Leave it, I already preserve it
Nintendo must have thought something like this when sending the cease and desist letters to those responsible for some projects of the scene who talked about preserving Nintendo games and, to do so, resorted to a system for extracting the unique keys of Switch games that allowed you to save them on a computer and, of course, play them later thanks to an emulator. And of course, it has been this point that has no longer been so funny to the Japanese, although since that initiative they have shown repeatedly that they are not an illegal game distribution channel.
That is why the Lockpit project has officially announced the closure of any development, in the heat of those threats from Nintendo that, although initiatives like this may seem good, in reality they only hide new ways of extracting unique keys from the games that could be considered illegal since they infringe intellectual property rights of the Japanese.
It is obvious that the moment you are circumventing a protection system, you are forcing and reaching an undefined terrain where many rights can be violated, and surely all must be respected. In Spain, all users have the right – and pay for it – to a private copy for exclusive use that we could not share in any way. Is something like this respected in projects like Lockpit or is an end such as preservation really used to hide the possibility of playing all Switch releases without paying a single euro?
Nintendo and its record against piracy
Without a doubt, what happened with Nintendo and that communication to those responsible for Lockpit not surprising if we look at the history of the japonsses, who have been facing the copy systems of their video games since the days of Super Nintendo, Game Boy and even NES. At the beginning of the 90s, it was especially significant in its fight against copycats and since then it has not stopped having teams in its different countries’ offices specifically dedicated to prosecuting these practices.
Nintendo, as has well shown, It is one of the few that have a clear strategy when it comes to preserving their video games, that is taking them from one console to another within a monetization strategy and giving value to users that is praiseworthy: Nintendo Switch Online is the best example of this, currently, as was its Virtual Machine in previous ones such as Wii, Wii U, etc.
Be that as it may, know that if you have a Nintendo-related video game preservation project in mind, Go forgetting, because they are the ones who are in charge of doing it. At least as far as their own releases are concerned. Another thing will be the hundreds or thousands of names that reach the Nintendo eShop, nobody knows if someone will take care of preserving them… or not.
