Wasn’t Gaben’s point in that statement that although piracy inevitably happens to some degree, the best way to mostly prevent it is to make a good service? That’s why Steam was such a success, as it made digitally licensed games easily accessible to PC gamers who were previously being screwed over by other platforms.

It is a KDE thing, but Fedora is the distro on which it works best. On a lot of other distros it often runs into problems.

I think Nintendo would be able to manage getting a good price per gig on 32GB and 16GB cartridges. They have massive demand (a vast amount of Switch 2 games are under 16GB) as well as close historical relationships with flash manufacturers. In addition, I wouldn’t be surprised if those sizes were still mass produced at low prices for embedded or industrial computing use, even as consumers move to larger storage media making consumer SD cards at those sizes more expensive per gig.

I’ve tried quite a few distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Solus, Arch, so on) and none seem to offer this feature. It’s a shame, as it’s quite useful to have since updating a live system can sometimes cause some trouble. Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems (I know openSUSE at the very least acts a bit funny when it comes to PackageKit, I think Arch as well).

Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press “update” in Discover and it’ll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things “just work”.

Nintendo needs to get to work making smaller cartridges for Switch 2, 64GB carts only is too expensive for a lot of publishers. I do think key cards have a purpose for 64GB+ big games that would be very expensive physically without the key card system, but smaller games should have the whole game on the cartridge. At the very least Nintendo needs to ban code in a box and make those publishers move over to key cards.

Hopefully they can manage to stem the flow on the eShop. The shovelware problem is worse than it was on the Wii. However, I have noticed recently on my Switch 2 (also maybe on Switch 1 eShop as well now?) that a lot of those sorts of games aren’t flooding the front page all the time, which is a good sign. They probably changed some of the algorithms, as I think they were tuned to show newest releases first.

In my experience, even when new my 3DS XL died way faster in sleep mode compared to the Switch. I’ve had a Switch in a bag for nearly two days on sleep with some light gameplay and still have at least 50% of its battery. Meanwhile, the 3DS XL battery went down quick enough one of my first purchases was one of those USB charger cables so I could charge it anywhere. It lasts under a day on sleep with some light gameplay.

What sort of AAs were you using? I used to get around at least a month or two on a set of fully charged standard Eneloop AAs. Then again, I didn’t use my Xbox too intensely, maybe you had a different experience. It would make sense for the Elite to have longer battery life simply because of better battery chemistry (lithium ion on the integrated pack compared to AAs with nickel metal hydride).

It is extremely unlikely that Steam are accepting of piracy. They may be negligent (maybe not investing enough into copy protection), but being even somewhat accepting would immediately tarnish their reputation with game publishers. Denuvo seems like more of a quick fix, not a real solution, that was put on after publishers started to lose patience. Even for their own self interest, they would be losing money on their own published games.

You have a good point. As long as that fear is in the used games market, people will be incentivised to only buy new cartridges (if not digital) as they can’t trust any used ones. The only sales then would be between people who know each other and are swapping their games, which is a far smaller market. It is somewhat ironic that the MIG Switch, a device made by people who have nothing to do with Nintendo, might end up helping Nintendo revenues by making it so that nobody can trust that used games weren’t cloned.

Don’t give them any more ideas! No, but actually, this might be an unfortunate consequence of this whole thing. Locking it to a console would get rid of MIG Switch, but at the cost of killing a big used game industry. I think they wouldn’t try it, due to the sheer amount of blowback they would get (far beyond anything else they’ve done before), but we never know.

As in they would never allow that to happen under any circumstances. Companies are already clamping down on other platforms due to piracy (just look at how many Steam games have Denuvo in addition to the Steam DRM, Steam’s protections get cracked fairly easily nowadays), so not surprising Nintendo want to nip any copying problems in the bud before shit hits the fan.

Yeah, nobody buying used games will know that it was previously used for cloning. Hopefully they ease off on the bans until they can figure out a better idea on how to deal with MIG Switch.

I do wonder what a more permanent solution for these sorts of situations could be, as right now these things are case by case. Either Nintendo tolerates the use of cloned cartridge IDs (which is something no game company/publisher/whatever have you would ever accept), or they bring down the ban hammer on random people who just bought a used game and had no idea it was used for copying (which is just a dick move). Nobody buying a used game is going to have any real idea where it came from, and in a lot of used stores the carts probably get mixed around anyway. Having any sort of checker for cloned IDs would also be difficult, as Nintendo’s systems probably only catch it when both are in use at the same time. Perhaps they could use some system to look for MIG Switch use specifically, and only block that cartridge? That would probably be the best way to go about it, but I’m not so sure about the technical details that would make such a thing work, as it would require some reverse engineering of the MIG Switch.

EDIT: I do think as well this article is too generous to Nintendo. The writer focuses on how easy it was to get unbanned, rather than the ban in the first place. Nintendo should at least start sending an email warning or something before deciding to block online. That would give people a change to figure out what is going on, instead of waking up one day to find they can’t access the eShop or GameChat.

If you have one nearby, get your new rechargeables from IKEA. The LADDA 2450s are far cheaper rebrands of the usually decently expensive Panasonic Eneloop Pro, and they last such a long time compared to most rechargeables.

You can put hall effects on the base DualSense, but it requires a lot of soldering work, putting it beyond most people’s reach compared to a simple connector, and most people would get another controller. Hall effect on the Edge is very easy though, since those sticks are modular.

This is a shame. I used to use vouchers all the time, and it got me into games I wouldn’t have tried otherwise since I had a spare voucher lying around.

I don’t get why Sony and Nintendo refuse to follow Xbox and just have a battery door you can throw AAs or a battery pack into. It is a far better design. Still, props to Nintendo for being the only one of the big three to have modular sticks on all their regular controllers (Sony and Microsoft have soldered sticks except on their high end controllers). Disassembly seems a bit tedious on this controller but not a total nightmare. However, all of them need to have modular USB ports, as it’s a common failure point that needs to be user serviceable. I do wonder how Nintendo are going to handle the new EU repairability laws when they release Switch 2 revisions.

An overclock definitely would help performance, even some high end PCs can struggle to run Cyberpunk at an appropriate resolution. However, I do not think Nintendo (or any console manufacturer) would take the risk of a factory overclock, especially considering they are probably using lower bin chips to reduce production costs.