Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo To Sell Old Consoles To China?
drfishy writes "An interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on IGN hints at the possibility of Nintendo entering the Chinese market with their products soon. The most curious part of the interview is that Satoru Iwata says Nintendo is considering releasing older generation hardware to combat piracy, could this mean the big N is going to start making Super Nintendos again? Will there be new games? How would this fight piracy?"
The only real way I can see this fighting piracy is if they want to go back to cartridge based systems, but why not just make the products good enough that people will actually buy them.
how i wouldnt mind buying a older nintendo, if it is 1/3 of the price....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
the single most nintarded idea I've ever heard
The cartdrige systems are harder to pirate because it requires more hardware than a CD burner. That alone prevents casual copying of games.
They are using the older (N64 I assume) generation because it was the last cartdrige based system.
The Gameboy Advance is clearly based on the Super Nintendo. Given that many Chinese probably do not even have televisions, having an all in one unit like the GBA is probably a great idea. I doubt we will see the actual console as it once was, the unit will probably be very much like gameboy advance. Perhaps it will have a TV out or something of the kind.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
You forgot this is China where the fucking Lord of the Rings 4 disc ultimate value most wonderful DVD collection ever will probably sell more pirated copies than official ones.
... cause it's so easy to copy a GameCube Game.
Jayysn
There is a war going on for your mind.
By re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo can shutdown ROM piracy by claiming that the games are actively on the market.
If Nintendo starts manufacturing old hardware again that will mess up the prices of used games in a big way. I we at the mall days ago and they has NESs for 40 bucks, SNES for 30 and N64s for an amount I forget, but cheap. They might have been cheaper than the NESs I dont' remember so well. Bit it was messed up! We've got like 3 NESs in the house. Well actually 1 physically here. I own one that is far away. We won one at a duck hunt tournament (people SUCK at duck hunt!) and my roomate's got one. We gave one to his brother.
Oh yeah, that's another thing. At that very same duck hunt tournament there was a guy who was collecting Mario/Duck Hunt cartridges. He had so many he made a suit of armor out of them. However, he performed very poorly compared to us in the tourney. Apparently he collected so many that the price went from 15 cents to 95 cents a cart in his time. If nintendo manufactures more old Nintendo stuff wont that not work. I mean people can get carts for 95 cents they aren't going to pay more than that. And making more supply just lowers prices.
I'm fairly certain Nintendo will only be manufacturing N64 stuff if anything. They aren't that stupid.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Going back to cartridge-based systems will only make thinks a little harder for the pirates, but therein lies another problem: if a pirated cartridge costs more than a copied GameCube CD, wouldn't the effort be useless?
A third of the price of what? The price of a Nintendo console in the 1980s?
It's called "inflation". Deal with it.
(And why did you leave the +1 bonus on your post? If used on silly little things like that you should turn it off. You only wrote 15 'words', for fuck's sake.)
The formula: GBA, lots of old and new titles in cartridge format, adapter for television, chinese lettering.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Having lived in China for three years, I can assure you almost every Chinese household has a TV. Sets are cheap with a domestic 29-inch selling for around $US90.
A Hong Kong-based market research firm recently suggested television set penetration was around 92 percent on the mainland, compared with 42 percent for refrigerators!
All of the major consoles (inc XBox) are available in China as "grey imports". A PS2 sells for about US$200 and an XBox for about $US300. Pirate games galore and easily available for around $US2.50.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
We all know how much harder a 32mb prom image is to toss around the internet than a 640mb sorta-but-not-quite-ISO cd image.
GameBoy emulation on the Sharp Zaurus helps keep my sanity through certain classes <cough fake="true">English</cough>
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The Game Boy Advance already shows this.
Nintendo will curtail piracy of their games because nobody will want to play anything on their older generation hardware.
Then again, with the huge number of people in China, Nintendo would only have to sell their old leftover hardware to a sliver of the population for it to be successful.
But this begs the question: did they not sell enough N64 and SNES consoles in China the first time around? If they did, they've got competition from all their old stuff floating around in 2nd-hand stores over there. And if they didn't, what makes them think this re-release of their out-dated stuff will do any better?
to think about the children in underdevelopment countries. I'm sure my nephew in China will dump his PS2 once he could have given chance to taste the power of.....an old Nintendo. The Nintendo emulator on his dual Athlon-MP 2600 definitely can't compare to a real one. However Mr. Iwata must take into consideration whether there's enough electricity to power up one Nintendo there, because people are still using dynamo to power up lightblubs.
Exactly what parallel universe is Mr. Satoru Iwata living in?
I see a lot of people linking cartridges to combat piracy. This is not at all what Nintendo has in mind. People are pirating Nintendo hardware/software because they simply don't exist on the Chinese market. So if you introduce them to the market, some of the people who are pirating Nintendo merchandise will start to purchase it, and piracy will decrease. Granted, in some cases it may be cheaper to pirate, but by giving people what they want, they may be willing to pay for it.
