No, it cannot.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.
Right. I think the confusion stems from the linked article framing this as someone getting banned for using a second hand Switch 1 game on a Switch 2.
What actually seems to have happened is someone bought a dumped cart, got their account banned when it was flagged for not being unique and then had a relatively easy time of getting customer support to unban them when he called to explain he actually did own the physical cart.
From that perspective it all makes some sense, it’s just not what Metro decided to report, I’m assuming due to being swept into reports of resold bricked Switch 2s.
Well, no, the dude telling the truth is the first bunch of letters. The point is how the thing that he’s telling the truth about actually happened to him.
Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.
They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.
Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It’s been a while since I looked into it.
In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.
Given that there are no good sources of Nintendo storage out there I don’t know how profitable it’d be to make a bootleg single-game cart when you could instead sell the same hardware as a flashcart. Used Switch games aren’t that expensive anyway. I guess it’s technically possible, though.
A false positive is almost weirder, because what does a false positive look like? A false positive on what test? Admittedly I have no idea of how they’re ID’ing flashcarts to ban them. What they have clearly works, but without knowing what the technique is I can’t tell if a false positive is even possible. The “bought a cart that had been used to make a known dump” theory is… possible, but I’d need more proof than just sounding more plausible than anything else.
Either of those hypotheses shows that their EULA overreach has practical implications that they should have considered, but it’s fundamentally different from what the article is putting forward.
Both the carts and the digital downloads are signed, but the cart signature is not stored with the account or associated to it, to my knowledge.
With digital games you can run them on two Switch consoles at once and, while that has been complicated by the “virtual cards” it would not ban you, it’d just kick you out of the game.
I can’t promise that they aren’t flagging physical cards showing up in two places at once. That is possible, as I said above. I am just not aware of that being a thing that they do, and it would not be Switch 2-specific, so it’d be surprising we only hear about it now.
It could be that this guy got himself a bootleg cart, but that sounds expensive to create for how cheap used Switch games are, and you’d get dinged on the flashcart, period, it wouldn’t necessarily require the game to appear in two places at once.
So it’s not that I’m saying this didn’t happen, I’m saying I don’t know what happened or why just from what is currently being reported.
They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.
Eh… I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.
From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.
This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.
Or, I guess d) is lying about it?
Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.
At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don’t even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.
That doesn’t mean I’m on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it’s just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.
But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.
EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that’s the most likely scenario?
Cool. But that’s not the conversation we’re having an five-ish million people clearly don’t share that concern.
I don’t think I can agree. I mean, I’m sure being in Latin America and being at the tail end of support for less global products skews this a bit, but ultimately these are two big global publishers selling globally.
For what it’s worth, Steam is willing to sell me any currently available Steam Deck in my region with 3-5 day delivery. There currently isn’t any Switch 2 stock on Amazon or the local top specialty game retailer. Checking a couple other major retailers it sure seems to be sold out everywhere for now. You’d probably have a better shot at a physical retailer.
So I’m saying that Valve has stock of the Deck and has for ages, at least in the territories it supports through direct sales. Which is expected, the thing is not new anymore, but it suggests that if it needed to ramp up production it could, it just doesn’t have to.
You could argue that this is not apples to apples, and it may not be, but the difference is so large it may not matter. The Switch 1 by itself was about as large as all of Steam combined, let alone the Deck by itself. The Switch 2 did in weeks what took the Deck years to do, crucially at the same price point (the Switch 2 is cheaper than the OLED but more expensive than the LCD). Considering how much of the marketing and the community focused on the Deck being a Switch killer based on the performance advantage it had, I’m going to say they are close enough competitors and the gulf between them is large enough that whatever differences you want to account for are accounted for.
Which, again, doesn’t speak to the quality of either piece of hardware, but it does to the notion that the Deck has been a runaway success or that it has overwhelmed Valve’s expectations.
I forget what wave I was on. I know I wasn’t there day one, but it also wasn’t that long of a wait.
My best guess is Valve was making very few of these. It’s pretty impressive that Nintendo has been able to move this many consoles while keeping stock up, but Valve was clearly not operating at that volume for both cost reasons and to create some hype.
For the record, I do own both a Switch 2 and a Deck. It wasn’t that hard to get either, but the Switch 2 was available on day one in a way the Deck was not.
I am very glad it exists. I may have a problem with owning handhelds. I am the perfect mark for this stuff. I have multiple upcoming boutique handheld PCs I’m actively trying not to overspend on.
