Piracy is an issue of service, not price

He's apparently been saying this for a while

hypervisor bypassed games ≢cracks.

This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it's not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders' best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.

The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America's entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn't have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.

None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They're just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.

• Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.
• Business Judgement Rule
• A decent, albeit brief summary from the NYT on shareholder primacy versus business judgement.

The Nintendo?

This wouldn't be the matter of an internet boycott, but normies just not wanting a $1000+ digital only system.

Because with this new proposed system, physical games were effectively just download codes. Which introduced several downsides for the many people who rely on discs, most notably the complex system involved in reselling physical discs.

Sure, this system made physical game ownership worse, but it made digital game ownership much better. Which Microsoft assumed would be a welcome tradeoff because consumers largely prefer digital games. But they had overlooked the large segment of consumers who are physical-first and do not care about digital games at all. Sure, gamers are largely gravitating towards digital games, but we are not yet at a point where literally everyone prefers digital. There are still some consumers who rely on physical for some reason or another.

The other big downside of that proposed system was the always-online requirement. Your console had to ping the Xbox servers once every 30 days to check what licenses are attached to your account or something. That was another reason why this system was ahead of its time; by assuming that every user had a stable internet connection. For most people, that wasn't a problem because they prioritize having a decent Internet connection, but plenty of people don't use the Internet.

Even to this day, an always-online requirement like that wouldn't be welcomed by many. Sure, most users in 2026 would be unaffected because they are always connected, but there are enough users without an Internet connection that would find that to be a problem. And saying "People without a good Internet connection are just not ready for this next generation, so we're still supporting the previous generation for a while" was not the best answer for those people.

It made digital game ownership significantly better at the downside of making physical game ownership worse. To people who prefer digital games (which trends show to be more and more users as time goes on), that tradeoff is very welcome. But there are still a lot of users (even in 2026) who do not care about digital games at all, so to them, that system just added extra headaches that were of no benefit to them in any way.