reddit: nico_is_not_a_god pokemon romhacks: Dio Vento

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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • It is not “Krafton free”. Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn’t just “the publisher”. There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there’s some number of lifetime sales that, if they don’t ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they’d be legally required to pay out the “bonus” that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it’s still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.


  • Honestly even the absolute best case for this game is still “the more you care about it, the better it is for you to wait until it’s out of Early Access”. Early access for an “exploration first” game means your exploration is going to find a bunch of “come back later” walls, placeholders, and bugs. That’s the point of Early Access after all. I’d have enjoyed Subnautica a lot less if I’d played it during Early Access and was waiting on a patch to let me explore the Aurora.





  • Honestly it never ever made sense to price a digital download at the same point as a physical object. Providing a digital download is entirely infrastructure costs, the cost of delivering “a copy” to the customer is fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, for a cartridge, for every copy, Nintendo (for example) has to buy a bunch of plastic and EMMC, image that flash storage with Mario Odyssey, print labels and stickers and encase that chip in more plastic, wrap that plastic in more plastic, ship those crates of plastic across the ocean, all to sell them to walmart and gamestop that take a cut of the sale themselves. When a customer downloads Mario Odyssey, all sixty dollars go straight to Nintendo.



  • Nintendo can already brick your cartridge over the internet and make it require game updates (via system firmware updates). They have already done this with Super Mario Wonder on Switch 2 - the game will not run without an update download. You can’t revert firmware versions on a DRM box like the Switch, and new cartridges (even ones with “the full game” on them) will require and include firmware updates. Playing the console online or purchasing any digital-only content (or downloading free patches) also requires the latest firmware, and there are whitelist mechanisms in place for Nintendo to outright say “you cannot run v1.0 of game X on system version 16.7.2U”. The v1. 0 being on a cartridge has no bearing on this functionality.

    The only way to “play video games without relying on the internet or a company’s server” legally while being 100% sure that the company can’t do what they did to Mario Wonder is to buy and maintain multiple outdated firmware consoles that are isolated completely from the Internet. That’s obviously infeasible, so the only way to “play video games without relying on the internet or a company’s server” is the complete defeat or removal of DRM. On Nintendo platforms, that means piracy, full stop. On PC, there are a ton of games that are DRM-free digitally distributed products - those are the endgame here, not chips or discs. After all, with no DRM, you can put your copy of Slay the Spire on as many flash drives or DVDs as you want!





  • 3ds games do not pass the “hammer test” of digital product resiliency. They aren’t even properly tied to an account. If I smashed your digital-purchase-laden 3DS with a hammer, or threw it off a bridge, you’d never legally get those games back again. Even buying a secondhand 3ds with the right games installed (as legal purchases) violates the license terms.

    currently, while the servers are up, the Switch passes the hammer test. Buy a new Switch, sign in to your account, re-download your games.

    Note that neither of these are true preservation because the threats to game preservation are more varied than “smashed your console with a hammer”. And also that physical copies are borderline meaningless in an era where the majority of games have DLC. If I hammer-test your 3DS but you have Smash as a cartridge, you’re still never gonna legally play as Cloud Strife again.

    The Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch all got hacked thoroughly before the console’s end of life and thus the legal preservation situation is mostly irrelevant, but the currently ironclad Switch 2 is a ticking time bomb.