MudMan

People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.

There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.

And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.

There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.

Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.

What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.

Yes, that’s the point. You put them in there, try to enforce them, see if that plays out or not. Ultimately you’re punting the determination of how far they can apply to the courts.

Which ends up being why a lot of these never get enforced. In some cases the companies would rather let you quietly break their terms than roll the dice and find out that they don’t have the protections they tried to give themselves.

Ultimately the limits of EULAs are set in legislation. What really matters is consumer protections. And in issues like these and copyright more generally we are in a bit of a no man’s land where the regulations are woefully out of date, not keeping pace with the new online-driven economy of digital goods and companies are mostly not trying to enforce a bunch of their EULAs anyway.

We end up in a system where a significant chunk of our online economy is decided by Google and social media companies by default.

It’s telling the guy went “what did Brave do now?”, though.

Maybe telling that we have a couple meme opinions in our head for these recurring arguments and we don’t particularly consider anything else, but telling nonetheless.

For sure. There’s plenty of unenforceable stuff in EULAs. For one thing a bunch of these are trying to apply globally across places with way different laws managing customer protections.

But if you don’t mind that logic getting turned both ways, just because a EULA clause isn’t enforceable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add it.

If the idea is your lawyers think there’s a risk of people buying a copy, refunding it and keeping it and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen it makes some sense to add the clause. If a judge ever says that clause doesn’t apply to a given situation you still mitigated the risk from the intended applicable situation.

That’s why these license deals also tend to have boilerplate about how a clause being unenforceable or made illegal should not impact the rest of the clauses. It’s a maximalist text, by design. It mostly exists like a big wet umbrella to keep companies out of the splash zone. Whatever ends up being used in practice is anybody’s guess. The world of civil law and private deals is way less of a black and white exact science than most people getting their legal intuition from crime dramas tend to think.

I am mad about how dumb we all are, and how easiy swayed by simple narratives that reinforce our biases.

From the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA:

This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.

You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.

This didn’t cause any stir when it came out. That makes sense, right? Nobody reads these things.

Except everybody in the press read this one, because it went viral for being written in character as a D&D document and having a bunch of jokes in it.

Admittedly this is meant to apply to refunds and things like refusing the privacy agreement, but that’s the point, it’s fairly standard boilerplate for that reason.

Not what it says.

It’s in the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA.

Read the article.

What they’re saying is this is a relatively common temrination clause. It’s meant to apply to, say, refunds.

Right. I think the confusion stems from the linked article framing this as someone getting banned for using a second hand Switch 1 game on a Switch 2.

What actually seems to have happened is someone bought a dumped cart, got their account banned when it was flagged for not being unique and then had a relatively easy time of getting customer support to unban them when he called to explain he actually did own the physical cart.

From that perspective it all makes some sense, it’s just not what Metro decided to report, I’m assuming due to being swept into reports of resold bricked Switch 2s.

Well, no, the dude telling the truth is the first bunch of letters. The point is how the thing that he’s telling the truth about actually happened to him.

Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.

They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.

Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It’s been a while since I looked into it.

In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.

Given that there are no good sources of Nintendo storage out there I don’t know how profitable it’d be to make a bootleg single-game cart when you could instead sell the same hardware as a flashcart. Used Switch games aren’t that expensive anyway. I guess it’s technically possible, though.

A false positive is almost weirder, because what does a false positive look like? A false positive on what test? Admittedly I have no idea of how they’re ID’ing flashcarts to ban them. What they have clearly works, but without knowing what the technique is I can’t tell if a false positive is even possible. The “bought a cart that had been used to make a known dump” theory is… possible, but I’d need more proof than just sounding more plausible than anything else.

Either of those hypotheses shows that their EULA overreach has practical implications that they should have considered, but it’s fundamentally different from what the article is putting forward.

Both the carts and the digital downloads are signed, but the cart signature is not stored with the account or associated to it, to my knowledge.

With digital games you can run them on two Switch consoles at once and, while that has been complicated by the “virtual cards” it would not ban you, it’d just kick you out of the game.

I can’t promise that they aren’t flagging physical cards showing up in two places at once. That is possible, as I said above. I am just not aware of that being a thing that they do, and it would not be Switch 2-specific, so it’d be surprising we only hear about it now.

It could be that this guy got himself a bootleg cart, but that sounds expensive to create for how cheap used Switch games are, and you’d get dinged on the flashcart, period, it wouldn’t necessarily require the game to appear in two places at once.

So it’s not that I’m saying this didn’t happen, I’m saying I don’t know what happened or why just from what is currently being reported.

They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.

Eh… I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.

From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.

This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.

Or, I guess d) is lying about it?

Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.

At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don’t even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.

That doesn’t mean I’m on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it’s just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.

But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.

EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that’s the most likely scenario?

Sure, and with the GPU sucking up a bunch of juice that’s plenty to get toasty.

It’s just I haven’t been using laptops that do that in the past few years and coming from desktop world it feels so wrong now.

On a 1660 Ti (MaxQ, I presume)? I can believe it. It’s the exact range of game that card is made for. At a glance I don’t see Skyrim AE benchmarks, but notebookcheck has it running Monster Hunter World, MGS V and Rise of the Tomb Raider maxed out at 1080p60ish.

Maybe I’m spoiled by just assuming Windows and Linux benchmarks are comparable by default? I guess it’s no longer a surprise now, so… congrats, everybody?

Also, man, is there something you can do about those CPU temps? It makes me nervous just to look at that 28% utilization at 90C. I’ve been away from gaming laptops since handhelds are a thing and I’m not used to that anymore.

Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.

But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.

For me it got particularly bad back when I was running Manjaro and the GUI package manager showed you multiple package types for the same software all the time. Three metronomes is bad, but three differently packaged versions of Steam is worse and potentially unrecoverable.

Gonna raise the notion that a good, usable piece of software would not require much, if any level of awareness on this front, since most users aren’t willing or able to have that awareness in the first place.

The way this should work is you click on things you want in a package manager and then those are present and available transparently whether you use them or not. That goes for all OSs.

Hell, even Android’s semi-automatic hybernating of unused apps is a step too close to my face, as far as I’m concerned.

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.