They can. It's cost pohibated. Everything would have to be custom and 0 interaction with general public PC's. Even than. If their internal hardware is stolen. Welp waste of time.

A downloaded, pirated copy being played on Wii U running custom firmware isn't.

There might be 100,000 downloads. I don't know what the number is. All I know is that you can run pirated Wii U games on Wii Us and emulators.

Ohh, sorry about that. I don't have the slightest clue where he pulled that.

As far as I can recall the PSP did wonderfully.

There's been a few times where I saw piracy actually affect consoles... Xbox (OG) where people would download the entire library onto their console and some of those early CD-based consoles that you could simply burn your own games for. Even then, the impact was minimal as most people don't bother with such things.

Besides, Switch games are still a long, long way from being playable when emulated.

Oh, I see. I guess the Wii U has enough of an adoption rate to still do some damage I guess. Guess it depends on how many people are taking the trouble to mod them. It can't be that bad though. 

It's bad. But the hack might not be convenient for many of the masses if nintendo can update firmware to make things difficult. But the fact that it's started so soon will make companies question developing games for the switch.

Flashcarts for the ds were incredibly common, especially when they became easy to use. I think it's ridiculous to think that piracy never has a big impact on sales, as some like to suggest.

C'mon, people who pirate games weren't gonna buy any in the first place. They have to buy the console itself though. PS has always had this issue and that didn't hurt hardware or software sales.

The hardware did great but software sales were relatively low because of piracy which led to less support.

With Switch being relatively low power hardware especially in portable mode and hacking getting low level access quite quickly it seems plausible that a Switch emulator will come out sooner rather than later. Probably ideally running on PC's with nvidia gpu's.

Even seems possible for such Switch games to actually run at high resolutions too including 4k or with 3D support.

With the Tegra X1 chip inside the Switch not even featuring any Nintendo branding you wonder if there is any real customisation in it. So you end up with a lot of existing reference information for the hardware, low level access to the firmware and left pretty much with decrypting the software. Just seems like we could have a dreamcast level piracy problem with the added issue of the console being fully emulated very early.

I also think the very high pricing of Switch games makes piracy more likely. There is more money to be saved basically but there is also the actual possibility that emulation will run the games with enhanced graphics so piracy might result in a better experience too. Maybe even online gaming without paying a subscription too. Backing up your game save files, playing on VR headsets, using decent controllers, ultrafast loading times, no need to change cartridges, easy storage on a large HDD, game mods and no doubt many more benefits to emulation.