So you played their game on an emulator, and you "would otherwise have really considered" paying for their products (but you didn't). How are they losing out by alienating you?
I bought prior generations of Nintendo consoles. I had not considered current consoles. I recently reconsidered via discovering current games via emulation and am now put off by present behavior. What did they gain? historically downloading a small file has been a poor predictor of people's willingness to spend $20 let alone $400 for console and game.
Also historically emulation has been teaser because they tend to trail console release by years and only gain good support by the time present generation is passe. Probably the biggest issue here is emulation is unusually good because nintendo released gamecube 1 2 and 3 and their latest effort is weak enough that PC actually plays at a higher res.
Can you really claim to be a future customer of a product when you can get and are getting the value the product provides without having to pay for it?
It's funny to me how every time the topic of piracy comes up, the world suddenly becomes so full of people who totally like giving companies money out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. And then by next week when it's time for another post about how open source maintainers get burnt out from a lack of material support, we all suddenly remember how human nature actually works.
Yep. My last Steam purchases include Cities: Skylines, Graveyard Keeper, Mini Metro, etc. All games I bought after I pirated and played them for a few hours. If I can't pirate a game, then I won't buy the game. Exceptions include games with a proper demo, like The Stanley Parable, or games that're love on first sight, like Lethal Company.
I have 112 paid PC games in my steam library and over the years I've owned 6 consoles as well as building or buying many gaming computers. I'm definitely in the market for games and machines to play them.
They didn't lose out on any of those things – at worst, they lost the potential that someone who recently played their game without paying for the hardware or software would pay next time.
"This game was so great that I would consider paying next time, but I'm definitely not going to pay this time" doesn't seem, to me, like a credulous position.
We're talking about Nintendo. They literally don't sell their older games and consoles. Your only options are the (sometimes severely overpriced) 2nd hand market and piracy.
That might be relevant if we were talking about someone wanting to play the Nintendo DS port of Chrono Trigger. But we're talking about Breath of the Wild & the Switch, which are in stock at every store that sells video games.
Just my take, but they've ensured the Switch and games I bought from them will be the last. I prefer to use my hardware keys and game carts on PC for higher resolution.
