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

I don't give it much thought. I've got enough on my plate without worrying about pirates on Nintendo's behalf.
 
I know the following is not what this thread is about, but it's what I thought it was about before I read the OP.
Seriously (disambiguation: I am honestly being serious), I think this game has a chance of expanding the world of Hyrule to focus a bit on the adjacent unexplored sea. Given Wind Waker's precedent it's quite possible we see pirates of some sort in TotK. But I also think they may take the opportunity to include sky-based civilisations, so airships and sky pirates is also possible. Either way, pirates are due for a comeback in popular media and I think the time is ripe given the interest in things like media piracy and human rights, etc. Also the new Avatar is water-based so it's being pushed into in the zeitgeist.
 
Pennington said:
I know the following is not what this thread is about, but it's what I thought it was about before I read the OP.
Seriously (disambiguation: I am honestly being serious), I think this game has a chance of expanding the world of Hyrule to focus a bit on the adjacent unexplored sea. Given Wind Waker's precedent it's quite possible we see pirates of some sort in TotK. But I also think they may take the opportunity to include sky-based civilisations, so airships and sky pirates is also possible. Either way, pirates are due for a comeback in popular media and I think the time is ripe given the interest in things like media piracy and human rights, etc. Also the new Avatar is water-based so it's being pushed into in the zeitgeist.
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This would likely be a more interesting discussion, yeah.
 
It will not meaningfully effect sales. A lot of people pirating it probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
I do hope their are pirates in game, be they of sky or sea.
 
And here comes the Steam Deck pirates. Hopes Nintendo adds some sort of anti piracy check just to piss the pirates off. Most of these "morally correct" pirates doesn't even own a switch for the keys.
 
NintenDuvo said:
Is there a fool proof way for Nintendo to make the Switch 2 to never be modded or hacked?
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Easy, don't release it. So it can't be hacked! ;)

Nintendo already does a lot to prevent hacks: web browser only for limited use cases and hidden away from the user, no local save backups etc.

It can take some time until a device is hacked, sometimes it's quick and easy, or it could be never hacked. No one can knows beforehand.
 
LukasManak22 said:
fuck piracy
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The only time it is excusable is when the software can no longer be purchased. IE the OG resident evil PC ports or really any out of print game from the 80s and 90s as those are far harder to find or even things never technically released such as bio force ape
 
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Tatsu said:
Always online is really it. Make the console not able to be used without a daily server authentication
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Until it is reverse engineered and the checks get patched out or the CFW flies under Nintendo radar. This is always a cat and mouse game. ;)
 
I don't think it will affect sales too much, partly because the amout of people who actually has machines capable of running an emulator at full speed and has the knowledge to do so is very limited. Add to that that only the very first version of the Switch could be easily modifiable.

What i'm actually expecting, however, is a blowout of media sites and content creators actually advocating for using emulation, like kotaku did with Metroid Dread. Easy clicks, and it panders to the Steam Deck holier than thou audience - wich must be quite juicy, given the fact that they were taking the risk of being blacklisted by Nintendo.
 
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Beanstar40 said:
If i downloaded a rom for zelda off the internet and ran it on an emulator, that would be theft.
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Nope. Theft requires deprivation of property. If you go into a game store and steal a copy of a game that is theft because the store no longer has that copy of the game. Downloading a ROM from the internet creates an entirely new copy, not depriving anyone of anything tangible and so is not theft. It is copyright infringement because under intellectual property laws in many countries only the copyright holder can legally make new copies of Zelda.

By all means feel free to argue that piracy is immoral if you want but 'piracy = theft' is not only wrong but just fucking annoying as it always seems to be argued in the service of some multi-billion dollar corporation.
 
crepuscule said:
as it always seems to be argued in the service of some multi-billion dollar corporation.
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Isn't this kind of a contradiction in a forum about a multi-billion dollar corporation?

Ok, i'll bite. For argument's sake, let's say you're right and nobody loses, but i would still say every rom downloaded is theft in a sense. You're creating new copies without creating benefits for the copyright holder, resulting in not creating benefits for the copyright holder and thus, in a form of theft.

And even wthout that, Piracy is anti-ethical as long as what you're pirating still has some commercial life. In the case of recently released games is even more blatant.
 
Reinhard Schneider said:
Isn't this kind of a contradiction in a forum about a multi-billion dollar corporation?
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Nope. I like the games Nintendo makes. Doesn't mean I should defend their corporate intresets.
Reinhard Schneider said:
But i would still say every rom downloaded is theft in a sense. You're creating new copies without creating benefits for the copyright holder, resulting in not creating benefits for the copyright holder and thus, in a form of theft.
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Nope, it's just copyright infringement/piracy. Some governments and especially corporations love equating the two in propaganda but it just isn't theft because nothing is actually taken from anyone. As I said you're free to argue it is immoral.