But they are competitors. If anything, they are about as similar as they’ve ever been, honestly.
I’m only reacting to they weird Valve mythmaking that presents them as being extremely successful in the meme up top. Yes, the Deck is a very popular PC handheld, it is supposed to account for half-ish of the entire segment and it’s been very well priced for what it is, but it isn’t a runaway hit in the large scheme of the game industry and game hardware manufacturing.
Weirdly so is Nintendo these days.
In any case I’m not sure what “percentage of units sold/manufactured” implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn’t much of a metric unless you’re doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they’d manufacture them faster.
I mean…
Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what? Three weeks? I’m not even saying it’s better, but I think people should get a sense of the scope of PC handhelds in general compared to consoles and the Switch specifically. And I say that as the owner of multiple handhelds, the Deck included.
I mean, for all the quotes you missed the one that explicitly does “all you ask”.
I know that’s not universal, and some people with similar accessiblity problems have the opposite experience. I don’t question that.
The thing with talking to each other on the Internet while disagreeing (respectfully) is that we end up having to parse which of the parts we disagree in to even have an argument about. I don’t mind people liking the Steam controller, but I’m also not shy at calling out the ways in which its rough edges are not a me thing.
I think it’s undeniable that it’s pretty plasticky. I think I can make a pretty solid argument about its setup and usability being overengineered while not getting to the ostensible goal (mouse and keyboard on a controller format, presumably). And for what it’s worth, I think the fact that it’s a pretty niche thing goes to show this is the consensus reaction to it.
All of that can be said without taking anything away from the people that like it, I think. But… you know, that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re wrong about it or that those are all entirely subjective observations about it.
I’ll say that my “hate it with a passion” stance is less about the Steam Controller itself and more about how it keeps sneaking into all of Valve’s hardware. I’ve said this before: I don’t know who’s still stuck on making touchpads happen, but it made my time with the HTC Vive much harder than it had to be and the Steam Deck didn’t need to have Dumbo ears, so I do think there’s a value to reminding people (and Valve specifically) that this isn’t going to happen and everybody else is not jumping into their touchpad fetish for a reason.
I would argue that the reason you haven’t found a controller with the same functionality as the Steam controller is most people don’t like using overengineered trackpads to try to replicate sticks and d-pads that are much better at the job they’re designed to do. Only Steam keeps messing with this concept and… it really doesn’t work.
The Steam controller was an attempt to bridge the gap of consolizing PC games back when people still thought of PC games as primarily keyboard and mouse. It’s… not a great way to play mouse and keyboard games on a TV and it’s mostly a step backwards from a normal controller for games with controller support. Which is the vast majority of PC games now anyway.
And yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. You do play mouse and keyboard games on it and love it, and you think it beats sticks because you can spend hours on Steam making overly complicated setups that allow you to macro all sorts of nonses into the trackpads and paddles and whatnot.
That’s cool, if that’s what you want to do. Go nuts, have fun. But there’s a reason it isn’t a particularly mainstream way to engage with PC games.
Gyro, though, is actually useful for first person shooters. It’s nowhere near a Steam-driven thing or a Steam controller-specific thing, but I do wish Microsoft would start building it into controllers so we could have it on Xinput as a standard and have an easier time using it at the Windows level instead of having to depend on Steam as a translation layer, particularly for non-Steam games.
I hate this thing with a passion.
Some of it is a me thing. The trackpads hurt me physically. I’m talking immediate pain. Even when it came out a decade ago and my writsts were less busted than they are now they hurt. I know that’s not universal, and some people with similar accessiblity problems have the opposite experience. I don’t question that.
Some of it is most definitely not a me thing. It was plasticky, flimsy, prototypey and trying to make a thing happen that was not going to happen.
I don’t blame people for swearing by it as contrarians. Hey, I am fond of controllers people don’t like (the joycon are the best controller this generation and people like the wrong Saturn controller, and I’ll fight you on both of those). But still, I feel when this comes up it doesn’t get enough pushback mostly because not enough people actually tried it. I own one, I tried it and it was not good.
I don’t regret having one, though. Bit of a collector’s piece. I should go dig it up and make sure none of the plastic has rotted away.
You know the real problem with this conversation?
It is not, and everything I said is sincere and honest.
I mean, unless it’s a confession, which I guess I could believe.
Wait, who wins between scissors and wax tablet? Does that count as stone?