Edit: I guess I didn't realize Portal was on Switch.
For instance, I run qemu all the time to emulate various android devices.
I suspect that you're thinking specifically of game emulation though.
Running software on an emulated device is fine legally as long as it doesn't violate copyright law.
For instance, you can legally backup software that you own in the US [1] - that extends to games as well - and because emulators themselves are legal (although you may also need to backup the device's BIOS), you can have a completely legitimate archive of copyrighted games to run via an emulator.
That said, it's unlikely that most people archive software themselves, and it is not legal to distribute backups in the US, even if both parties have legitimately acquired copies of the source material.
Are there details on those measures?
The switch is already weak in terms of hardware so I am not sure how many games will end up integrating it. Regardless of what Denuvo says in marketing, it will slow down games. Nintendo has since tried to distance itself from it, but Denuvo has said they have entered NDA agreements with large publishers already. Denuvo would also need low level access and approval from Nintendo, so I am not sure why Nintendo is pretending to separate itself from this effort.
According to this article, this is an initiative championed by Denuvo alone, without Nintendo's involvement.
They used to sell emulators on their marketplace for their back catalogue under the 'virtual console' brand and more recently on Switch include emulation for NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 titles as a benefit on their online subscription model.
Nintendo: "oh no, how dare you show that your product can do something that's perfectly legal and a very common use"
I think what they sells are more about services that support the game. For example: you can find l4d2 crack easily. But you are never able to join to the official community server list without a proper purchase.
When you are confident in your own products, you don't have to stoop to cheap user-hostile bullying tactics to protect your wares.
Emulation legality aside, Nintendo would certainly be the company I would expect to pressure Valve for a case against enabling and abetting piracy given their history of legally attacking perceived "competition".
Stay with me.
In Europe during the time of Mozart, composers were incentivized to be prolific by only getting royalties off the first public performance of their works. Now that is not fair today because of course we can losslessy reproduce such things infinitely.
However, Humble Bundles (and really, steam sales and other similar discounts and give-aways) work because the vast majority of the money a game is ever likely to make is early in the revenue cycle. Not 20 or 10 or even 5 years later.
We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictional losses for the copyright holder. What losses? If you're not selling the game anymore, how can you have losses from it? If you're not selling that movie in my country, how can you show a loss from me downloading it?
The entry on the GOG.com wishlist has 36K+ upvotes with a new comment posted every week or so. Seems like low hanging fruit for someone at EA to make a quick buck.
Also the games aren't 100% unavailable, they're perfectly available on their original platforms on the secondary market if you want one badly.
That is because there are statutory damages to copyright violations. By definition, any violation causes a fixed amount of damage.
I too have many gripples with copyright but this is simply wrong. Copyright is designed to protect the rightsholder. Whether it is a person or a company is irrelevant. This isn't a conspiracy or cynical-type explanation, this is by design
Copyright is designed "to promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts."
That should be the first question.
An advocate for the devil would claim that those creators were compensated upfront rather than over the lifetime of the product. Therefore, the company is rightfully collecting the revenue that the creator left to them that they already paid for.
Which is a view you’re welcome to hold, but I’d certainly prefer a system designed for people who engage in creative work to have a greater share of what they create, and for the economics of creative work to not be so deeply entrenched in wealth consolidation for its own sake.
Disclaimer: the sum total I’ve been paid for purely creative work is approximately $11 from my share of ticket sales and a couple of drinks on the house. Which is $11 dollars more than I ever sought out, because I realized making a living as an artist had dim prospects before I even got a chance to try.
Ports, remasters, official emulation, and subscriptions have given a longer "tail" for at least a handful of classics but even without that it's "the IP" that would be most jealously guarded.
I can almost guarantee that this isn't Nintendo's primary motivation for the behavior. There is much more money to be made with xplat games, and almost all (if not strictly all) consoles are loss-leaders.
Nintendo is ruled by dogma, nothing more, nothing less. Nintendo is much like Larry Ellison[1], don't try to make sense of them. If it wasn't for a core set of IP that their designers/developers routinely ace, they would be dead in the water.
