this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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I guess it must be a hot take, because it gets downvoted a lot every time I say this, but...
I think it's better to boycott Nintendo outright, rather than pirate their games. Piracy is still promotion, it still benefits them, and anyone going out of their way to facilitate Nintendo piracy is clearly putting themselves at great risk. Even video content creators who are doing nothing illegal are at risk of legal battles they often can't afford.
Nothing that Nintendo comes out is so uniquely great that it's worth putting up with their awful business practices, fan abuse, and general enshittification. As far as video game platforms go, Steam provides orders of magnitude more value for the same cost, and they are doing genuinely good work advancing the quality and popularity of Linux.
This would never be downvoted on Lemmy, so you've asked to be distrusted. And no, piracy is not promotion. No one is going home and buying a switch 2 if they play an emulator of an SNES game at my house.
People play Nintendo games because they are fun. Pretending otherwise is kind of stupid. I'm hard pressed to give them any more money, but some weird campaign to pretend they don't exist isn't going to change a damned thing.
Edit: notice how I'm downvoted but the person saying a popular opinion while claiming they'll be downvoted gets upvoted. Imagine that.
Unless you have no playmates, you basically play the games and later discuss with your buddies. In turn you passively encourage your mates to play the games, even if you pirate, the social force is there.
Boycotting works, we're social creatures