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Discussion Tears of the Kingdom and piracy, what are you expecting?

balgajo

balgajo

Koopa
Recently, in my circles, I see a lot of people talking about playing Tears of the Kingdom on emulator. Of course I expect some of those people to pirate it as not everyone that I talked has a Switch to do a legal ripoff. So I was wondering, what do you expect about Totk piracy in terms of volume?
Personally I don't believe it will impact its sales that much but I expect it to be the most pirated Switch game. Specially considering how well the first one if emulated.
 
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It will not affect sales. You just might see some people gloat about it online and be annoying about it. Also not really my concern what others do. I'm going to buy it digital + physical and play asap.
 
I’d like to pre-emptively remind this thread that any users that claim to, encourage, or promote piracy will be moderated, as promotion of piracy is against the site rules. Thanks.
 
Breath of the Wild was the key driver of Wii U emulation, and famously was pretty extensively pirated as a result. Still seems to have very little actual affect on sales. This is not a defense of Piracy, but I think people underestimate just how much even a small technical knowledge barrier to entry discourages like 95% of people from even considering it.
 
We'll see the same pattern as all of their 1st party games this generation.

At least a week or so earlier, someone will "get their copy early" and then it'll get dumped online, we'll see the typical Yuzu vs Ryujinx videos. This won't affect sales though.
 
I don’t expect it to be huge. BUT I think the %age of people talking about playing it emulates who have bought the game outright to be quite low. And that sentiment will kind of be skirted around.
 
I don't think it really matters. Obviously it's not ok but I believe most of these people just wouldn't buy it anyway.
 
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it's fucked up that legal dumping is so difficult while finding an iso is so easy

as such I don't expect to hear about any significant impact. kotaku will run a piece about how to do it though
 
i expect a lot of people, including here on famiboards to magically get early copies and legally dump the game and start playing when the game leaks a few weeks before release. also people will emulate their legal copies on their PCs.

but it won't have any effect on sales tbh, it's gonna be huge and those pirating weren't gonna get the game anyway.

LukasManak22 said:
I don't think that any of the Ninty's Switch releases was ever impacted by piracy.
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yeah, agreed
 
Joining the chorus of "sales won't be impacted". The people who aren't gonna buy TotK were never gonna buy TotK anyway.

Raccoon said:
kotaku will run a piece about how to do it though
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And then they get in trouble for it haha it's hilarious how true this is
 
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WestEgg said:
Breath of the Wild was the key driver of Wii U emulation, and famously was pretty extensively pirated as a result. Still seems to have very little actual affect on sales. This is not a defense of Piracy, but I think people overestimate just how much even a small technical knowledge barrier to entry discourages like 95% of people from even considering it.
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I agree. But keep in mind that currently there are BOTW installers that you don't even know that you're playing on a emulator. The difficult in this case is more about the technical barrier to find these type of installers than the process itself.

Specifically about emulation piracy, besides knowing how to do there's a percentage that wouldn't buy it anyway, other that already bought but didn't care to do a legal ripoff. So the only that can affect sales are people who would buy it if there wasn't an emulation option.

The ones I believe that could affect the most(at least in countries like here in Brazil) are the illegally sold consoles. Basically they offer you an "unblocked" switch with tons of games that everyone with 0 tech know-how can play. I just discovered that there's also unblocked OLED models.
 
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Hopefully really negligible yea. I'm going to get both the (inevitable) collector edition + digital copy anyway!
 
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The worst unfortunately. I wish people would simply buy the games they're interested in, instead of stealing. It's not hard.

I don't think sales will be effected, but many of the people on Twitter will use their decision to pirate it as a cornerstone of their personalities for a few months.
 
Most of the Switches currently in circulation aren't hackable, at least by any means we know of, and models that can be hacked tend to go for higher prices on the used market. High-perfomance gaming PCs haven't gotten much cheaper and TotK's engine will likely be differentiated from BotW's to the point that emulators will need to be rewritten to accomodate for it. I don't see how piracy would affect TotK sales more than it affected BotW sales.
 
There'll be high profile coverage of emulated Tears of the Kingdom online, but it will have zero impact on the game's commercial success. The majority of people won't care about technical performance, and I'd expect to see a much more polished open world game than Scarlet/Violet, and a step up over Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

If piracy or technical shortcomings were a widespread issue*, then engagement with the system and software sales would already be slowing.

*by this I mean if a large portion of the userbase had this issue; that's not to belittle people who are disappointed with where things stand on a hardware level right now
 
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I think it's going to be covered alot, specially with a lot of guides on how to optimize it in X device, and really don't think it's going to affect the sales. With that said I've seen recently on facebook marketplace and other online sales pages a lot of those "buy any digital switch game for 5/10 bucks" and Im pretty sure it's going to appear a lot with Zelda (BTW anybody know how that works? Do they create burner accounts with pirated games or something??? becasue even with account sharing there has to be a limit no?)
 
