> More than anything, the way Nintendo has structured these Breath of the Wild exclusives speaks to how woefully outdated its digital strategy is. That may be

> More than anything, the way Nintendo has structured these Breath of the Wild exclusives speaks to how woefully outdated its digital strategy is. That may be true but that still doesn't change the fact that the author is unlocking paywalled content without actually paying for it. There are many instances of games shipping with DLC already bundled and buying it will merely unlock the content locally with no download necessary. Would anyone argue that unlocking that content by other means than buying it was not piracy? It's the same argument we hear about "abandonware". "Well, they're not planning on selling it digitally and obtaining a copy is difficult and/or expensive so it's alright to download it." Well, legally it's still piracy — no two ways about it (at least until it falls into the public domain, but that'll be a good while still for many of the games listed on abandonware sites). The whole piece reeks of post-rationalization. I don't care if he pirates stuff or not but this feeble attempt to rationalize it is honestly a bit tiring to read. You can take up the debate about Amiibo availability etc. without also arguing that this is the reason why it's OK to pirate it. And the fact that he rounds it all off by putting all of the blame on Nintendo (despite his weaving back and forth earlier) just cements it for me: > If only Nintendo would let more players in on the fun. Finally (and now I'm just splitting hairs because I've gotten all worked up about this), I think he needs to revisit his definition of cheating: > I’ve been cheating in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I don’t mean that I’m running an illegally obtained version of the game on an emulator, or that I’m exploiting the game’s design flaws to skip over parts of the story I’d rather not deal with. The former isn't cheating, that's just pirating it, it's a completely different thing. The latter is up for debate I guess. No speedrunner would consider it cheating (obviously, if it saves time and it's in the game code then it's alright) which leads me to a thing many people could learn from speedrunners' approach to games: Don't make any assumptions about how you're intended to play a game. Unless you have the devs right there to tell you, you really can't know or infer it. /rant Edit: I'd be happy to hear opposing views since there appear to be some.