no way Persona 3
Wasn't Gaben's point in that statement that although piracy inevitably happens to some degree, the best way to mostly prevent it is to make a good service? That's why Steam was such a success, as it made digitally licensed games easily accessible to PC gamers who were previously being screwed over by other platforms.
I think Nintendo would be able to manage getting a good price per gig on 32GB and 16GB cartridges. They have massive demand (a vast amount of Switch 2 games are under 16GB) as well as close historical relationships with flash manufacturers. In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if those sizes were still mass produced at low prices for embedded or industrial computing use, even as consumers move to larger storage media making consumer SD cards at those sizes more expensive per gig.
Nintendo needs to get to work making smaller cartridges for Switch 2, 64GB carts only is too expensive for a lot of publishers. I do think key cards have a purpose for 64GB+ big games that would be very expensive physically without the key card system, but smaller games should have the whole game on the cartridge. At the very least Nintendo needs to ban code in a box and make those publishers move over to key cards.
Hopefully they can manage to stem the flow on the eShop. The shovelware problem is worse than it was on the Wii. However, I have noticed recently on my Switch 2 (also maybe on Switch 1 eShop as well now?) that a lot of those sorts of games aren't flooding the front page all the time, which is a good sign. They probably changed some of the algorithms, as I think they were tuned to show newest releases first.
In my experience, even when new my 3DS XL died way faster in sleep mode compared to the Switch. I've had a Switch in a bag for nearly two days on sleep with some light gameplay and still have at least 50% of its battery. Meanwhile, the 3DS XL battery went down quick enough one of my first purchases was one of those USB charger cables so I could charge it anywhere. It lasts under a day on sleep with some light gameplay.
What sort of AAs were you using? I used to get around at least a month or two on a set of fully charged standard Eneloop AAs. Then again, I didn't use my Xbox too intensely, maybe you had a different experience. It would make sense for the Elite to have longer battery life simply because of better battery chemistry (lithium ion on the integrated pack compared to AAs with nickel metal hydride).
It is extremely unlikely that Steam are accepting of piracy. They may be negligent (maybe not investing enough into copy protection), but being even somewhat accepting would immediately tarnish their reputation with game publishers. Denuvo seems like more of a quick fix, not a real solution, that was put on after publishers started to lose patience. Even for their own self interest, they would be losing money on their own published games.
You have a good point. As long as that fear is in the used games market, people will be incentivised to only buy new cartridges (if not digital) as they can't trust any used ones. The only sales then would be between people who know each other and are swapping their games, which is a far smaller market. It is somewhat ironic that the MIG Switch, a device made by people who have nothing to do with Nintendo, might end up helping Nintendo revenues by making it so that nobody can trust that used games weren't cloned.
Don't give them any more ideas! No, but actually, this might be an unfortunate consequence of this whole thing. Locking it to a console would get rid of MIG Switch, but at the cost of killing a big used game industry. I think they wouldn't try it, due to the sheer amount of blowback they would get (far beyond anything else they've done before), but we never know.
As in they would never allow that to happen under any circumstances. Companies are already clamping down on other platforms due to piracy (just look at how many Steam games have Denuvo in addition to the Steam DRM, Steam's protections get cracked fairly easily nowadays), so not surprising Nintendo want to nip any copying problems in the bud before shit hits the fan.
Yellow 13 or Erusea ring any bells? Sounds like you played 4. Controls have stayed similar since then, the arcadey style is still strong in 7. 8 isn't out yet, hence the rituals.