You always have with Nintendo products. They have always had very aggressive licensing practices. In the early days they were more flexing them on developers, but it does not surprise me that in the wake of everyone telling them that modding and emulators can be explicitly legal that they would turn that particularly litigious aspect of their family friendly brand on the customers.
Always has been unless you count modding to remove this kind of shitty DRM.
Nintendo was the company to popularize DRM in home consoles with the US release of the NES. The Famicom had no DRM even though it was identical hardware otherwise (well, that, the RF modulator, and the PCB layout).
At this point I want Switch 2 to flop so hard they go the way of the Sega and start licensing their IPs on other platforms, giving up on consoles. A shame, too, since their tech is little kid hand friendly and the PC market doesn’t seem keen on tiny screen handhelds.
Oh, you thought you owned that thing you bought? No. This is 2025. You own nothing. It doesn’t matter how much money you gave them. Yeah, gave them. Because you didn’t buy that stuff. You’re just borrowing it.
Microsoft and Sony don’t brick your console if you hacked it; they’ll ban you from online services and possibly deny any warranty claims if you bricked it yourself by mistake, but they don’t make your device a paper weight.
Sony may not do it, the same way Nintendo might not do it either, but both reserve the right to do so
Edit: If you take a look at the PLAYSTATION®5 SYSTEM SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT under “6. VIOLATION OF AGREEMENT; TERMINATION OF RIGHTS AND SIE INC REMEDIES”, one of the possible actions they may take states:
disabling use of this PS5 system online or offline
Hilarious that this comment is so far down, Lemmy can be such a circlejerk.
Sony and Xbox absolutely reserve the right to brick your console. IIRC Sony bricks stolen Playstation consoles if they ever connect to the internet. This is nothing new.
Yeah the Nintendo vitriol for the past month has been funny. I get it, companies are not our friends, and Nintendo has done a lot of shit to be mad at. The game keycards are dogwater, but this concept of buy cartridge and download the rest is not new. Sony and Xbox have literally done the same shit for years, and Nintendo did this with some large games on Switch 1.
Another comment showed Sony will brick hacked consoles that get on the internet. Switch 1 also does this.
The price sucks, but it’s definitely tariffs, since the console is like a whole hundred dollars cheaper in Japan.
If you wanna pirate/emulate, pirate/emulate. I just don’t like pirating current gen consoles, and it’s a hassle to do so on Switch 1 if you got a newer one. Plus switch emulation on steam deck seems to be iffy for some games… I pirate/emulate old consoles cause they’re dead and they’re not making money on them anyway. Sometimes you just want to buy a game and enjoy them, especially for online ones like Splatoon.
I’ll just wait for the price to be reasonable one day.
They can “reserve the right” all they want, that’s illegal where I live, and they sell their devices officially here. I’d love to see them trying to hold this stance in court - even Apple lost here over a similar issue, so go right ahead and try.
I’d like to say their legalese is written in a way that covers more ground in the US, the most litigious country in the world. I would imagine if this was taken to court, their lawyers would argue that “permanently unusable in whole or in part” includes a console serial ban from NSO, or argue that it’s the user’s fault for bricking the console when they attempted to mod it, and Nintendo is therefore not liable or obligated to fix it.
But between the UK-ToS and US-ToS, Nintendo just straight up tells Americans that they themselves are going to break your damn console if you do a thing they don’t like. That is absolutely dystopian.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne