That's not the story at all. Rajan entered a voluntary agreement with Nintendo, through which his game would be distributed on their platform. He deliberately deceived them about the presence of a potentially security-critical feature, thereby breaching that agreement; Nintendo took the perfectly reasonable decision to remove his game from their platform.
There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about bootloader unlocking, sideloading and consumer choice, but this is not that debate. The issue here is fundamentally about someone intentionally deceiving a business partner.
Sidebar: There are no shortage of tablet-ish computers that will run arbitrary code. The Joy-Con controllers are class-compliant and will work with any Bluetooth host. There are open alternatives, but a lot of people buy the Switch specifically because it offers a curated experience with clear age ratings and effective parental controls.
To meaningfully contribute to the debate on walled gardens, it is first necessary to acknowledge their relative popularity compared to open platforms. If walled gardens were universally and unconditionally bad, it is implausible that they would have such broad market acceptance. In the case of Nintendo, this issue is particularly acute - many informed observers credit the NES10 chip and the Nintendo Seal of Quality with saving the video games industry.
I think that a legal fudge I would be satisfied with is where a manufacturer wants a branded store and some lock-in, that they nevertheless must allow secondary marketplaces, with the legal protection provided for both users and the original manufacturer that any secondary marketplaces can be contractually required to be clearly labelled as such.
Apparently, getting a Nintendo developer account is pretty difficult. You have to pitch a specific game to them and follow a bunch of rules to make your game and code secure. That's also why Nintendo treated this incident as such a big deal - they are very strict about access to the platform, and this blatantly broke their rules.
... and buy separate devkit hardware (relatively cheap compared to Wii U days, but still), make an actual game (devkit does not play retail games, and retail console cannot install dev-signed apps), get it through TRC/lotcheck, pay the fees to publish the game, give trailers/launch material to Nintendo, never once mention its secret purpose as a jailbreak, and then secretly share it with all your friends without any bit of the hacker community finding it out. Extremely easy.
> The switch is completely thoroughly irreversibly jailbroken at the hardware level already.
This has been fixed in hardware revisions since about a year ago. Getting a unit that is vulnerable to the so-called RCM exploit has become increasingly difficult.
(The boot9strap exploit against the 3DS, on the other hand, was never fixed. One wonders why.)
Consumers own their devices. You can't just assume everything a company puts into an agreement is legal, moral or enforceable. They're always trying to put one over their partners and consumers.
There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about bootloader unlocking, sideloading and consumer choice, but this is not that debate. The issue here is fundamentally about someone intentionally deceiving a business partner.
Sidebar: There are no shortage of tablet-ish computers that will run arbitrary code. The Joy-Con controllers are class-compliant and will work with any Bluetooth host. There are open alternatives, but a lot of people buy the Switch specifically because it offers a curated experience with clear age ratings and effective parental controls.
To meaningfully contribute to the debate on walled gardens, it is first necessary to acknowledge their relative popularity compared to open platforms. If walled gardens were universally and unconditionally bad, it is implausible that they would have such broad market acceptance. In the case of Nintendo, this issue is particularly acute - many informed observers credit the NES10 chip and the Nintendo Seal of Quality with saving the video games industry.