Recently a friend of mine had a jailbreak done on his Nintendo Switch, which is something I was unaware was an option. Nintendo is normally really good at preventing something like this and it was a surprise to me that it is possible. I suppose everything is possible these days.
I had never really considered doing this but when he turned up and showed me his start screen that had 20 games on it, many of which are brand new, I have to say that I was a bit jealous.
Photo taken with my seriously terrible phone camera
He also informed me that in the future he can easily add any new game that is released via a rom and is also able to play classic games via an emulator. The options are basically endless and of course, cost nothing.
The only downside he said, was that you cannot play online anymore once you do this. This wasn't really an issue for me because I am so disinterested in online play that i never even bothered to set up a Nintendo account. I do play a few games online with close friends and family on my PS5, but for the most part I am a guy who likes single player RPG's and metroidvania games and those don't need to be online.
I don't know if playing GBA games was even possible before now, I never bothered to look into it, but according to my friend it is possible and very easy to do.
Now here comes the ethical dilemma part: I don't actually like to participate in piracy. While I am perfectly happy to stick it to the big studios that seem to have made a game out of fleecing us, Ido feel a bit bad about smaller studios who these days seem to be making much better games than the AAA studios who seem to have taken on the opinion that they can do whatever they want to us and there is nothing we can do about it. It's one of those "fuck you, pay me" sort of situations from Goodfellas.
I was pretty upset about precisely this sort of thing when I paid $70 for Zelda, Links Awakening and the entire game only took about 8 hours to get through. For the most part I look at games as a way to actually save money because there aren't very many activities that we can do these days for 100 hours that only cost $50 - $100. In the case of that Zelda game though, Nintendo was simply ripping us off. The game was a remake (which I wasn't aware of at the time) and all they did was give it a graphical upgrade. According to a friend of mine that played it on Game Boy, it is exactly the same story. They didn't put a lot of work into this but still charged full price for it.
This is customer exploitation in my opinion and since all Zelda games are Nintendo exclusives, you either pay the price, or don't play it... your choice, right?
Well, not in the case of my friend with the jailbroken Switch. he can go and get any game, any time, for free.
I'm considering doing it myself to be honest but at the same time I would rather give the money to the smaller studios that make indie games that are awesome. If we all steal their games the next thing we know only the AAA studios will remain and then can just resume treating us all like ATM machines with no other choice.
I have not yet decided if I want to do this but you can't argue with the price. According to my friend the price to have it jailbroken and have a 256GB SD card installed is around $70... the same price I paid for that one ripoff Zelda game.
What do you think?
Please note just in case some admin has an issue with piracy being on here: I didn't actually do it, I am just contemplating doing so.