Hacker News Reader

Comment by phatfish | Hacker News Reader

This is about someone buying a used cart that had been dumped with the MIG Flash mod.

I remember when this MIG mod got released people were saying buying used would now be a roulette as Nintendo can spot the duplicated cart when it is used online and blacklist your switch. Not sure how often it ended up happening, but at least once it seems from this article.

Can't say I'm happy with how Nintendo is dealing with physical games, which means I'll need a really good reason to buy a Switch 2 myself. But Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Sony) are trying harder to kill physical sales and resale.

Nintendo at least have some skin in the game as they have the largest percentage of physical sales compared to Microsoft/Sony.

View on HN

"Nintendo can spot the duplicated cart."

I think they cannot spot the duplicated cart specifically, they just see the same "cart" (or key) used twice or multiple times at the same time and block it and possibly all devices involved.

Not defending Nintendo, but I believe it is technically impossible for them to distinguish between the pirate and the victim.

That means they're happy to punish the victim. The moral choice would be to punish neither in this case.

Yeah, if they were able to directly identified a duplicated cart then the easiest solution would be to update the console software to just not play duplicated carts. There shotgun approach is just biting them in the ass since the market has apparently already been flooded with duplicate carts and all they are doing is antagonizing people who believe they bought in good faith a legitimate game

This can't be a new thing, right? For decades there have been entire businesses dedicated to buying and selling hard copies of video games, and online play has been common for at least one decade. I think it's on them to figure out how to make copying hard copies difficult or to distinguish between the legit copy and illicit copies. Banning people for using a legitimate hard copy of a video game because someone else has a illicit copy of it is in no way acceptable.

How are you so confident about this? It seems like the random YouTube video I saw on this topic [1] had dumped their own games and ran into trouble by using those dumps.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgYTA18_vo

If they can't distinguish between the pirate and the victim, they shouldn't be punishing either. Banning people for playing legitimately purchased software on an unmodified console is draconian IMO.

It's unclear to me in your comment if you know this so just want to point out that with Switch 2 a lot of the cards are just licenses for a digital download - particularly 3rd party games. 1st party though it looks like they're (currently) putting the whole game on the cards.

Given their obsession with piracy/emulation I wouldn't be surprised to see them completely abandon it in the future and just have the cards be license keys like Sony/M$ currently do. We'll see i suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com