[resonanttoe]

It's a perceptual argument I think.

If publishers like EA and Ubisoft lose faith in the system's ability to protect against piracy, they're less likely to go out of their way to develop for it. This is especially true for Nintendo that requires (for varying reasons) special porting/development.

For the sake of argument its easy to assume that PC, Xbox and PS4 roughly being equivilent to develop for. (this is totally cutting the gordian knot but...) They're essentially all X86_64 architecture with similar third party modules present (nVidia, AMD). So development on these systems is a lot easier.

For Nintendo, you have to develop within the limitations of typically not as powerful hardware. (Take a look at WWE2K18 between PS4 and Switch.. they struggle with that). Which means that you have to not necessarily spend more, but spend extra to get it working on Switch properly (I.E, its not quick and cheap).

Therefore if the piracy rates are high or perceived to be high because of a flourishing and popular homebrew community (false equivalency but I'm confident that it happens.) then the desire the expend that extra effort will go down. Espeically if the return is expected to be low.

Also emulators are easy these days and that just totally erodes the Virtual Console Market. Around the Wii they discovered the HUGE proportional market for virtual console (Near 0 development cost/effort, huge returns, relatively)

One of the first things that will come from this is a port of RetroArch. Which is cool but not what big N wants to see.

[vvanders]

I would separate PC and XB/PS in that analogy. They're very different both in terms of how you write performant code and what the support profile looks like.

Back when I worked on them getting PC stuff up and running marginally was pretty easy. X360 and PS3 took a ton more work to do properly(PS3 only would allow only allow a very small number of open file handles just to name one of many things).

[donatj]

> If publishers like EA and Ubisoft lose faith in the system's ability to protect against piracy, they're less likely to go out of their way to develop for it.

This was part of what killed the Dreamcast. It became very easy to burn CDs of games, rampant piracy, developers dropped out.

[Grazester]

That is not totally true. EA never comitted to the Dreamcast and its death was due to all SEGA's past mistakes that burnt consumer and developers alike. Piracy was never an issue with the Dreamcast in that it didn't hurt the system.

Someone did a pretty in dept analysis of the Dreamcast console and games sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hGK2ep3gJI&feature=youtu.be

Sega was strapped for cash and couldn't compete with Sony's hype and deep pockets. The Dreamcast was dead out of the gate unfortunately.

edit:// Seamus Blackley the CTO of the Xbox and person who came up with the idea that Microsoft needed to get into the console market and pushed the company to do it, is quoted as saying "If I had known how powerful Sony and Nintendo were, I would have probably given up on there wouldn't be an Xbox"

That should give you and idea of what the console business is like. Even with Microsoft's deep pockets its a hell of a challenge.

[freeflight]

> This was part of what killed the Dreamcast. It became very easy to burn CDs of games, rampant piracy, developers dropped out.

The original Playstation also could run pirated games rather easily, even without chipping it. All that was needed was an action replay/game shark and using the swapping trick. What made this even more appealing was the fact that the console was region locked and these methods allowed to bypass the region lock.

Which was a pretty big deal back then because it wasn't a given that games got released in every region (no Final Fantasy Tactics for Europe) and if they were then there was often a delay of several months until it ended up in certain regions (Europe). So chipping the Playstation had several advantages for an avid game player.

As a result, there was a very lively schoolyard market of burned PlayStation games being traded, back then I didn't know anybody who didn't have their PlayStation chipped/used swapping trick and didn't have a massive collection of burned games downloaded from the www or straight up copied from rental places.

Did that kill the PlayStation? Nope, it still ended up being one of the most successful consoles. So I'm not sure that console piracy is really that big of a factor for a consoles success or lack of success.

[saguro]

I don't buy the added development cost argument. Firstly because AAA dev kits already have out of the box support for the Switch, secondly because sony and xbone put just as much effort into preventing unsigned code execution as nintendo does.

Then is it just about protecting the emulation market? For nintendo I'd agree. For sony I'd say maybe. For microsoft? They don't really have an emulation market to speak of, but they still dump a lot of resources into DRM.

So is it all about the perceived threat of piracy, or is there more?

But to my earlier point, piracy stops being a factor a decade or two after the release of a console. Why don't we put time limits on DRM like we do with copyright and patents so that the manufacturers are forced to allow full use of the devices eventually.

[resonanttoe]

Re: Development cost. I think we probably just have different perceptions on what that cost will be. I'm happy to disagree with you here, but I think we'll talk around the lack of any facts here. (Read: I have nothing I can present to concretely prove my point or disprove yours so I'm abandoning that line and will take your point as given as much as I feel mine (should be?) is :D)

I would however still argue that its the perception of piracy and those costs rather than any reality of it.

In regards to the idea of time-limited DRM. The argument here is what does that ultimately give Nintendo? The device is EOL and from their point of view the goodwill of the small community of us who like poking around the devices isn't worth even the relatively small amounts of effort to implement that model of DRM. Especially when Homebrew development happens within a console lifetime to begin with.

Essentially, the work hours for homebrew is bought and paid for by these folk here. Nintendo has to do nothing and they get that Homebrew warm-fuzzies from a small group of folks.

However the perceptual loss of faith from someone like EA would cause a huge and immediate impact to the life-cycle of in the In-life console. (Think of the Polygon,IGN and other articles that would come out if EA so much as sniffed at the idea of the Switch being to much of a piracy-risk)

So no, I don't think there is more to it than a perception. Which sadly I think is overweighted in the argument. But already in this post, there are some weird equivalencies between user features and OS security being made which has a lot of value for people (not saying they're wrong in their valuations, just maybe the placement) so perception counts an awful lot for a lot of folks.

[saguro]

Agreed. I guess the core of the question is 'what does that ultimately give nintendo?'.

And that's where I think the government needs to step in as it did with copyright and patents, and ask an additional question: 'what does that ultimately give to society?'. The answer is decreased environmental impact and decreased cost of living. The console manufacturers are passing on costs to consumers that consumers shouldn't have to bear - and don't have to bear when it comes to patents and copyrights. Imagine if patents were perpetual like DRM is and rocket engine technology would forever belong to a single manufacturer with the license..?

[resonanttoe]

Totally agree, but the chance of that happening is pretty low. There isn't perceived to be a problem in that area at the moment that Governments worldwide really need to fix.

To the copyright point. Standard copyright will still apply to all the works produced (which is what, 75 years after last publication) but considering that Video games as a somewhat mainstream endeavor is only at absolute best 40-50 years old, were unlikely to get a test of that any time soon, and thats before republication through virtual console and GOG may actually constitute a refresh on the copyright period.

I think its more likely that consumer pressure to do an ID style of things whereby they opensource their older stuff is the likely fix to our problems.

[BoorishBears]

There's increased development costs on multiple fronts.

Common AAA engines don't support multiple platforms seamlessly, each platform has it's own input devices, asset formats, etc. that need to be supported.

When I worked on a team using the Wii U's Unity3D environment, Wii U builds required a special version of Unity3D, obviously needed to support the specialized form factor of the Wii U's input devices (I'm sure Nintendo has new guidelines on what each game has to support when Joycons are attached and detached). There were even guidelines on how the home button was handled across platforms or how long you could spend loading assets.

Not to mention many large AAA studios are using their own engines (Nintendo had a third tier of development tools reserved for them, that allowed native access and did nothing to support cross platform development) that aren't built to support the Switch without an investment that's greater than on the fairly similar Xbox and PS4.