It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.
I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
Lifetime of goodwill I believe the quote is. The OP is right on that too. I don’t know how old you are, but there’s a certain generation that allocates Nintendo an exceptional personal worth and views them as an exceptional company, due to the long standing memories that are associated with their products. Mainly the NES/Super NES era, but they had a few waves. It’s not really brainwashing, it’s literally like 20 or so years of memories with products that were key during crucial moments of our lives. So yeah, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that with the way they are acting in our modern age, honestly.