When copying was extremely hard(back in antiquity) everyone who was an artisan was producing 1 art per 1 unit. So you didn't even need a state-level enforcement of copyright; either it was good work or it wasn't.
During the run-up to industrialization more possibilities to make units without making art came about. But the means of production were still capital and labor-intensive - there were only so many printing presses in town. Therefore, copyright built a social contract: the state enforces what the presses can do to copy your work. As soon as you exited the borders of that state, piracy was prolific.
This regime continued all the way through the 20th century and only started cracking when homemade copies became good enough, which, within media industries now fully enmeshed with state interests, the obvious response was "don't tape at home, don't copy that floppy, you wouldn't download a car."
Nowadays there is no scarcity of copies, only scarcity of attention. "Likes" are effectively a currency, but likes aren't state money, they're an awkward mediation of platform algorithms. Instead we have a two-class media system where, in each form of media, there's "the industry", which deploys all the mechanisms of the state(corporate investment, IP laws, marketing campaigns) to encourage consumers to give up their state bucks, and then the "gig workers", who have assembled a patchwork of social media mechanisms to get eyeballs to their work and pick up commissions, crowdfunding, and other forms of fundraising that allow indirect exits to state bucks. Because you mostly can't get paid for what you already did without utilizing the full might of the state, everyone is inclined to push monetization further towards promises of future work: the stretch goal, DLC, etc. Buying the rumor and selling the news.
In this framework, we have to discuss NFTs. They aren't "ready for use" in the current state of things, but they present an alternative mode of exit: discard the unit production mindset and define the art as a financial asset. It already has some analogue in the gallery system, but digitization makes it a cheap, low-friction process. With "all my apes are gone" comes some demonstration of effectiveness: You can, in fact, just put a price to art, let traders make risky gambles with it, and rely on a non-state, independently operated system to give you a cut of the resulting carnage.
What we don't have yet is strong coordination between likes and trading. What made NFTs a bubble was the degree of misrepresentation on display; far too many works were being inflated through traditional boiler-room schemes, and many more were stolen works scraped from unwilling or unaware sources. Everyone pounced on proof-of-concept tech with an angle for a rug pull. But this is the kind of thing that tech has seen many waves of: snake oil salesmen turning some genuine breakthrough into fools' gold, followed by a gradual address of each specific problem that made it foolish.
So I think of the possibilities for art as a thing society can fund and reward going forward as a thing that will look both more social-media-like and asset-like; maybe not in the specific mode NFTs took, or in the specific form that engagement on TikTok takes, but drawing on some aspects of both and building a greater-than-the-sum result.
Valve isn't burning any bridges here because there were no bridges to begin with.
The only thing I can see this threatening is native JoyCon/Pro Controller support on Steam (more specifically use of their controller glyphs) if Nintendo want to get real vindictive. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much of an existing relationship to be threatened.
I've seen a lot of formerly xbox and playstation exclusive titles start popping up on Steam... so you wouldn't need an emulator for those...
No other way to get Mario on Steam yet though ;)
The specs look decent enough and the price is cheaper than a laptop.
Hook it up to a dock and it should work and perform like a laptop. With a decent CPU, quick SSD and 16GB of RAM you should be able to do certain types of dev work quite comfortably if you hook up a display or two, a mouse and a keyboard.
The thing just runs Flatpak so stuff like VS Code and Jetbrains products will run perfectly fine.
The Linux desktop seems to tweak some things in the UI to be friendlier toward users coming from Windows. Not sure if that's a valve thing or not, can't say I'm a distro guru.
It's not super performant for me on a 4k display, docked. But, it should all work with a nice usb-c monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a dock off Amazon.
Guaranteed there will be something funky in the distro that gets in your way at some point though.
It'd be easier to use if it can automatically do it for you though. Something like, enter a special env, install packages, leave and it automatically pop up an image for you would be nice.
I think this is quite similar to docker image layers except it is composable
That said, it would probably work so long as you connected an external keyboard.
