Among computing hardware companies Nintendo is really second only to Apple in making sure to remind us to never buy their devices on a regular basis. Well, unless you count Sony perhaps but not sure I would count smart TVs in quite the same category.
Their DRM is optional, and many games on Steam are DRM free, meaning you can copy the files to another machine not running Steam and it would work just fine. And Steam's DRM, if used, is the least annoying DRM out there IMO.
Less games actually use Steam's DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.
There's an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there's no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.
Hey Nintendo, how about you just release an emulator on PC and sell ROMs yourself? I'd gladly buy pretty much every first party title you make. You could even limit it to older games and I'd still buy a ton.
I don't want to keep Nintendo hardware around, but I do want to play Nintendo games. My wallet is ready.
Nintendo isn't know for handling "the internet" very well. Just look at their online services compared to their competitors over the years. We still use friend codes ffs.
Now that we have viable PC handhelds I no longer have a reason to care about Nintendo. Blast the pirates or don't, I'm not buying their shit either way. On the other hand I've got a lot of friends who actually have decent money in Nintendo's ecosystem who use emulators to play the games they own in a way they prefer. This has left a bad taste in their mouths...
Yup, I'm happy to buy Nintendo games, I would really rather not play them on the Switch. If Nintendo released on PC, I'd be willing to pay more than the Switch game price.
Wouldn't it be funny if people made a switch 2 emulator quickly and host it through i2p or tor, maybe git through those or just send patches so it can't be taken down, that would be horrible. I hope people don't do that to Nintendo.