Listing it is the right thing to do. That doesn't make it the proximate cause of death if the person dies, though. The folks who crunch the numbers know how to tell the difference between dying with COVID and dying from COVID. That's how we know that COVID caused a huge surge in heart attacks and strokes that, if we were using your approach, would not have been counted, because they don't look like deaths from COVID, and yet the statistics on their timing show that the excess clotting that caused them is, in fact, caused by (or at least triggered by) COVID.

I assume you mean that the Pfizer vaccine was developed by BioNTech, which is a German company; Pfizer (a U.S. company) just did the clinical trials, logistics, and manufacturing. Development of that vaccine was largely funded by the German government, and got no funding from Operation Warp Speed at all, though, so I wouldn't say that this is ultimately what happened. They developed it in spite of U.S. funding for a rival. :-)

If you had said "The user's account is blocked", you would maybe have a point, though arguing that someone did something by proxy opens you up to all sorts of legal risk. A sane company would ban people who install a hundred pirated titles, not someone who installs one or two.

But as long as the ban is tied to the physical device, and a major part of the device's functionality no longer works, no reasonable person could argue that the device is working correctly, and if the device is not working correctly and cannot be made to work correctly by the user, that constitutes a defect, by definition. So unless your definition of "defective" doesn't agree with the dictionary's definition, the device is defective, and arguably by design.

Not necessarily. See my comment earlier about contracts of adhesion and unconscionability. Given a large enough class suing for class action status, there's a very good chance that the arbitration clause would get thrown out. Alternatively, given a large enough number of individual members all demanding arbitration at once, Nintendo could very well do the math and conclude that waiving the clause is in their best interest because of the cost of defending so many arbitration cases. The deck is only stacked against you if you don't band together.

Amazon has a standard vendor contract. Take it or leave it. And they're a big enough player that there's really no negotiating with them, even for relatively big players like Nintendo, because Amazon could quite literally buy a ~86% supermajority interest in Nintendo with cash on hand.

It is entirely possible that third-party resellers would be the ones stuck with the useless hardware, rather than Nintendo, if the sales are happening through third-party Amazon vendors rather than directly. But if those resellers end up losing their shirts and going under, Nintendo won't have sales, so it isn't in Nintendo's best interests to screw them.

You absolutely can return such a device, at least within the return period, because Verizon doesn't ban devices; it bans users. A different user obtaining that device would still be able to use the device. That's a key difference between what Nintendo did and what other companies do. By banning the device, rather than the account, Nintendo is effectively reducing the value of the hardware by hundreds of dollars. That's fraud, and there's really no grey area here.

You keep using the word "warranty". A warranty is an agreement between you and the manufacturer. It has nothing to do with the reseller accepting a return. And yes, with Amazon, "It doesn't work" is a valid reason to return something. In fact, that's true with almost any company. Whether you can return it for a refund or just a replacement is another question, and if *you* are banned, then a replacement won't help.

But again, that's not what Nintendo is doing, at least according to the summary, so "it doesn't work" not only is a valid reason for a return, but also is likely to solve the problem.

We have yet to see a case where a company massively reduced the resale value of hardware permanently.

There's actually a pretty long list of those sorts of licenses by major companies that have been found unconscionable. The devil's in the details.

True, but that is a decision made by the game publisher. When it is a hardware vendor, which qualifies as a gatekeeper, it becomes a very different matter. We're on the verge of seeing Apple seriously beaten down by the courts over locking down iOS devices to only allow purchases from their store. And making it scary to buy games that are sold on physical media is a substantive step towards doing the same thing on Nintendo's game platform. From an antitrust perspective, going down that path would be highly inadvisable in the current legal climate.

To the extent that the game publisher and the gatekeeper are the same company, the antitrust concerns actually become more of a concern, rather than less, because you could argue that the game publisher Nintendo is colluding with the hardware vendor Nintendo to increase the value of their online store by discouraging third-party sales in ways that drive the industry towards a gatekeeper store monopoly. And now you have an even bigger mess, and you might even have problems with the DMA in Europe as well.

