They had a Patreon where you could get early access to the dev builds. It exploded in popularity when Tears of the Kingdom leaked like two weeks early. Because TOTK ran like ass on the stable build, but the early dev builds started patching in support for the game as soon as the leak happened. And since everybody wanted to play the game early, they all joined the Patreon.
That early support was ironically a large part of what got them sued. Because they were tacitly endorsing piracy; They were blatantly working on fixes for a game that was only available due to a stolen game cartridge and widespread piracy. They couldn’t go “well we don’t support piracy,” because their actions proved otherwise.
They couldn’t go “well we don’t support piracy,” because their actions proved otherwise.
They could make the argument they were working on it so it would be ready by release, but yeah, taking money for it makes them a more obvious target. That and they necessarily had to have access to the game in order to work on it (or at least others had to have access to it in order to receive bug reports on it).
