> homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.
I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.
This. You can get all original Wii games in the used market for little money and this gives you the flexibility to play backups of your original games without loading and unloading discs, faster load times, etc. I understand piracy is the number one goto, but not all sums up to that.
> People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.
With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.
On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.
The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.
FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.