I've seen teens emulating GBA Pokemon games for years, wtf kind of crack are you smoking?.

I really don't get why you bring up the braindead folks, as if they are some saving grace of beacon of aspiration. 

I agree, it must be a true successor, not an iteration of the original Switch. And yes, the timing sounds fair: any launch 31-12-2023 or before is your win. Any launch 1-1-2024 and after is my win.

Do you want sig or avatar control? I feel like a week of either would be a solid bet, but I'm willing to go up to a month if you want.

And where do my gaming loyalties lie? I'm a Nintendo fan in general and I've got a few series in specific I cherish: Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong Country, Professor Layton, Ace Attorney, Smash Bros, Banjo Kazooie. If you want to be extra cruel just remind me that my favorite DS game 'Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure' will not only never get a sequel, but practically nobody knows it even exists.

Lol gotcha. I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but Project X Zone is my most hated game of all time. I spent over 50 hours beating that stupidly repetitive, a button mashing game when it came out and to this day wish I could assemble, smash, and incinerate every copy of it ever made. So an avatar about that game would hurt the most for me. A week is fine by me.

Not only GBA Pokemon. Many of Nintendo older IPs were experienced trough emulation for the generation who born in the late 90's and 2000's. Piracy is an overlooked factor when people are analyzing the industry. It's like when you have a new manga that was never released in west, but when it gets official release it tops new York times sellers list right out the gate, why? Because there was already an avid pool of customers reading it online, just not paying for them 

I agree games (especially older games) are very easy to emulate. Take as much effort to run them as to install any software and open any file on windows

I too once used to emulate Nintendo games back in the day, like Pokemon G&S, first few Mario games, first few Zelda titles etc. 

Yes. All Game Cube games I've played were through emulation. Unlike SNES and N64 that were plentiful, I've never really saw anyone in Brazil with a Game Cube, it was a system I know it existed thanks to Magazines (although they were mainly focused on Playstation 2 at the time)

I also emulated GBC and some GBA games as well. My first Nintendo handheld was a DS, and even though they could play GBA cartridges I was just much more convenient (and free) to download GBA roms as those cartridges weren't that easy to find at stores, I think the only GBA games I've legally played on DS were the ones my neighbor gave to me

The point is, if a 7 to 8 years old kid had no problem emulating I don't think grown up men and women would have such problems either

Never once emulated aside from official re-releases.

I'm actually more likely to buy a Switch Lite if anything. I play my Switch mainly in handheld mode on my commute to and from work/school. And while the screen may be nicer, the Switch Lite's portability is a bigger deal to me. And since the Oled model does nothing for docked play, it'll be the same experience when I'm playing on my TV anyway.

But probably won't buy either and will just save it for an XBox PS5 when they're finally available. No rush on those though.

As an 8 year old I had no problem with piracy either. Then I grew up, got a job in software development, saw my own work get pirated and never pirated since. Sure you can legally use the emulators, and if you dump the roms yourself, from your own copy, on your own cracked hardware, it's technically legal as well. However, instead of going through all that, I rather just play the original software on the original hardware instead. (Since you got to have that anyway to 'legally' emulate)

So yes, nowadays I do have a problem with emulation. And even the defense of, well I bought the game, so I can download the ROM, does not hold up imo. You're promoting the download on an illegal rom. I deleted my MAME collection long ago as well as other stuff, not mine to use.

Sometimes it can be very inconvenient. I just ordered S4 of the Expanse from the USA, gave up waiting for a Canada release. It can probably be downloaded in plenty places. Waiting for games to arrive from Play Asia can take a long time, there's plenty to play locally anyway.

Well by "no problem" I didn't mean moral problem, I just said emulation is easy and don't need advanced tech knowledge to use it. If a kid can emulate games, a grown ass man will have no major problem either 

The discussion about the blurred lines of which levels of piracy should be accepted however is far more complicated. Once I get my first job I also quit piracy (mostly, still pirating some comics and animes), but then I had an insight of a fundamental truth: Without piracy, I wouldn't have the same hobbies as have today. Or at least wouldn't be nearly as engaged to them as I am today. For instance, I don't spend money drinking or partying, I'd rather just save money to buy more mangas or go to cinema instead. So in reality the years of a shameless stealing when I was a teenager (when I couldn't afford any of those things I was stealing anyway) actually created an avid customer for many years perhaps decades to come. 

I also think I have a more... "open" perspective about piracy because of a strong cultural difference. You live in Canada, an american neighbor. I can only guess the absolute majority of cultural products you consume are quickly released there. I'm Brazilian and sometimes movies, series, games and comics can simply never be released here. For instance, books. I only started buying non released books in Brazil when I got a Kindle and could download them, before that it was just incredibly hard and expensive to import something all the way from USA, and of course the options were far limited, it was basically Amazon or nothing 

So in the end, while piracy is in fact stealing I can only find it morally wrong when a simple question is raised: Can you afford whatever you are stealing? And by afford, sometimes it means you would need to stop spending with another things i.e. deciding to whether rent a movie or buying a game but still affording nonetheless 

If the answer is yes, then I agree. It's a bad thing and should stop

If the answer is no, then I disagree. That person wouldn't have bought it legally anyway, so why bother?