bridge the connection between the devices so that would be my choice, as it is the cheapest option.
Gonna go ahead and guess; buy it in EU, turn on your vpn, connect, setup, register. Keep your vpn turned on perpetually. Maybe you’ll be required to have a european bank issued card when you make purchases as well.
Or just get a steam deck, or another device you can install your own software on. This for me is a reason I never would get an iPhone. Although I don’t have a ton of apps from outside the playstore I do want the option. Maybe my next phone will just be a Linux phone.
Cant you sideload on iPhone now after EU regulations? Or is it only 3rd party app stores?
NetBird is your friend 😄
It’s gonna be a shame if H4ckerM4n2015 may brick you Switch after loosing a game of Mario Kart.
Vulnerability for me, not for thee, right?
Lol, why even buy such a piece of shit then? Even when in the EU, the fact they do this is enough.
Seriously! Just buy a used 3DS and hack it to run every game, emulator, etc. You can actually play DOS games and ScummVM games on it!
You can’t play Donkey Kong Bananza
Because Banana!
But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.
That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.
And yes, I do own a Switch 2.
Same for veganism. Taste is always king :/
It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.
Veganism is mostly about animal suffering. You cannot have meat at home without suffering, though I agree it can be very much less than current industrial scale of death.
As for mariokart, you could find or fund open source or ethical alternative developers
That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.
But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.
The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.
But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.
You could fund half the game’s industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.
So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.
I don’t disagree with you
Luckily I don’t have kids and hence don’t have to buy them such crap 😁
But yeah sure, I’m all in for regulations. But voting with your wallet is still the most basic way to say “lol no”. If I’d be hellbent on gaming on-the-go I’m sure there are alternatives that come close at least. If not, the I guess I’d carry a laptop around for that
No it is not.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed. If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
Because I have no intention of playing pirated games so I’m at no risk? Also I’m in the EU so I’d be fine regardless?
It’s already happened that Nintendo remotely bricked a switch 2 because its owner bought an used game, but that game was dumped by its previous owner.
You also have no intention of buying 100% genuine original, but used, games?
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.
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?
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.
how much hassle is it going to be to undo it?
Yeah, I bet it would be a bitch, no doubt.
I like tinkering with consoles and devices. […] Why should Nintendo control that.
Agree completely. They shouldn’t.
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?
Definitely a balance between funding their legal team and just wanting to play the games they put out, indeed. Currently I just want to play. We’ll see if I take the high road later. Having too much fun with my kids at the moment though.
Common European W
Remember, when tech bros complain that Regulations Stifle Innovation, this is the kind of “innovation” they’re talking about.
They want to innovate some more money out of your pockets.
Nintendo, you are supposed to be the good guy company remember?
Sadly the good guys retired and left the company with the rats.
considers altering entire network stack to trick a Switch 2 into thinking it never leaves EU soil
“Nah, I’ll probably just not buy one. Fuck em.”
Steam Deck, nothing more than Steam Deck…
Steamy Decky
Are there switch 2 emulators yet?
Seriously? It’s been out for a few weeks, obviously there aren’t any. And since Nintendo spent a lot of time and money to shut down most original Switch emulators I doubt we’ll see S2 ones anytime soon. The increased S2 hardware power, also obviously, means you’d need a current or even future top-end PC to be able to handle the emulation.
Your comment is on the level of a 5-year-old asking if they can play Switch 2 on their phone or something. The answer is so incredibly obvious.
You are right about the processing power part but your comment is a bit too harsh considering the switch 2 has shared the same firmware with switch 1. And possibly very similar hardware
I am not a emulator dev. though. But I am speculating it would be easier to develop emulators for switch 2 compared to a brand new console (or compared to generational leaps of other consoles)
Pleasant. I suppose you never have questions about topics which are not your forte?