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WestEgg said:
Breath of the Wild was the key driver of Wii U emulation, and famously was pretty extensively pirated as a result. Still seems to have very little actual affect on sales. This is not a defense of Piracy, but I think people underestimate just how much even a small technical knowledge barrier to entry discourages like 95% of people from even considering it.
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Famously? I dunno, wasn’t CEMU already a thing a couple years before 2017? When BOTW came out it just felt like the second coming of the Wii, people bought the new Nintendo system along with the new Zelda. On top of that the Wii U version wasn’t delayed so you had Wii U owners finally getting their purchase justified. So on one hand you had Wii U owners, on the other you had people jumping in on an actually desirable new Nintendo console. When I think about “extensively pirated” Nintendo games, I think about the first Xenoblade which had over 6 figure downloads back when the game simply wasn’t available in North America. In BOTW’s case it was a very small niche, the game still sold very well

So for TOTK, I’m not sure how well Switch emulation is going but there is definitely no guarantee that it will magically run the game much better so there’s that. I think the “circles” talking about that are ultimately extremely online, in the real world TOTK will just sell well as expected. That minority is just extremely loud, and it got worse since the whole “anti-consumer” narrative, on top of some people being upset that the “new hardware” that they tried wishing upon existence won’t launch with the game. Actually yeah it might be problematic online since you may have certain “game journalists” posting tutorials on how you can pirate the game like they did with Metroid Dread. But yeah besides the Twitter idiots that made pirating Nintendo games their whole personality, I don’t think it will matter, they are really just a vocal minority
 
Apopheniac said:
Most of the Switches currently in circulation aren't hackable, at least by any means we know of, and models that can be hacked tend to go for higher prices on the used market. High-perfomance gaming PCs haven't gotten much cheaper and TotK's engine will likely be differentiated from BotW's to the point that emulators will need to be rewritten to accomodate for it. I don't see how piracy would affect TotK sales more than it affected BotW sales.
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It seems that OLED hacked through modchip . Didn't know about it until today.
At least in Brazil there are places selling a new switch, already modded, so the user don't even have the risk of ruining their own.
 
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I think, internally on Nintendo, the piracy-emulation-weekEarlyLeak is an elephant in a room. Always happens, this leaks their games, spoilers appears on internet (harming the legal user) and a lot of the people starts playing the games on illegal ways.
In addition, not all, but many pirate copies of the switch games are copies that they could have sold to those consumers

Probably, this is a thing they will be investigating for the successor.

In the case of TotK, I have zero doubts that when the internet leaks it will become a hotbed of spoilers, most of them to spoil the game for those who expect it.
In the case of our website, I don't know if Famiboards has a clear policy on spoilers, but I suppose that if trolls arrive whose only intention is to spoil games, they will be penalized.
 
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Beanstar40 said:
I do plan on playing on pc, but i will of course dump by own cartridge to do so.















Linkie3 says What's the legal difference between dumping and playing your own legal copy on an emulator? Or buying the game, leave it in the box, and then play an iso from the internet? I don't think Nintendo really cares that you using a "legal" copy to emulate the game instead of using a random iso from the internet.


Sorry but quoting on mobile is not working properly.
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Emulators are not illegal, but theft is. If i downloaded a rom for zelda off the internet and ran it on an emulator, that would be theft. If i purchase the game and dump my own rom that i bought, then all im doing is using the thing that i paid money to own. If i were to then upload that rom to a website for anyone to download, that would then be me partaking in piracy, but i would never do that.
 
There will be people playing it on PC a week before release and they'll be all smug about it

Me? I'm not gonna take any chances with crashes and visual bugs when it'll be time to play Tears of the fucking Kingdom.
 
WestEgg said:
Breath of the Wild was the key driver of Wii U emulation, and famously was pretty extensively pirated as a result. Still seems to have very little actual affect on sales. This is not a defense of Piracy, but I think people underestimate just how much even a small technical knowledge barrier to entry discourages like 95% of people from even considering it.
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I agree, and I also think many of the people emulating, do own their games. They just want a higher resolution or framerate than what the Switch hardware can give them, it's not about not paying for the game, imo.
 
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Regarding Switch piracy via ROM downloading and emulation, it's inherently inconvenient. You lose the hybrid functionality and online (or have to find some workaround), you need to obtain the keys from a softmodded Switch or track them down, have a capable enough machine, deal with shader stutters, set up controller support for enabling features like gyro, and so on. Not impossible or even that difficult, but enough to stop some folks from going all the way.

The tradeoff has to be worth it. Back in the Dolphin days getting to run Wii/GameCube games in HD was easier to accomplish and it was a marked improvement over the SD image. It was worth dealing with the slight inconvenience.

