Playable Nintendo Switch games on non-Nintendo Switch devices for a while now. This is nothing new. But over the last few weeks, I really feel like I’ve felt a shift in the scale of the conversation, and although it’s anecdotal, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it feels like a sea change.
To explain what I mean, I’ll give you a little website inside baseball. As you’ve probably noticed, game guides are a big part of the business model for outlets like VG247. Which guides we produce are determined by two key factors.
The first is intuition: we play the game and figure out what we feel people will get stuck on or care enough to pick up their phone and do a search. Once a game is published, we can more directly track what people are typing into Google, Bing, and other search engines. And if we see a particular search increasing in popularity and frequency, we know we should probably make a guide for it.
Everyone is on it. It’s certainly no Internet secret. It’s all part of the dark art of “search engine optimization,” a difficult tightrope to walk between providing useful information and over-optimizing pages so they read like they were written by a robot. Some do well, some don’t. But one interesting thing about search trends is that they often give you insight into the psyche and interests of players around a particular release.
Ever wonder how we know why we make “best stalker” guides? Wonder no more.
Sometimes, for example, we see voice actors appear, presumably from people impressed by a performance or enamored by a character’s voice. We see spikes in fan art searches; usually on the most physically attractive characters, obviously. If something like a glitch or funny line of dialogue goes viral, we can track its rise to meme status as it spreads.
Such is the case with Xenoblade Chronicles 3. This is a game with tons of labyrinthine quests, heroes to unlock, a class system to navigate, and more. During its first week, however, there was one notable staple in the search traffic surrounding the game: piracy.
It’s all anecdotal, of course, but while I was trying to see where people were hanging on Xenoblade 3’s design elements, every other search query seemed to be about emulation. Or get the game illegally. Or by adjusting your emulator settings. Or downloading new shaders to get the best possible appearance outside of the game.
No, there is no pirate class.
This was just my personal experience playing around with various search tracking tools, but for things to show up as a search trend, there needs to be a fairly significant number of people typing it into Google. This has happened with other Switch titles (I remember several similar trending issues for Pokémon Legends Arceus and Metroid Dread), but the scale of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s first weekend of release was much bigger.
This wasn’t helped by the game being leaked before launch, of course. Many media outlets ran headlines like “Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has been leaked and is fully playable on Steam Deck,” which seemed like a call to pirate action. These headlines also highlight Nintendo’s biggest problem, though.
Switch emulation has almost always been very advanced despite the relative youth of the console. This is a consequence of its relatively modest power level. But now it’s so easy that many Switch games are now playable off Switch on day one, or in the case of Xenoblade, day minus four. Then there’s the power level of the Switch itself: where expansive games like Xenoblade often struggle, you can get better performance elsewhere.
Little by little, the temptations of the enthusiasts to do bad things accumulate. Before these people inevitably show up in the comments, they get mixed up with these people who own the Switch and buy the games, but choose to emulate them for performance reasons. However, the search trends show that many people are looking for a game download. How many of them actually have the game? I do not deny that such people exist, but I doubt that there are many of them.
Would this look better on a good computer? Legally we can’t say.
Gamers who were around 15 years ago know where this leads. On the Nintendo DS, hacking went from a complicated matter to a trivial matter practically overnight. It was one of the most successful consoles of all time, and common hacking methods still required the hardware, but over time, software sales began to suffer, which had a knock-on effect on games.
How GamesIndustry.biz’s Chris Dring pointed out last year when similar trends appeared for Metroid Dread, the “R4 Card” and its peers hurt the DS so much that some publishers stopped making games for the console. Others ported planned DS games to other platforms.
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The Switch is not yet at this point. In fact, it is quite far. Crucially, playing Switch games is still significantly more complicated than those heady days when hacking a DS game would take about five minutes, most of which was spent browsing a dodgy website. That’s why I saw search terms around patches and shading and all that banter. But it seems to get easier with each major release, and these things are a slippery slope.
It’s worrying for the Switch, especially given the memory of how much piracy took the wind out of the DS’s sails in its later years. In this case, all Nintendo could do to stop it was to release a new generation of hardware. And this seems to be going the same way.
It’s easy to answer that without a doubt. You know, with that gif of Woody Harrelson wiping his tears with money from the movie Zombieland, or saying boo hoo, poor multi-billion corporation, and I get it. But once piracy becomes endemic on a platform, it affects all developers alike, big and small, and even starts to have an effect on projects in development. I hope it’s not too bad. But it sure looks like the genie is out of the bottle now.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is now available for Nintendo Switch. Check out our review here, and you can read everything we know about the game at the link.
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