I get how it can be shocking that someone doesn’t know as much as you about something that seems like common knowledge to you,
But tbh I’m like pretty certain the firmware is mostly the same, and it can’t be that different if Switch 1 games can be upgraded to Switch 2 games. I doubt they went back and ported every single game to a new system if it wasn’t easy to do so. So tbh I don’t think its going to be that long for emulators to come out.
Switch 1 was feasible as its CPU was similar to the ones found on a $200 android tablet from 2018 so even a Chromebook can emulate that.
Switch 2 is comparable to a mid range modern gaming PC so we have to wait at least a decade for full speed emulation, if not more
Switch 2 GPU is similar in spec to a laptop RTX 2050 with more vram and better DLSS, I wouldn’t say that’s mid range gaming PC.
I’d say something decent will exist by the end of the decade if Nintendo can’t stop development of emulators.
I kind of want to pick one up, but i can’t get a clear picture on if I should wait for a steam deck 2. From what I could find, they want to wait until there’s enough of an upgrade to be worth it. At one point that suggested around 2025, but more recent stuff makes it seem like they’re not even working on one, and other stuff hints that they are.
Get a Steam Deck OLED if you want a Steam Deck. Don’t wait for a hypothetical next version. I have both the LCD and OLED, and while both are excellent, the OLED is a slight improvement in a few days (lighter, less bezel, 90hz instead of 60hz, obviously you get an OLED screen, and the CPU/GPU are a tiny, tiny bit beefier).
Its probably 3-5 years out, games aren’t pushing hardware enough to justify it at this point.
My cousins and I had this discussion and I’m like, “I dunno, I’m happy with it.”
It’s an indie/AA machine with 6th-gen retro perks. I’m good. That’s my niche.
they have said they’re not working on a version two because they don’t feel the need to upgrade their hardware right now.
this is a low powered handheld gaming device. i use an LCD model as my daily gaming device and it kicks ass. i am unsure what upgrades are going to make it more “worth it” beyond what they’ve already done with the steam decks they are making and selling.
it works well and plays games right now, is my point.
i advise that you stop waiting to buy the next Shiny New Thing™️ and just get one if you want one. they’re fun and life is short. enjoy yourself!
if I should wait for a steam deck 2
there will alaways be The Next Device. There are no real hints that it will release anytime soon.
So if you’re interested in picking one up, now is a good of a time as any. You can also save some money by getting a refurbished 64GB model and upgrading the ssd yourself (takes just a couple minutes, a screwdriver and a thumbdrive with usb C to reinstall steamOS)
I picked one up a few years ago and I love it. When I have the opportunity, it’s so nice to chill in a waiting room and game instead of just doom scrolling.
Like the other poster said, I’m happy with the regular deck. Given there’s no news about the 2nd one, I’d grab it and enjoy.
Because in the US, you guys aren’t really consumers (which would give you a status), you’re merely walking and vaguely sentient (hopefully enough to click on “add to cart”) wallets that the corporations pluck money from at every opportunity. This is your legally enforced reality.
We are not even people anymore.
yo ho, all hands, hoist the colors high,
heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
The current management of nintendo will never figure it out. Piracy is the competition. It’s not about getting the thing for free, it’s about getting a better service. I’d buy mario 3 again (again) if that meant I’d get a rom I could run on my pc through FCEUX and enjoy all the features/enhancements that software offers. There’s a handful of gamecube games available on switch2, but all of them are better through Dolphin than what official hardware can offer. Nintendo’s refund policy is a joke. The eshop is unpleasant to use. Even ignoring all of that, the original switch only had a handful of actual first party titles, not enough to justify the console’s price tag (and each those were merely ok, not enough to justify buying a console for one game).
sega sells their games on steam, and while I don’t like the emulator they use I can at least say that I own a legal copy of sonic spinball.
deleted by creator
better consumer protection says what
It says “Sign the Stop Destroying Videogames initiative if you can”
I have, and I have advocated for it everywhere.
Still would be EU only.
Americans can’t sign it, but the law would absolutely benefit American gamers.
If they have to do the legwork to leave the games in a playable state or pass it to the community, American gamers will be able to participate.