Now? Well, I've played BotW in 4K. It looks beautiful, of course. But then I booted up BotW on my Switch on the same TV, and at 900p it's not a significantly worse image, it's less of a pain in my ass to connect to my television, pair controllers with gyro, have backed up saves with NSO instead of manually storing my save files on cloud storage, and it's easily portable. So I gave up on the emulation.

That's just my personal experience, but the way I see it - the more barriers there are, and the more acceptable and convenient to access the initial product is, the more infrequent piracy will be.
 
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People are gonna play the leaked game early, whether emulated or on an actual switch, and we're gonna see PLENTY of bugs, glitches and performance issues that will be fixed with a day 1 patch.

And everyone will yell about the Switch and game being doomed and keep talking about how upgraded hardware would've saved the game
 
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Belinda Blumenthal said:
It won't impact sales literally at all because people who aren't going to buy it aren't going to buy it.
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...i wouldnt be confident in that.
it wont be a ton (like in the hundred of thousands),
but if you want to play it with better performance (as many do) emulating is an option, downloading is easier then ripping it yourself (needing to have an launch Switch and hacking it), so i could see many being like "i already have to download it... ill buy it later, for sure..." and never really buying it.

With piracy its often a trade of between convenienve, quality and price.
music piracy had a steeeeep fall of with streaming, video piracy to ...till there where to many inconveniently distributed places.
Steam and its features (cloud saves, etc) +steel sales helped al lot against game piracy on pc.

I think it will be in the single digits. still a sizable chunk, just seeing how much BotW was emulated and modded.
i generally think TotK, while having the benefit of the huge number of switches out there, wont be much better in sales then BotW. I feel like BotW was a gaming culture moment that a direct sequel on the same console just wont be able to recreate. And people will blame it to a degree on piracy.

(Im not approving or promoting piracy, my statements are meant to be factual statements (meaning its easier to track down a link then original hardware), if im wrong and we have easier methods then that to rip a switch game i am open to enlightenment/correction)

Serif said:
Regarding Switch piracy via ROM downloading and emulation, it's inherently inconvenient. You lose the hybrid functionality and online (or have to find some workaround), you need to obtain the keys from a softmodded Switch or track them down, have a capable enough machine , deal with shader stutters, set up controller support for enabling features like gyro, and so on. Not impossible or even that difficult, but enough to probably stop some folks from going all the way.

The tradeoff has to be worth it. Back in the Dolphin days getting to run Wii/GameCube games in HD was easier to accomplish and it was a marked improvement over the SD image. It was worth dealing with the slight inconvenience.

Now? Well, I've played BotW in 4K. It looks beautiful, of course. But then I booted up BotW on my Switch on the same TV, and at 900p it's not a significantly worse image, it's less of a pain in my ass to connect to my television, pair controllers with gyro, have backed up saves with NSO instead of manually storing my save files on cloud storage, and it's easily portable. So I gave up on the emulation.

That's just my personal experience, but the way I see it - the more barriers there are, and the more acceptable and convenient to access the initial product is, the more infrequent piracy will be.
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If its just the same game rendered in 4k, i would be with you, but assuming that they are using mostly the same engine with optimizations and stuff, im confident that many of the modifications (QoL, shading, manipulating draw distance and stuff, gras density,...) can be ported fast (-> in the first weeks to a month or 2), so i am confident that many prefer those aspects to the portability factor (there are many that never undock the switch).
Personally i would not like to sacrifice the portability, the pick up and play mentality (and my split between gaming and computing hardware that i keep up for the most part), so im with you there.

Actually thinking about it...
i have an OG switch, so making a rip would not be to hard... i just dont have the hardware (PC) to do it (13 inch notebook...)... but the prospect of having better LoD rendering, framerate, etc... would be great for a second playthrough.
 
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Switch emulation is nowhere near easy enough to use to ever hit that critical mass of piracy where it starts affecting Nintendo's finances in any significant matter. Complete coinflip if TotK will even run well early on even though many will pretend it does.
 
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People that are going to pirate the game were never going to buy it in the first place, so it doesn't really matter.
 
Yoshifan31 said:
Famously? I dunno, wasn’t CEMU already a thing a couple years before 2017? When BOTW came out it just felt like the second coming of the Wii, people bought the new Nintendo system along with the new Zelda. On top of that the Wii U version wasn’t delayed so you had Wii U owners finally getting their purchase justified. So on one hand you had Wii U owners, on the other you had people jumping in on an actually desirable new Nintendo console. When I think about “extensively pirated” Nintendo games, I think about the first Xenoblade which had over 6 figure downloads back when the game simply wasn’t available in North America. In BOTW’s case it was a very small niche, the game still sold very well
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Zelda definitely played a role in how much support went into CEMU, even before 2017. The writing was on the wall for the Wii U since 2014, and there was no guarantee the Switch was going to be the runaway success it ended up being. Even since then it’s been the primary way people play BotW with mods on PC, which in themselves are very popular.
 
