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.
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 gaming 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yea, distribution and creation of art has to be separate. Only way I see against enshitification.
Like, there must be a choice between ad spreader datahoarder low price offer and premium low data no ad offer. There must be no monopoly over distribution of a specific art piece if it is no unique art form, like a hand drawn picture. (Like music, games, movies, series, trading card game, tabletop games, apps etc.)
Meaning, nintendo, netflix, apple, disnay and similar would have to offer distribution licenses according fair market rights and not limit those licenses to themself as self distributor.
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.
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.
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.
I have no intention of buying used games, no. Never bought a used game for the original Switch either. I always buy my shit on launch because I want it fast. 🙂
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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 gaming 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
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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.
(deleted content)
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.
(deleted content)
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.
(deleted content)
Yea, distribution and creation of art has to be separate. Only way I see against enshitification.
Like, there must be a choice between ad spreader datahoarder low price offer and premium low data no ad offer. There must be no monopoly over distribution of a specific art piece if it is no unique art form, like a hand drawn picture. (Like music, games, movies, series, trading card game, tabletop games, apps etc.)
Meaning, nintendo, netflix, apple, disnay and similar would have to offer distribution licenses according fair market rights and not limit those licenses to themself as self distributor.
At least, that is my opinion
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
(deleted content)
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?
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.
Yeah, I bet it would be a bitch, no doubt.
Agree completely. They shouldn’t.
Pirated games can be one or several of the following:
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.
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?
I have no intention of buying used games, no. Never bought a used game for the original Switch either. I always buy my shit on launch because I want it fast. 🙂