ready to play Nintendo switch Temporarily not a game on a Nintendo Switch device. This is nothing new. But, over the past few weeks, I really feel like I’ve sensed a change in the scale of the conversation – anecdotal though that is, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 It feels like a sea change.
To explain what I mean, let me give you some inside baseball sites. You may have noticed that game guides are a major part of the business model of outlets like iGamesNews. The guides we make depend on two key factors.
The first is intuition — we play games and figure out what we think people will be stuck or worried about is enough to pick up their phone and do a search. Once the game is released, we can more directly track what people type into Google, Bing, and other such search engines. If we see a spike in the popularity and frequency of a particular search, we know we should probably guide on that.
Everyone is involved. It’s certainly not an internet secret. It’s all part of the dark art of “SEO”, walking a tightrope between providing useful information and over-optimizing pages so they read like they were written by a robot. Some people are good at it, some people are not good at it. But one of the interesting things about search trends is that they often give you a glimpse into the psychology and interest of gamers in a particular release.
For example, sometimes we see voice actors popping up—maybe people who are blown away by the performance or mesmerized by the character’s voice. We’ve seen a surge in fan art searches; apparently, usually the most brazen fan service bait characters. If something like a bug or funny dialogue goes viral, we can track its impact on the state of the meme as it spreads.
This is the case with Xenoblade Chronicles 3. It’s a game with tons of dungeon quests, unlocked heroes, a navigation-like system, and more. During its opening week, however, there was one notable major component of search traffic around the game: piracy.
Of course, this is all anecdotal, but every other search query felt like an analog when I was trying to understand what people were paying attention to about Xenoblade 3’s design elements. Or illegally acquire games. Or adjust the emulator settings. Or download new shaders for the best game look.
This is just my personal experience playing around with various search tracking tools, from simple free tools to dizzyingly expensive and in-depth premium trackers. The stories of both pathways are very similar. It does take quite a few people to enter these piracy-related terms into Google and other search engines for things to become a search trend. It’s happened with other Switch games — I remember Pokemon Legends Arceus and Metroid Dread had several similar themed trends — but in Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s first weekend, its scale felt much more important.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the game leaked before launch. Many media have published “Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has been leaked and fully playable on the Steam deckwhich feels like a pirate call-to-action. However, these headlines also highlight Nintendo’s major problems.
Despite the console’s relative youth, Switch emulations are almost always very advanced. This is the result of its relatively modest power level. But it’s easy enough now that many Switch games are now playable on day one off the Switch — or in the case of Xenoblade, minus day four. Then there’s the power level of the Switch itself: where scaling games like Xenoblade often struggle, there can be better performance elsewhere.
Slowly, the temptation for audiophiles to do bad things grew. Before these people inevitably show up in reviews, there’s a mix of people who own a Switch and buy games but choose to emulate them for performance reasons. However, search trends show that many people are looking for game downloads. How many of them actually own the game? I’m not denying the existence of these people – but I suspect it’s in large numbers.
Players from about 15 years ago knew what this could lead to. On the Nintendo DS, piracy went from a complicated thing to a trivial thing almost overnight. It was one of the most successful consoles of all time, and common piracy methods still required hardware – but over time, software sales did start to suffer, which had a knock-on effect on the game.
as Chris Dring of GamesIndustry.biz pointed out last year While Metroid Dread was on a similar trend, the “R4 Card” and its ilk hurt the DS so much that some publishers gave up on making games for the console entirely. Others moved planned DS games to other platforms.
Switch isn’t at this point yet. In fact, it’s pretty far off. Crucially, playing Switch games is still far more complicated than those crazy days, with bootleg DS games taking about 5 minutes, most of which is spent browsing a dodgy website. That’s why I see search terms around patches and shaders and all this crap. But it does feel like each major release gets easier – and these things are a slippery slope.
That’s concerning for the Switch, especially given the memories of bootlegs surging through the DS’s late sails. In this case, all Nintendo can do is release a new generation of hardware to stop it. It feels like this thing.
It’s easy to respond lightly to this question.You know, the image of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money from the movie Zombieland, or Shh, poor multi-million dollar company –I understand. But once piracy catches on on the platform, it affects developers of all sizes equally, and even starts to have an impact on projects in development. I hope it doesn’t get so bad. But it does feel like the genie is out of the bottle now.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is out now on Nintendo Switch. Check out our review here, and you can read everything we know about the game at the link.