Reinhard Schneider said:
And even wthout that, Piracy is anti-ethical as long as what you're pirating still has some commercial life. In the case of recently released games is even more blatant.
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I wasn't making an arugment about the ethics of piracy due to the rules, only whether it was theft. But yes I agree that the recency and commercial life of the product has impact on the ethics of pirating it as does who the copyright holder is, and the circumstances of the pirate.
 
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The distinction I am making is this: a potential lost sale is materially different from stealing physical property.

If someone were to somehow make an exact copy of my unbranded hammer out of thin air remotely would that be considered theft? I would still have the hammer but it would be a potential lost sale to the hammer companies.

If not I cannot see how you would consider copyright infringement/piracy to also be theft.

Note that this does not contain an argument that copyright infringement/piracy is not bad just that it is separate to theft.
 
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crepuscule said:
Nope. Theft requires deprivation of property. If you go into a game store and steal a copy of a game that is theft because the store no longer has that copy of the game. Downloading a ROM from the internet creates an entirely new copy, not depriving anyone of anything tangible and so is not theft. It is copyright infringement because under intellectual property laws in many countries only the copyright holder can legally make new copies of Zelda.

By all means feel free to argue that piracy is immoral if you want but 'piracy = theft' is not only wrong but just fucking annoying as it always seems to be argued in the service of some multi-billion dollar corporation.
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I get your frustrated, but theres no need for this to turn into a heated argument.
 
BassForever said:
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.
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yeah, with people having less and less capable pcs at home (for general computing an average tablet/notebook/smartphone is fine).
With dolphin pretty fast your average laptop could emulate the stuff reasonably, thats not the case for wii.
r4 was easy to get your hands on, and you would not need to install some weird hacks onto your hardware, so it was approachable.
Even if i feel like it will become a topic in the near future, currently its to hardware demanding and not easy enough to be a problem.

There are 2 things that get conflated here:
the loss in interest for the platform (which, while not currently a problem, will in the mid term be one,
and you don't just flip a switch and move to the next one),
and the loss of software sales because of piracy (as mentioned above, still not easy enough)
the second is dependent on ease of access (or existing hardware that can run it "easily"), the first is how the hardware/software compared to the rest of the market.
I am confident that the fall off will be slower then with the wii, because the technical shortcomings are less obvious to the average person, but it will happen in the next 1-3 years, especially with a fall of of third party support (ports, multiplats), and waiting to long leads to thid parties not tking nitnendo into account for new projects, leading to a gap in support bevore they restart it. So it IS in nintendos interest to not wait till nobody cares for switch to start moving to its successor.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, switch is getting old, but its not ancient or dead.
 
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crepuscule said:
Perhaps because I am autistic but I don't consider this to be in any way a heated argument tbh.
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My appologies, i got heated was projecting. I guess the way i saw it was that by not purchasing the product to play it it was theft, but in a world where you can lend people games, i see how that argument holds little water
 
It’s very very simple: my PC does what Nintendont. I’m buying a copy of course, to play there.

I wouldn’t be ripping game dumps if a new console negated the reason for me to apply the slightest of anti-aliasing and a stable framerate.

As many have stated- you really shouldn’t worry or care about what, less than 50,000 units in its entire lifetime being pirated? They’re gonna sell a fucking bajillion copies.

Your stock profit wouldn’t even be affected. Are you a share holder?
 
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will leak a week in advance like every other Nintendo game everyone is going to bitch about and no-one cares
 
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Switch emulation is not an easy thing to set up, and piracy via homebrew Switches is both limited to a subset of early release hardware and also a complete PITA to set up. It's not like with the DS, Wii or 3DS; where it was hilariously easy to steal games once they were hacked.

I don't expect it to affect sales all that much.

The thing is that Switch's software security was never actually "beaten". All current homebrew methods work thanks to a screw up by NVidia, where they left in a means to bypass the built-in security hardware module in early models of the Tegra X1 hardware. But it's not an easy thing for your average person to set up for themselves, nor is it currently possible to do on any model of Switch hardware being sold today.

I get that it's frustrating to see a handful of thieves running TOTK in 4k on their PC on day-1, but it's really only a very small amount of people who will be able to do this.
 
Dcubed said:
Switch emulation is not an easy thing to set up, and piracy via homebrew Switches is both limited to a subset of early release hardware
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If you know how to solder or pay someone to do it. There are mod chips for newer hardware. That‘s what Team Xecuter got into legal trouble. Nintendo stopped them but copycats are selling their own chips now.
 