Actually, there's a huge difference. It's called the "reasonable person test". In law, that means that if a reasonable person would not expect a hardware purchase to suddenly get massively reduced in functionality for buying a used game, then Nintendo generally speaking will be hard pressed to prove that their terms of service (being a contract of adhesion) are not unconscionable. In the absence of such determination, Nintendo disabling the device at least arguably has no legitimate basis in the law, and could be considered fraudulent.

Add to that the presumption that Nintendo has incentive to make used copies of games scary for consumers because they will make more money selling directly to the consumers, and this starts to rapidly fall into the "attempt to monopolize" section of the Sherman Act, which makes the behavior legally actionable federally.

I could go on, but it suffices to say that this is highly questionable on Nintendo's part from a legal perspective, and is a really great way to get their company nailed to the wall on multiple federal charges.

That said, none of the questionable legality of their behavior, their terms of service, or their warranty policy negates the fact that Amazon's vendor contracts determine whether or not Nintendo has to take the return, not any agreement between the customer and Nintendo.

That's where you go to your credit card company and issue a chargeback. Amazon really doesn't have a choice in the matter unless you give them one. As someone who has used this process successfully, it is absolutely better than getting screwed by a sleazy vendor.

Nintendo's perspective is moot. What matters is whether a contract of adhesion is so draconian that it would be held unconscionable by the courts. I would argue that it almost certainly would be held unconscionable under those circumstances or anything remotely similar to those circumstances.

And again, you're still talking about warranties. None of that matters. The return policy is dictated by a standard Amazon vendor contract, not by whatever pile of legal vomit Nintendo wants to put down on paper.

That said, installing a game presumptively manufactured by Nintendo or one of its licensees does not, at least to a reasonable person standard, meet the criteria you're mentioning here, which means installing a game that to the best of your knowledge is a legitimate copy of the game resulting in Nintendo choosing to brick your online access is fraud, and absolutely is grounds for warranty service, were you not returning the product through the original retail channel, which makes the warranty moot.

Nor does installing a game appear to meet the criteria here. The user did not use any game enhancement or copier device. The possibility that someone else may have sold a game that was so copied is moot. Nintendo still doesn't have any legal right to brick the device, even under a strict reading of those warranty terms.

And the fact that Nintendo has to do something to make the Switch 2 not work — that it is not the fault of the enhancement/copying device actually breaking the Switch 2, but rather Nintendo deliberately doing something in response to someone having used such a device — means that this warranty, if interpreted the way you interpret it, is likely not legally a warranty under Magnusson Moss, and therefore, sale of the product with such a fraudulent warranty would be per se illegal in the United States.

You can't just write a bunch of contract terms down on a piece of paper and claim that because someone appears to have violated them, that person has no rights. The law doesn't work that way. A company can disclaim a warranty only for things that were actually damaged by the use of third-party hardware, software, etc., not merely because of the use of third-party hardware, software, etc. The law is very clear on this. Their warranty terms do not give Nintendo any right to disable a device, nor to return a device so disabled, merely because Nintendo *knows* that someone has done so, much less merely because Nintendo *thinks* someone has done so. The legal bar is far higher than that.

No, the damage is due to Nintendo arbitrarily declaring that the device is banned. Installing a game is not consumer abuse, period.

Also, I think you're greatly overestimating how much effort Amazon puts into defective returns.

DOA returns don't work that way. As a vendor, Nintendo has two choices: refund the money and pay for return shipping back to Nintendo or refund the money and let Amazon scrap the product. There's no warranty involved at that point.

Yes, they absolutely could do that, and no doubt would. But A. they would take a monetary loss on that, because by law they would have to then sell that unit as refurbished, at a discount, and B. they would have to pay for Amazon shipping that product back to them, pay someone to check the product and repackage it, and then pay again to ship it back to Amazon. I'd be surprised if that added up to less than a $150 loss every time it happens.

