On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
What's the answer here?
Yet most of those are not lost sales. They never even want to buy the game to begin with (most of them doesn't even have a Switch 2). Also as easy emulation gets nowadays it's still a "technical hurdle" for most people.
The game sold 5.2m copies in 4 days https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/261111....
An opposite example would be emulating random NES games, probably only trying them out. And those are still sold on Nintendo's virtual consoles.
2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault.
Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc.
Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.
Exclusives don't make any sense in this day and age.
Money is a tool to exchange one commodity for another and not some divine arbiter of goodness, where the more you have the more good you are. To say some corporation deserves money when they have all the money they could ever use is so ridiculous to me. "Yes, we have made hundreds of millions, but poor little old us deserved billions!"
However, pirating brand new games sucks. The game industry itself and people's jobs rely on companies making a profit from the games they create.
Yes, Nintendo has a lot of money and is a huge company, they also have shitty legal practices, but they make great games and deserve to continue to make a profit on the huge investments they make in games.
Games are cheap compared to how expensive everything else has gotten. Just buy the damn games. There are so many other shitty companies you can pirate from, but most game companies aren't it.
You should consider who it is, that is pirating these games. It's basically entirely one of 2 categories of people
1. people who don't have the money to buy the game. And consider this too: maybe they had to make the choice between this game or another game. Either way, they only buy one game, and not both. There's no sale lost.
2. people who just decided that nintendo doesn't deserve their money for some moral reason and if they didn't have an emulator, they just wouldn't by the game anyways. Again, there's no sale lost.
OoT is still selling like hot cakes.
If they have the money to buy, let them buy.
If they don’t, then they won’t.
Being an asshole about it because you’re desperate to squeeze every last cent out of prospective players is evil