The James Webb Space Telescope is my favorite indie game

fps isn’t graphical fidelity, it’s litterally how it feels to play. It defines your whole experience.

My comment didn’t mention resolution or quality of graphics at all. I’m only talking about framerate, which has a major impact on how responsive and fluid the controls feel. All else being equal, a higher framerate typically just feels nicer to play. Compare Super Mario 64 (30fps) to Super Smash Bros. (60fps).

People were playing 60 fps minimum on most games before 2020. What era are you stuck in that you think 60 fps was a difficult target before 2020 haha. Even consoles have moved onto 120 fps options now.

I played TotK at launch on my Switch and also loved it.

The point you’re missing is that, whilst the game is already good on original hardware, the game is better when emulated and running at the full 1080p 60fps.

Think of it like Nintendo is giving you a ice cream sundae, and the emulator is adding extra toppings.

Also man, try to get out of the habit of doing the “Oh you like pancakes? Why do you hate waffles?” thing, it’s just combative. I mean unless you’re looking for an argument then by all means go ham

Never said I can’t enjoy it. I beat it on Switch. It was great.

I’m saying a better game is available, and to deny yourself that game solely because of Nintendo lawyers is dumb.

Haha cinemas existed. Old people watched old movies at home on 4:3 ratio with tiny screens. It’s not that it can’t be enjoyed, but what we have now with restored aspect ratio and better scans is an improved product.

Forgive me if I say that might sound like a biased take.

Personally, leaving aside the legal argument of piracy, I would be fine with paying Nintendo the money but playing on my steam deck and having stuff like steam input and having my save games for future PCs. I haven’t played TotK yet but the 90+ hours I put in BotW is locked to the switch which I sold after getting a steam deck. I don’t care for high end PC performance.

You dont need a 3k gaming pc to get started. PC has lots of options, thats part of the appeal.

Steam alone has as many monthly active users as the switch has lifetime sales. Its not a tiny niche market.

Its also not unpleasable. There are certain technical standards, sure. But that is true for all consoles as well.

I am not sure what you mean by metrics but bad performance makes a game feel bad to play, a game barely running at or below 30 fps (I remind again 30 is the minimum number of frames for it to look fluid at all). Not just that but the input latency is gonna be terrible. Paying full price for a game on it’s own console and than have it run badly is a “fuck you” to the consumers but you are still insisting that the crap they have shitted out tastes good because you don’t have anything els to compare it with.

I never said I’d pirate, I said I’m not going to buy the game.

I’d only be within my rights if I actually backed up the game, but I don’t have a rooted Switch, so that’s not an option for be currently. It’s easier to just not buy the game.

The DMCA.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html

Nah TOTK runs like garbage on the switch compared to it’s potential you can say it ‘doesnt matter’ but it’s a mess. I played for a couple hours on my actual switch but got so annoyed with the horrendous aliasising of shadows and jagged camera movement that I stopped and spent a couple days of free time setting up yuzu on my PC. The difference is NIGHT and DAY! You are just sitting in Nintendo’s cave watching shadows on the wall if you think it doesn’t matter. The difference is in fact enormous it just might not matter to you.

That’s fair. It is popular for a reason, even if I don’t see it myself.

Laws should be heavily influenced by what is morally right and wrong, but morality as a concept is not influenced by laws. An individual’s or culture’s sense of morality might be, but if laws are derived from morals then that’s fine.

Questions of morality will have different answers when the context changes, so it may be morally unacceptable in one society to do something and morally acceptable to do the same thing in another. Laws have an influence on morality only insofar as laws have an impact on the context in which actions take place. This would not be because the law prohibits those actions.

Some examples:

• If a law is passed outlawing sharing nonconsensual AI-generated pornography, it should be because it was agreed that doing so is morally wrong. The law being passed doesn’t make it suddenly morally wrong.
• If a law were passed making some completely innocuous action illegal, and frequently punished - say, hand-painting Nintendo or Disney characters on an interior wall in your own house - then posting publicly on someone’s Facebook wall about loving their Princess Peach X Princess Elsa mural would be morally wrong, even though it would have been fine to do that before the law was passed.

The context that we have is that it is illegal (in the US) to:

• distribute copyrighted materials
• download copyrighted materials
• bypass DRM even when making a backup, except for specific purposes. With video games, unless you are circumventing DRM because the auth servers were taken down (inapplicable for the Switch) or solely because you have a physical disability and are patching the game to support other input options (standard keyboard and mouse specifically excluded), then it is still illegal.

So in either case you’d be doing something illegal. But morally, in a situation where you’ve purchased the game and are platform-shifting to an unsupported platform (like the “time-shifting” defense used with VHS recordings, DVRs, etc.), then the laws aren’t really relevant. The laws certainly don’t exist because there’s societal agreement that this type of platform shifting is morally wrong.

The reason the person I replied to had to pay someone to rip his own game for him is because Nintendo makes it difficult to do so. Even if the law were different and allowed those actions, I don’t understand why anyone would think that it makes sense that a corporation can morally obligate their customers (who want to consume their product in a particular way) to perform work with no value add when the customers could get what they want by doing something much easier.

Unless you’re actually causing harm (directly or indirectly) to someone by your actions in one instance but not the other, I don’t see how one option would be morally acceptable and the other morally wrong.

If the game were supported on the other platform, then the context - and potentially the outcome - changes. If Nintendo invested a decent amount of money porting BotW to Android phones and it cost them a decent amount of money to do so, then would it be morally wrong to not support them and to emulate it instead? Would there be an ethical obligation to support them? What if the Android port was terrible - would it be acceptable to buy it, then use the emulated version anyway - and if you’d bought the Android version and were emulating it on Android, would there still be a moral or ethical obligation to purchase the same cart you were emulating? What if Nintendo just licensed or repackaged Yuzu and didn’t actually make any changes to the game, so their investment was minimal?

It’s a different situation entirely when determining whether it’s morally wrong to host a site with freely downloadable ROMs. The site could be used by people who did not purchase those games, causing lost revenue to their creators.

Both of those situations have grey areas and I can see why someone would consider them immoral. I have opinions on them, of course, but there’s a lot more nuance there; I can easily see why someone would feel differently.

With this specific situation I don’t understand - and am trying to understand - how someone could come to different conclusions for the morality of the two actions. Are they inferring that you support the site hosting the content when you download it? (If you use an adblocker and don’t financially support them, would it then be fine?) Are they assuming torrenting, where you would have to either leech (which they would consider immoral) or seed, and thus distribute, as well? Or is there some other factor that I’m not thinking of?