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Comment by xnyan | Hacker News Reader

>Other publishers get mad if Nintendo can’t keep piracy on their platform under control

Maybe, but if that mattered we would have seen the consequences already because Nintendo since the gamecube has been uniquely abysmal at anti-piracy, the worst by far of any console maker. Most recently their blockbuster game Tears of the Kingdom was playable for free for anyone with a decent video card, more than 10 days before the game was officially released.

That’s not an aberration, they are just extremely bad at securing their hardware platforms. they still seem to be doing OK.

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My impression is that Nintendo doesn't really care about piracy. It doesn't seem to affect them meaningfully, and their actions to stop piracy are always in the "too little too late" fashion. I have a Switch, and I don't pirate its games because I like the company. It wouldn't be hard to do it if I really wanted to.

What they really seem to care about is their brands and IPs, and seem to go after about people using those - for example, the draconian rules on streaming, shutting down Smash Bros competitions, etc.

I can understand their actions. More than any other game company, Nintendo lives and dies on their brand and IPs. Sony and Microsoft are larger than their gaming divisions. Nintendo only has gaming to save itself, and their IPs are major console sellers.

> they are just extremely bad at securing their hardware platforms

Frankly, though I hate to defend them; this is wrong and an insult to Nintendo.

The Nintendo Switch was so, so close to being a masterpiece of security. Nintendo even built their own OS from scratch for it based on a microkernel. It is so secure that an open-source developer who reimplemented it (SciresM) has said we very likely may never have a kernel exploit on future Nintendo systems, ever. The entire kernel is so compact there’s almost nothing to attack. Everything else from graphics to USB runs in sandboxed usermode and can’t run homebrew. This thing is intrinsically more secure than the Xbox One and PlayStation 5 in design.

Nintendo’s software was, according to him and other developers looking at it, downright almost flawless in security. The problem was NVIDIA, who had a bug in their recovery mode allowing unsigned code; and NVIDIA again for releasing a chip with inadequate protections against glitching. Nintendo did everything they could almost perfectly, but their chip supplier didn’t.

Both of those are one-time plays though. The next chip will almost certainly contain glitch protection; and the recovery mode bug has already been patched on newer Switches. Combined with Nintendo’s (literally) impeccable OS design, and the Switch 2 may not be broken for a very, very long time.

Switch was broken through a Nvidia tegra hardware bug.

And Nintendo Fokus on gameplay and not doing the hardware race makes emulation much easier for current games (switch is also really old by now)

>Nintendo since the gamecube has been uniquely abysmal at anti-piracy, the worst by far of any console maker.

I'm still amazed at the 3DS piracy that was done through downloading from the official eShop.

I think a big part of the issue may be that the Switch is extremely weak (compared to competing consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X) so its games can be emulated very easily.

The Switch is extreemly week vs a PS4 I don't think this is what they are competing with.

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