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Comment by maronato

2 days ago

Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.

I’m yet to hear a moral argument for emulating current games you don’t own unless you’re poor and need to choose between buying Zelda and starving.

They have sold millions of faulty joycons (referring to drift), when the solution was already available (hall effect sticks) but it would have cost them an extra $1 per joystick, reselling games that came out in 2010 for $60 today, and using DMCA to bully youtube channels that show videos of their games are some morally reprehensible things from the top of my head.

It does not entitle anyone to pirate their games, but taking your words, Nintendo is not exactly starving either, they could have spent the extra $1 on the joycons to fit them with non drifting sticks. Even if you use their replacement program, you just get another joycon with the same stick.

> Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.

If you do so, the seller has one less device. If you copy a game, the seller still has the same number of games. Your analogy clearly doesn't work. A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.

  • > A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.

    Well, we literally invented Star Trek replicators for information, and we've seen what happened. If we had Star Trek replicators people would be complaining that replicating food, medicine, etc. is immoral because you should be paying the "original creator" for their intellectual property.

    • Not defending the length of current US copyright, but as long as we live under capitalism, the people who spend years of their time making the information need to get compensated somehow.

      2 replies →

What if you buy the game secondhand, cheaply? My friend got Animal Crossing with their switch for free with a bundle, but they don't like playing the game. This would be much better than paying full price for a game that never will go on sale.

  • Buying a used game means the original owner can no longer play, and has to repurchase if they want to play as again. The same is not true for emulators

What if I emulate current games that my friend owns, but I make sure to never play the same game at the same time as he does?