[matheusmoreira]

Nintendo is the worst. Another example: Wii virtual console purchases don't carry over. They're selling people the exact same Mario ROMs dozens of times in a display of absolute rent seeking. Playstation recently got caught remotely deleting people's "purchased" movies too.

I too bought a Steam Deck and haven't looked back. It's still a normal computer even if Steam itself goes to shit, but all signs point to it steadfastly refusing to do that. Here's to hoping Gaben never dies.

[kmeisthax]

The Switch has one particular feature that doesn't get enough talk: basically any game update can be sent to another Switch peer-to-peer. I'm pretty sure it even works with Game Key Cards, since they're just a rebrand of an annoyance that the Switch 1 had since launch.

You could, at least hypothetically, put every physical cartridge in a Switch or Switch 2 and download all the updates to those games, and just have an offline mirror of Nintendo's entire update CDN. More likely someone should make a homebrew app that archives update data by using this weird peer-to-peer update protocol, but I have no idea what encryption would need to be broken to make that work. But it would be a legitimate boon to game preservation to have something where someone with a bone-stock Switch and a game can just download the update they need and be done with it.

[bananaboy]

Steam does this for installation with machines on the local network! It will discover them and get the data from those machines instead of downloading from the wider internet. I’m not sure if it works for updates but it might!