Games

Even though this is an annoying DRM layer, I do like the innovation attempted here.

Back in the day, you’d hand your disc to your friend and then they’d hand it back to you some time later. Digital has given us a lot more freedom in how we game, but the ability to share had been removed. This at least seems to be offering a solution, at least for those who either don’t want to or are unable to just Arr! the games.

All they need is to remove the asinine local connection piece, and make the timeframe longer.

So it's the overly complicated version of a system that's on more sane platforms like Steam? Ok.

Let me sell my digital licenses before we talk about them like they‘re comparable to physical media.

So I'm torn on this until I can test it.

Right now you can absolutely share digital games. You do need to have your account logged in on both machines and only the one where your "main" account sits can play the games offline.

This seems both easier and harder? There are now arbitrary time limits and per-game activations, which seems like a massive mess. Before the only limit was that a game couldn't be played in two places at once and that secondary consoles needed to stay online.

But conversely, the "main account" thing was annoying for a portable, so if you shared with someone that carried their console around outside the house it kinda required giving THEM the main account with all the games and keeping the secondary for yourself. This is a very parent-like situation to be in. So... that's better?

The worry here is that this sure seems like setting the groundwork to give up on physical media altogether without messing with the way people use Nintendo portables, and that is a bad thing overall. Given Nintendo's dumb, litigious approach towards these things they're getting no benefit of the doubt from me in this area.

Its still missing physical object's killer app: permanent license transferability.

With physical objects I can buy them from others, give them to friends, etc and that transfer can be permanent.

All of this lend and automatically return is just a mechanism to block permanent license transfer.

Hooray, new DRM?

I don't think you can share with friends? Only if you have a Family account and all the Switches are signed into the same Family.

I think that is a good thing. There are many reasons to dislike Nintendo, but they had no pressure to do this due to the lack of competition on their platform from other stores and manufacturers. 14 days is more than enough to finish most games or at least give them a try before buying.

I don't get why they needed a 14 day limit. Sounds half baked to me. Steam, although with its own limitations, still does a better job at game sharing.

DRM poop.

Its a strategic time for this regime to be implemented. With a sequel console on the horizon a lot of households are going to become 2 switch families soon. Anything to make customers more comfortable spending money will speed the uptake.

For PlayStation I liked they way they let each user nominate 1 primary PS4 and 1 primary PS5. They both could play the PS4 library without restriction so the old console was a perfect hand-me-down.

In comparison for Xbox they have maintained that the whole platform is homogeneous with each account only allowed one home console at a time be it One or Series.