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Thus far there's been no sign that Switch emulation/roms are hurting software sales the way R4's did with the DS. It's similar to how there's no evidence the steam deck, switch being "old", or any number of Gamer(tm) hot takes are having a negative impact on the Switch's ability to move hardware and software.

Users on sites like this are the extreme outlier minority in terms of how most people play games or what people want from gaming experiences.
 
In my experience, people who pirate even though they have a perfectly legal option available to them, will never go for the legal route anyways.

It used to be a different story back in the day with say... anime or even japanese only games. When there was no streaming sites that provided simulcast or worldwide releases or even just something as simple as consoles that are compatible across the world (region lock or PAL/NTSC), so if you wanted to see an anime or play a game sooner than 2 years after its Japanese release date, you were out of legal options. Often you wouldn't even know whether something would become available in your country at all. I remember regularly getting fed up and screaming at companies that I wanna give them money so let me give you money GODDAMMIT.

cough Anyways, granny is talking about the war again. Long story short many more people resorted to piracy then because there was no legal options. Now that there are, piracy for pretty much everything has dramatically decreased. So people who still do it just don't wanna spend money period.


But yeah for sure there will be some. And even those who dump their perfectly legally bought game will scream about how THEY get to play this game I 4k 120 fps "look at me flex you peasants" or some bullshit.
 
BotW was emulated very early upon release, although switch hardware was more acceptable back then. The pool of people using switch emulators is very small anyway
 
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Jannyish said:
In my experience, people who pirate even though they have a perfectly legal option available to them, will never go for the legal route anyways.
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As someone who tinkered with NES and SNES emulation in my childhood I remember that gaming used to be a prohibitively expensive hobby back then. Only big chains sold videogames back then, at ridiculous prices of course. My first console was a N64, and I loved to go with my parents at the flea market to get good prices in used videogames, because department store prices were prohibitive. Imagine paying $85 for Mario Kart 64 ($150 adjusted for inflation)!! No wonder everyone emulated games back then.

Nowadays the barrier of entry has lowered, games have become cheaper because more stores sell games/consoles, and the reseller grey market has come to our rescue. Remember how consoles in japan get scalped to be resold overseas? The same thing happens in the US for consoles and videogames to be resold in countries like mine, where Nintendo doesn't even have an official market or office and thus, you either rely on scalpers to get games on release date with a reasonable cost ($65) or pay extra to an "authorized" 3rd party distributor weeks after release ($80).

With how accessible gaming has gradually become, with the growth of the middle class in my country and with people staying single and childless for longer, it's rare to hear about modern consoles being pirated. You still hear rumblings but unlike 20 years ago, most people go the legal route, even with the lack of an official Nintendo market here.

Same thing happens in the rest of Latin America. Places with Amazon or big online shops benefit even more, and even in places like Brazil with ridiculous taxes that makes everything expensive, you can bypass them using stores like Aliexpress to get reasonable prices. Sorta related, but when you browse for switch games in Aliexpress you find tons of comments from Brazillians giving good reviews to those stores.
 
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Seeing as Switch emulators are rampant and working well at this stage and Switch emulation does not require "that" much horsepower it will happen more than ever guaranteed. But wait, ever worse: those people get to play it earlier then people who will buy the game and they WILL gloat about it and and/or bash the game. They will have discovered all of the secrets before you even played a second and rejoice because the datamining scene will already be all over it before anyone played it.

At the end of the day I tried to learn myself to not care, because they can do what they want but they won't take away my personal experience. It's up to me to avoid spoilers and whatnot regretably.

But yeah, I'm kinda salty. There, said it.

But no, it won't affect Nintendo's business in any significant way and the moment it would they will squash it one way or another.
 
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Raccoon said:
it's fucked up that legal dumping is so difficult while finding an iso is so easy

as such I don't expect to hear about any significant impact. kotaku will run a piece about how to do it though
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I have a first gen Switch, and considering my account and everything is on it, I'm genuinely scared to dump my games in case the system and my account get banned. I know it can be done through the SD card and there's little chance that one can mess it up, but still, one dumb slip up and you might boot it into the NAND and well... Yeah :(

And that Kotaku article was something else, showing how amazing it looks in an emulator? Sure, go for it, many of those games look ridiculous at 4k. But them pretty much linking to a ROM location... It's amazing the article was just adjusted and not forcefully removed.
 
How many people do you expect to pirate it exactly? Like, if we're being extremely generous, maaaybe in the low 10ks? lol
 
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