- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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…
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.
better consumer protection says what
It says “Sign the Stop Destroying Videogames initiative if you can”
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.
Common European W
prevent access to online services…that’s all they should be allowed to do. I don’t think I’d be able hold back on any company that decided what I do with MY hardware.
If they going to brick the console they better refund the money.
That is what they do. It’s an online ban, you can still use a banned console offline.
That is until the console is reset, at which point you need a valid account just to boot into the launcher.
Untrue, full console disabling is possible rendering it unusable for any content online or offline
They’ve only ever done online bans. There’s a lot of misinformation being spread around about bricks, but that isn’t what is happening.
What they have done (so far) and what they are capable of doing are two entirely different things.
No one has had their console remotely bricked. If it happens, we can talk, but until then you’re just getting mad at imagined hypotheticals.
Worst argument ever.
Why wait for it to happen instead of acting proactively?Why did they feel the need to implement that in A their legal speak and B partly acted on it (users of the MIG-cartridge got already hit by that).
Because they will at some point use the power. Why even risk that?
Because regardless of what some boilerplate legalese says, they are instead doing online bans. Fixating on a hypothetical when it’s the opposite of what’s actually happening borders on misinformation.
Scroll back up, this conversation started with the top comment saying it should just be online bans, I said that it is, and then y’all come at me saying it’s actually bricks. It’s online bans.
Before it happens they put it in EULA which they did.
You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.
It couldn’t be any clearer.
You’re fixating on legalese boilerplate, I’m talking about what they’re actually doing.
Go back to the start of this conversation. OP said it should just be online bans, I said that it is, and you’re umackshuallying over what hasn’t actually happened.
I found one of the many for you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqFY3rICDWs at minute 7.15
He can’t play Yakuza 0 and puyo puyo tetris, because it can’t download the mandatory update, it can’t launch games. Technically it’s not bricked, but because it can’t launch legally purchased games, it’s effectively bricked.
It doesn’t even show the game icon on the screen!
That is a ban from online services. The word ‘brick’ has a specific meaning, this isn’t a brick.
You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.
It seems hard to believe, but that’s the threat being made. Time will tell whether that’s bluster or if they’re really prepared to do so.
The fact that they are doing online bans instead is how we know.
But like I said, tell you what, if it happens then we can talk.
Lol, why even buy such a piece of shit then? Even when in the EU, the fact they do this is enough.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
Well, their shitty attitude towards consumers is why I won’t be getting a switch 2. So they can try bricking my asshole.
Yet another reason for you peasants to throw down your pitch forks and accept the all mighty PC as your lord and savior.
I have had this long-term tendency in my gaming platforms where I alternate between PC and console as my primary long-term focus. For example, I remember that 2019 was almost nothing but VR gaming on my PC, but in more recent years I’ve used game pass on xbox to play all kinds of titles that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
My family uses the Xbox pretty regularly still, but I think now that I can use my Linux PC from the couch (without taking over the TV) it has broken me from caring about consoles. Like, I recognize the skill of Nintendo’s developers and I know I’m going to play the mario & kart releases eventually, but I haven’t even considered getting a switch 2. I know a family member has one, so likely my first time playing Mario Kart World will be at thanksgiving, lol.
I am also a fan of emulation. I’d be content if you only ever allowed me to play my NES, SNES, and PSX roms for the rest of my life. But since Nintendo’s business model means putting their beautifully designed games only on restricted/limited hardware, it’s a better way to play some of their newer stuff too.