Fuffelpups said:
If you know how to solder or pay someone to do it. There are mod chips for newer hardware. That‘s what Team Xecuter got into legal trouble. Nintendo stopped them but copycats are selling their own chips now.
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Point still stands. It's not a simple and accessible procedure; nor is it a softmod that breaks through the security features of the hardware. A far cry from the Wii era, where it was trivially easy to hack the console to play pirated games.
 
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Fuffelpups said:
If you know how to solder or pay someone to do it. There are mod chips for newer hardware. That‘s what Team Xecuter got into legal trouble. Nintendo stopped them but copycats are selling their own chips now.
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It's not that it's impossible to do, but paying someone a few hundred dollars to get a mod chip installed on your switch to pirate games is a bridge too far for your average consumer. What made the R4 situation so unique was that R4's were super easy to find, extremely affordable, and simple to set up and go. Heck you can still find them for cheap on Amazon in 2023. The 3ds made it easy to find who was using a ds flash cards on 3ds thanks to street pass as the flash card would tell the 3ds the person was playing very specific games. During peak street pass I'd say 1 in every 20 people I passed would their most recent game be one of them.
 
Fuffelpups said:
If you know how to solder or pay someone to do it. There are mod chips for newer hardware. That‘s what Team Xecuter got into legal trouble. Nintendo stopped them but copycats are selling their own chips now.
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Chips themselves are crazy expensive, and the installation is... not for the faint of heart, to say it lightly.
 
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I don't mind talking about chips, but the emulation itself is easy. Any 13 year old can watch tons of video on how to install emulator and download Nintendo Switch game roms for free. It's available on Youtube, which oddly sees no problem with this type of content but annoys the creators if they dare to say the word "crap" in a video posted 10 years ago.

And if you can afford to run the latest Switch game on Steam Deck, it's not a question of price.
 
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Fuffelpups said:
Until it is reverse engineered and the checks get patched out or the CFW flies under Nintendo radar. This is always a cat and mouse game. ;)
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In reality they could push out an algorithim that updates firmware daily with a new key that is 2FA to an inbox on nintendos official site which requires you to register you console serial number on it. ( Of course that would be a big issue alot of people would have issues with)
 
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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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Idk if I necessarily agree. Since Nintendo is becoming extremely anti-consumer and anti-creator lately (ie. the issues with Gary Bowser and now pointcrow), it may push a lot of people to pirate just to avoid giving money to Nintendo. People used to just pirate for the higher fps but now they’ve given people a lot of moral reasons not to buy from them.
 
Even disregarding both moral concerns and ease of setting up emulation, I'd bet most Switch owners planning to buy TotK don't even own a PC powerful enough to emulate a Switch. It's not super demanding, but you still need a PC that the average Joe consumer probably doesn't have.
 
kindlekandle said:
Idk if I necessarily agree. Since Nintendo is becoming extremely anti-consumer and anti-creator lately (ie. the issues with Gary Bowser and now pointcrow), it may push a lot of people to pirate just to avoid giving money to Nintendo. People used to just pirate for the higher fps but now they’ve given people a lot of moral reasons not to buy from them.
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They've been pressing charges against ROM sites and leakers for years and games keep setting new sales records, so I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Also they used to be WAY worse about taking down YouTube videos of Nintendo content. You used to have to register for their program to use their footage at all, and then you had to stick to only their pre-approved list of games
 
kindlekandle said:
Idk if I necessarily agree. Since Nintendo is becoming extremely anti-consumer and anti-creator lately (ie. the issues with Gary Bowser and now pointcrow), it may push a lot of people to pirate just to avoid giving money to Nintendo. People used to just pirate for the higher fps but now they’ve given people a lot of moral reasons not to buy from them.
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They always say that and in the end Nintendo games break sell records left and right.
The reality is that the % of people who dislike and pirate Nintendo games for moral reasons is so minuscule that it's going to be pretty much imperceptible to anyone.
We've seen how little controversy impacts games with both pokemon SwSh, bdsp and SV, it's just a small loud bubble of people who complains.
 
kindlekandle said:
Idk if I necessarily agree. Since Nintendo is becoming extremely anti-consumer and anti-creator lately (ie. the issues with Gary Bowser and now pointcrow), it may push a lot of people to pirate just to avoid giving money to Nintendo. People used to just pirate for the higher fps but now they’ve given people a lot of moral reasons not to buy from them.
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99% of people who claim to pirate games simply for the sake sticking it to Nintendo are either trying to get a reaction out of Nintendo fans, were never planning to play the game at all and are just console warring, or are lying and would have pirated regardless of their stance. People absolutely will pirate the game, but the weird moralization justification is almost always internet hot air.
 
