My last Nintendo console was a NES, so I know very little about Nintendo’s more recent offerings (other than what I’ve seen in games media) and next to nothing about the Xenoblade Chronicles series. Thus, it wasn’t until I recently watched a YouTube video from last year and skimmed the comments that I heard about this one.

Xenoblade Chronicles X, a game from 2015, had a special edition available that included its soundtrack. Sounds at least potentially tempting – I’ve bought a few game soundtracks, and if this one was any good…

Wait, what?

• The special edition came on a USB stick that looked cool but had a measly 800 MB capacity, which made it worth a lot less.¹
• Instead of a bunch of music files, as one might expect, the USB stick had a single EXE file with the music files bundled into it. The only way to listen was to run the EXE. To Mac users, or to anyone who wanted to shuffle these tracks into the rest of their music library: too bad.
• The USB stick also had some notably pushy DRM that forcibly mapped it to drive letter Y and then changed the computer’s settings to prevent users accessing drive Y by any other means, including File Explorer. This did not revert back to normal afterward. To anyone who was already using drive letter Y – and as some reports noted, corporate networks often use the bottom of the alphabet – too bad.

Corroboration: here, here, here, and here.

Remember, this was in 2015. The MP3 format, which made storing and playing music on a computer practical, had been out for 26 years, and iTunes had been around for 14. The rest of us were used to it. Any execs scared enough of unauthorized copying to cripple their music releases this way should just not release music.

Also, this was ten years after Sony beclowned itself by adding similarly ham-fisted DRM to physical media, so Nintendo should have known to be more careful. At least Nintendo’s version didn’t open its users up to malware (that I could find, anyway), but still.

And it didn’t even work as DRM. In the brief amount of time I spent researching this post, I found multiple references to people bypassing the lock and getting at the music files; I’m sure I could have found step-by-step instructions after a few minutes of searching. (The DRM dev was Kakasoft, BTW.)

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1. I couldn’t quickly find advertised prices for the different game editions, but what I did find suggested that the Special Edition was somewhere around $90, or about twice as much as the standard edition, at release. 1 GB thumb drives cost $2 or less apiece when bought in bulk.