With the recent revelation/rumor/report that hackers have made progress at cracking Nintendo’s 3DS, online debate begins anew over region locking and piracy. I’ll get the region lock question out of the way: I follow @EndRegionLock on Twitter. Enough said. (My account is here.)

Now we can concentrate on piracy. I won’t comment on the morality issue; in the early 2000s I enjoyed debating philosophy online, but in three years I don’t recall changing anyone’s mind or anyone changing mine. It was great fun, but “multiplayer” philosophy doesn’t accomplish anything “single-player” can’t, so no ethics discussion. This talk is about numbers.

In Nintendo’s seminal SNES classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, throwing enough Rupees into a certain pond draws out Venus, a fairy who offers Link a choice of holding 5 more bombs (at least until the final upgrade) or 5 more arrows.

I’ve slowly been making a game in what spare time I have. Aside from the time investment, I’ve spent about $1023 on software tools and designing characters—pennies to a big publisher, certainly, but almost a full month’s after-tax, after-rent pay for me. Let’s say five years have passed, it’s the day before I launch my game, and I’m transported to Hyrule to meet with Venus. You know where this blog post is going based on its title, right? I believe you do! So click if it sounds interesting.