Pirated games can be one or several of the following:

• a means of participating in a chosen culture when players can’t afford/justify the price tag (one Nintendo game now costs the same as a week’s worth of groceries for two people where I live)
• a form of archive because game publishers are notorious for killing games
• a form of backup because things happen to disks/cartridges
• a form of backup because servers go down
• a form of backup because not everyone’s internet is reliable
• a means making the game more accessible by adding features (eg. the option of infinite lives/health for someone with muscular dystrophy)
• a form of protest over ever-increasing prices at the same time as ever-increasing layoffs, and ever-decreasing quality.

More directly relevant to you: the money you give Nintendo goes to their legal teams, to continue to find loopholes around the protections you have. They’re the ones fighting the “Stop Killing Games” movement. Nintendo recently won a lawsuit against 1fichier in France for hosting emulated games. It has been marked as a “significant” win against any level of piracy in the EU. Nintendo is continually working to make sure that despite living in the EU, you won’t be fine regardless. Your purchase directly funds that.

Maybe you have no intention of playing pirated games, but I hope you can appreciate that this is larger than just some teenager feeling powerful because they stole something?

Telecoms tradespeople in Canada are paid like absolute garbage. They used to be (and some still are, but they’re dwindling) part of the steelworker’s union, but they were hit hard by union busting, so now the majority are contractors who get paid by the job. This means a full 5 hour run of fibre to get a home set up pays the same as plugging a single wire in at the CO. But it’s luck of tue draw, and with the telcos cutting corners on everything, the “plug in a wire” jobs are like unicorns.

Plus the rack people have all been laid off, so the guys have to do that job on top of their own, and the IT side has all been offshored to folks who are not trained or paid enough to be competent. So what should be a 45 minute job that they could do 11 of in a single day now takes 2 hours, meaning they’re only getting paid for 4.

It would not surprise me if other blue collar industries started following suit.

They’re saying they’d rather have had the money that went towards the purchases of switch 2s left in the form of cash, rather than spent for them.

It’s a relevant critique because with their latest releases, Nintendo’s doing the same ‘cost increase to the detriment of employees and customers’ dance as the other big gaming corpos.

A person can agree something is better than the horrible baseline, and still bring up a topic of discussion on something that isn’t great.

Also, re: 2 weeks paid time off; look outside of 'Murica once in a while. The global average of paid days off is ~25. So 2 weeks, while lovely for America, is below normal.

It is a personal account, as that is her personal name, -and- she is the President. Both things can be true. Stephen King uses his personal profile in a casual format with quips and jokes, random posts about the weather, what he’s doing today, retooting fan art, and correcting idiots; because that’s what he wants to share, just like I do with my profile. Yes, he has to be mindful of what he posts because the internet never forgets; and so do I. My posts can have real world repercussions for my job, or business just like King or Whittaker. The only difference is viewership.

Regardless, if I accommodate your argument and focus on posts from “official” accounts, Wendy’s has used their accounts to troll for at least a decade. They have established informal engagement as a legitimate customer engagement strategy and it has been adopted by marketing teams the world over. Whittaker’s interaction has garnered hundreds of comments in this niche thread alone: hundreds of impressions of the Signal brand. You are arguably the only user who negatively responded to her. From a branding perspective, those are phenomenal Results.

I found the response humorous. I’d imagine if she felt this was actually important to address (rather than some idiot spouting BS) there would be a post from the Signal account, rather than her personal profile, and it would look very different.