People will justify piracy by saying that it helps the game's sales by giving them more exposure. But will then say that they pirate games because they don't think the company deserves to make money. I wish pirates would just say that they like getting free games instead of coming up with some bullshit to justify it.
 
kindlekandle said:
Idk if I necessarily agree. Since Nintendo is becoming extremely anti-consumer and anti-creator lately (ie. the issues with Gary Bowser and now pointcrow), it may push a lot of people to pirate just to avoid giving money to Nintendo. People used to just pirate for the higher fps but now they’ve given people a lot of moral reasons not to buy from them.
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The number of people who pirate for "moral" reasons were not only never going to buy the game to begin with, but also do not represent any meaningful portion of the Switch market. We've seen worse games with much stronger boycott pushes still go on to sell big numbers; this crowd isn't even gonna come close to making a scratch in sales for goddamn Zelda.
 
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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Common Kotaku ???
 
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What do I expect?

I expect that the people supporting these practices will remain sympathetic and offer a dozen excuses and reasons why the individuals caught out are on the moral right, while continuing to berate those that do not by screaming 'shill' and 'simp' at the top of their lungs on YouTube and forums.

One thing is for certain though, I do not have a PC capable enough if emulating a Switch. Would I do it if I did? Absolutely fucking not.

It's your game, you bought it, do what you want, but don't cry if you get caught doing something Nintendo doesn't want you doing and you get backhanded into the next gen.
 
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ToTK is going to sell a mother load at launch. And like every great big Nintendo release it will have legs. Whatever the record is for the fastest selling Zelda game is it's getting completely shattered in less than two weeks.

But yeah, people will pirate the game, that's the case with anything that can be pirated.
 
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It's probably gonna be the best selling Zelda game ever so I don't know why anyone would be concerned.
 
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GamerJM said:
Even disregarding both moral concerns and ease of setting up emulation, I'd bet most Switch owners planning to buy TotK don't even own a PC powerful enough to emulate a Switch. It's not super demanding, but you still need a PC that the average Joe consumer probably doesn't have.
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While yes, the common user is probably not going to pirate it because of this, you can pirate games directly in the switch without any hack at all: account selling. This shit is getting more popular in Mexico and you only need to know how to link an account. Here is a current example of prices of games selling online via secondary accounts and even give you discount for buying more than one (just divide the price by 18 and you got USD prices)

j9vqe6Z.png


And they have groups on FB/WA/Telegram in case you want to know the reputation of the sellers, and yes they have big posts of "Zelda TotK is coming soon, remember you can pay on Oxxo(the biggest chain of convenience stores here) and Seven Eleven" and you don't even need a credit card. I know kids and parents who has bought all their games like this and the common answer when I question them about getting worried if the account banned is "well, it was cheap, we can always buy a different account"
 
ermitron2 said:
While yes, the common user is probably not going to pirate it because of this, you can pirate games directly in the switch without any hack at all: account selling. This shit is getting more popular in Mexico and you only need to know how to link an account. Here is a current example of prices of games selling online via secondary accounts and even give you discount for buying more than one (just divide the price by 18 and you got USD prices)

j9vqe6Z.png


And they have groups on FB/WA/Telegram in case you want to know the reputation of the sellers, and yes they have big posts of "Zelda TotK is coming soon, remember you can pay on Oxxo(the biggest chain of convenience stores here) and Seven Eleven" and you don't even need a credit card. I know kids and parents who has bought all their games like this and the common answer when I question them about getting worried if the account banned is "well, it was cheap, we can always buy a different account"
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I don't even know if I really consider this piracy as much as it is just exploiting the account system. Interesting that stuff like this has cropped up though, honestly surprised it hasn't been a bigger deal before now.
 
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Piracy may not affect sales but this game will probably be one of the most pirated ever.

One of the most anticipated games leaking more than 10 days early, without DRM, playable on an emulator with whatever mid setup you have. That’s craziness.

Didn’t expect that when created this thread.
 
balgajo said:
Piracy may not affect sales but this game will probably be one of the most pirated ever.

One of the most anticipated games leaking more than 10 days early, without DRM, playable on an emulator with whatever mid setup you have. That’s craziness.

Didn’t expect that when created this thread.
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it was always going to leak around this time. Heck Smash Ultimate leaked even earlier
 
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What specific technical aspects does a hardware manufacturer need to work on to make its hardware difficult to emulate?

I ask this question because for me, despite the huge success of the Switch, Nintendo must absolutely correct two huge problems: the joy-con drift, which is not tolerable for us. The ease and extent of emulation, which is not tolerable for them.
 
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