[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.