In other words, the financial loss to Nintendo would be far greater than the cost of the game that Nintendo incorrectly believes that this person stole, so if everyone did this, Nintendo would stop doing what they're doing, because it would be a net loss for them.

Banning online access for a specific device is tantamount to bricking it, because that means you can't play any games that require online access. It's also theft, because they could not download content that they had paid for.

I can't. Either their servers are secure or they aren't; banning access from known-compromised devices won't change anything, because hacks will likely come from devices that are not known to be compromised.

Besides, reusing a game key number doesn't make the device compromised. You're trying to justify something that really isn't justifiable.

We often support and praise killing, not murder. Murder has a very narrow meaning, and is IMO per se evil, precisely because we have defined murder narrowly to include only premeditated killing without justification. No one praises or supports actual murder; to do so would be evil, even under your narrow definition, because it would be actively corrupting others to commit antisocial acts.

That's evil as a *noun*, sure. Evil is also an adjective. And whether used as a noun or an adjective, the word evil can also refer to the act itself, not just a moral condition. And as such, it can mean causing harm or intending to cause harm to others, and it can also mean morally corrupt.

In this case, the act of bricking a brand new game console without any evidence is doing an entirely evil act (harming others) in the name of justice. And from a theological perspective, there are few greater evils than this.

So IMO, your statement is not just wrong; it is bordering on heretically wrong. :-)

If you're smart, you'll return the console to Amazon as defective. If everyone did this every time, and ideally returned *multiple* new Switch 2 units in a row as defective (Nintendo even having the ability to do this is arguably a defect), Nintendo would end up with a huge pile of e-waste that they can't do anything with, the supply for their hardware would crater without any actual users, and they would be forced by market forces to pull their heads out of their asses.

Treating your customers as criminals is never okay, and if government is not willing to punish companies for such abuse, then it becomes the responsibility of the buyers to find a way to do so, to the maximum extent allowable by law.

The companies in question should just pass on the fees to their users. Want to use your Chase account with a third-party payment provider? That's a $15 service fee. When Chase starts bleeding customers, they'll rethink their strategy.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but presumably the second plan offers more than just 40% more videos per day. :-D

Yeah, the snark is high in this thread.

But in all seriousness, $3,499 really is an order of magnitude too expensive to compete against Quest at $499. If they had game availability that could compete with Quest, they might be able to get away with more like $750, but not $3.5k, or even $2k, realistically. It's just way too overpriced for something that in practice is only usable for gaming.

$3,490.99 to $4,391.99

No, that's adding a zero. :-)

Ah, but for the most part, that money just sits there. Investing money in stocks has only limited impact on anything, in practice, which is why it doesn't impact inflation much. The money doesn't ever get spent on anything that meaningfully contributes to strengthening the economy.

It is, but not proportionately. The increase in funds availability does increase demand, which increases scarcity, but the price people spend on goods and services doesn't increase to absorb all of the extra money going in — just some of it. That's why if you compare San Jose, CA to Jackson, TN, the median salary differs by more than a factor of 2.8, while the overall cost of living differs by only a factor of 1.9 (and if you ignore the housing costs that are largely caused by San Jose being landlocked, by only a factor of 1.5).

While true, absent government intervention in how people run their companies, you can't prevent scarcity. Scarcity allows companies to charge higher prices for the same amount of labor, so except when you're talking about true commodities, companies have a perverse incentive to keep supply down as much as possible, so long as they stay below the point where the profit margins become too high relative to the barriers to entry into the market and another competitor is encouraged to enter the market and compete with them.

I suspect that Apple's hardware design teams are rather fluid in terms of what projects they work on. Certainly nothing fundamentally prevents Apple from shifting them to work on the next-next iPhone design, or designing eyeglasses with a HUD, or designing some other new consumer device that someone comes up with. There's really no need for an updated version of the Vision Pro hardware right now, IMO, unless doing so would reduce the price by a factor of 4 to make it able to compete with Oculus. They'd be *way* better off having those people work on other projects until the technology reaches a point where there is a pressing need to do a hardware revision.