Even if they work for a company that is paying them, if that company doesn't get paid then they may get laid off or not get raises, bonuses etc.
There was carnage in the uk game industry job market when a load of companies all went under at the same time. I don't think it ever really recovered.
Piracy is a tiny, TINY percentage of the total userbase, be it in games, movies, whatever you want. Especially nowadays with how easy and "affordable" (if you don't think long term, but that's a different can of worms) streaming services are (for movies and music) and the ease of access to digital versions (in the case of games and books).
I mean, there's even that study that concluded that piracy barely affects end sales unless it's big blockbuster movies...and that in some cases (like games) it actually seems to help boost sales. Funny how said study was "hidden"
for years before we even got to see it. I wonder why
Article 1
Article 2
The study itself
The reason companies are so vocal about piracy is because they can't handle the thought of not having
ALL of the money. I still remember when
Microsoft tried to make Xbox One games have that dumb DRM system where you had to verify that you owned the games every 24 hours, and would make lending/reselling games a crapfest to make people buy more instead of having to deal with that hassle.
Not to mention the occasional buzz about some
game companies having ideas of trying to end selling games in second-hand.
The biggest reason companies lay off employees or don't give them raises often has little to do with piracy. Sometimes they do it even though they had hugely successful years (remember
this?).
Again, companies con't care about consumers; they care about consumers' wallets. Just at how BotW, Mario Odyssey, MK8 Deluxe and other Nintendo exclusives are still 60 or 70 bucks even though some were released 5 years ago when the Switch first came out. Meanwhile, PS4 and Xbox exclusives tend to lower in price after a year or so.
They don't care about their "grunt" employees (the devs and so on) as much as they pretend to; they're busier trying to make their profit numbers as big as they can to brag to shareholders.
You even have cases where they'll bitch and moan about games that sell a huge amount of copies but don't reach their insane sales goals (I know there were a few cases of this a few years ago with EA and one or two other companies, but I can't remember enough specifics to find any proper links about it), and then it's the devs that get shafted for it.
And don't even get me started on the
insane amount of money they get from microtransactions. Here's
another one. And
this one even mentions Nintendo, but it doesn't have any specifics about the split between MTXs and digital game sales - but if we go by the other examples, I'm gonna guess the MTXs are the bigger piece of the pie.
Note: I'm not defending Gary Bowser. I always thought that charging for the hardware mods was a bit close to the line (but I also understand it because it involves costs of production and sending to buyers), but them also making SXOS have licenses was especially cheesy and made me not care at all about chipping my Lite.
Plus marketing the SXOS for piracy was just a really dumb strategy.
TL;DR: There's a study that reveals that piracy might actually help boost sales of games in certain cases, and even then piracy is such a small percent of the whole userbase that whatever losses it causes are basically "pennies" compared to the rest of the money that Nintendo and other gaming companies rake in from legit buys of consoles, games, DLCs and microtransactions.
Especially in Nintendo's case since they just refuse to lower their prices and end up with 5 year old games still at 60 or 70 bucks that somehow still keep selling like hot cakes.
This is Nintendo just flexing their "legal muscles" and going way too overkill just because they have the money to do so, imo. Gary deserves some punishment, but dragging him over the coals then nailing him to a cross as an example makes them no better than the "evil" they're trying to "stop".
