Say it with me once again:
Fuck Nintendo.
They’re the Disney of the video game industry.
Yeah, I have zero desire to give them money. Luckily, there are solid options that aren’t them, notably the steam deck for portable gaming and pc/xbox/ps5 for home gaming.
Console Gaming is a lot less worse than Nintendo, but if you (or someone else) wants to be ‘pure’, they are also not recommended. Consoles are locked-down PCs controlled by the companies, not you, and they abuse their captive consumers by charging multiplayer online, having less promotions (and getting worse with time at that, by eliminating the physical disks), demanding subscriptions with ever more grades and higher prices, tying games to a digital account they can revoke, and not letting the users use the hardware as they see fit in general. PC gaming avoids most or all these issues, with steam excelling in everything (sans the digital license tied to the account, but even that is mitigated because their DRM is weak, and games frequently are found on the high seas if needed), and GoG (and itch.io, etc) respecting completely its customers (offline instalers, completely at your control).
F is for friends who say Fuck Nintendo
Nintendo once again treats its fans with contempt and hostility. It’s not a good look.
If anyone was curious, Echoes of Wisdom is totally playable on the Steam Deck
…Recent laws in Japan have criminalized console and game modding, as well as save file editing…
WHAT? why?..what???
Because:
Due to an amendment in December 2018 of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act in Japan, certain gaming-related activities and services have now been declared illegal. This includes:
- Distribution of tools and programs for modifying game saves
- Selling product keys and serials online without the software maker’s permission
- Game save and console modding services
As such, sales of products such as Pro Action Replay and Cybergadget’s “Save editor” have been discontinued.
It’s meant to ban sale of hardware devices and services that allow playing pirated games on Switch and such, but due to the way it’s worded it just bans them all.
lol man is just a game. Let me have fun exploring hidden rooms. No one is committing a crime by modifying their own game save.
Soooo they’re banning 99% of pokemon content?
I’m sure Nintendo still make great games, but that’s not enough anymore.
One day I hope more video game embrace open source/free software values.
Nintendo does still make good games, and they’re the only ones who seem to care about multiple people playing together while sitting on the couch, as opposed to focussing only on online multiplayer across multiple systems.
Which is why it’s so annoying that they do evil shit on the side like this. Nintendo are litigious to an absolutely callous degree. Wankers.
I feel like Nintendo has this huge army of full time lawyers who have to continuously find enemy to stay employed
Game engines and servers are great candidates for developers to collaborate their ideas into FOSS projects, but the model is harder to sustain for complete works.
While internet games can have subscription models where you pay them for doing game master type activities, moderation, and access to a hosted game server, static games are more like static art where you run into issues getting food and housing when you make your work output available for free. Crowdfunding / patreoning (in the larger sense of the word, not necessarily the app) creators / collectives can be a way for that to work, and we need to support more creators trying that model if we want to see more of it.
People generally don’t want to make games free because often 99% of what makes a game good is not the software aspect. People like games for interesting mechanics, story, art, and music. Those aren’t things that generally haven’t worked well being free and open
FOSS generally works because people use foss to create end products, and have an incentive to contribute because it benefits them financially (and the side effects is that it benefits others too).
Making a game FOSS rarely benefits the creators since it is the end product, even if it benefits the game or community.
There are cases where it works though, such as rhythm games, where the end product requires immense collaboration, but those often exist on the borderline of acceptability (due to copyrighted music use) and they end up with a need to be foss since licensing 10,000 songs is basically impossible.
(Shout out Quaver)