Cartridges are just as easy to copy as CDs with the right hardware. A friend of mine paid $300 Canadian for a blank cartridge (can hold, on average, 8 GBA games), a cartridge copier, and a GBA. He can store a bunch of games on a CD or on his hard drive, and dump them to the blank cartridge whenever he wants to play them. The games are smaller, the cartridge is rewritable (although yes, there are CR-RWs available) and hooks right up to his computer.
Introducing their products on the market won't make copying harder; if anything, it'll make it easier. It's giving people another incentive to not pirate these products that Nintendo is after.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
If there isn't a current working emulator for the N64, there will be (just like everything else). ROMs aren't a problem to dump, so it will actaulyl be EASIER to pirate those than to duplicate the special small GameCube titles. Not sure why Ninetnedo wants to go this route...
Actaully, given reports of their diminishing profitability, I'm not sure why they don't flood China with GameBoys instead. Or maybe that's what "old hardware" meant...
It is interesting that we are in place today where we need export restrictions to be placed on a gaming system... for security reasons of all things.
Whats next? Not allowing the lstest Tom Clancy movie to be released in countries who might want to blow us up?
And the Great Wall of Tetris....and the Forbidden City Zone...Summer Palace of Myst...Tiannanmen Squares... Yellow Sea Surf Games....and that up & coming emulator favorite... Temple of DVD Heaven ...nice troll...almost got me :)
Where are my mod points when I need them...
Think about it... suppose they re-release the SNES over there.
Now, think back to the days when *you* were playing SNES. Suppose consoles as powerful as the XBOX, PS2, and GameCube were available elsewhere in the world but they weren't available to you, thanks to your government.
Holy crap! I'd be plotting to overthrown that bastard in a minute!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Actually I think what he means is that in China you can get burned DVDs and CDs a dime a dozen, so they're afraid to release Gamecube in China. ROMs are much more difficult to copy so they'll release N64 instead.
I don't think it's got to do with preventing ROM piracy since no matter how long a game's been off the market it's still technically illegal to copy it.
I'm no expert on the Chinese economic situation, but the average Chinese person probably isn't quite as wealthy as the average American. Therefore, most Chinese probably can't afford one of the newer consoles. So, perhaps Nintendo is doing the same thing that that one Brazillian company was doing with the Sega Master System...if they can't afford something that's new, give them something that's old, but still about as fun.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Strangely enough, that was kind of the point of the original NES (a.k.a. Famicom - family computer) in the first place. Remember that parallel/expansion port thingy?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
I'll be looking into reverse exports for those with a nostagia itch. At 1/3, everyone can make a profit, I'm sure :)
Yes, that's right! I say rerelease the NES. Games could be made very easily and probably pretty cheaply too. The NES was the mother of all the Nintendo systems, as it was the first one to really revolutionize the home gaming system industy (in my eyes).
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
This might be a little off-topic, but I got to thinking (uh oh):
Assuming that Nintendo (or anyone else for that matter) re-released an old console & games, what kind of editing would be necessary to make a game fit the culture?
Take for example, the classic NES games Rush N' Attack (say it out loud) and Contra. Those were clearly marketed toward the anti-communism sentiment prevalent in the US in the 80's. How would the Chinese take to that?
Or even something say like GTA3... which very vividly portrays a modern western society (scary thought). For the most part, that's stuff we believe the Chinese can only dream of. What would they think of it? How about games like Wall Street Kid ?
For that matter, what kind of Chinese-only games are there? Damn, I wish I knew more about the culture... I'm sure they would have games that are pure fun in context to them, but would have no chance of being appreciated over here.
~~~
"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
Um, see the joke guys? Super Marx Brothers. Cough. . . Joke. . . Cough
Well, I suppose cartrages are a bit harder to pirate, but that never stopped anyone in east asia before.
On the other hand, while the chinese economy is on fire, I doubt many people would be able to afford $100 consoles anytime soon, but SNESs could probably be made for $10-20 MSRP these days.
My guess is there will be new games, but only in chinese from chinese 3rd parties, while nintendo puts out translations of their popular games.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
On a side note, I think that new Super Mario Bros. games should be made anyway. I want a Gamecube disc full of expanded versions of all the old side-scrolling Mario games. Man, I'd buy a Gamecube just to get at that! (Nothing beats the functionality or fun of the classic Mario games!)
i don't think nintendo wants to sell old consoles in china to 'fight piracy' - plain and simple old consoles are CHEAPER. The average chinese household couldn't afford a GC, so releasing the SNES or N64 is the smart move - the consoles are cheap to make and there are plenty of great games they can re-release (and make more money on).
smd4985
He says:
Due to piracy problems, we are studying several marketing methods, such as selling machines several generations old, rather than the latest models.
Maybe I'm just thinking too simply, but it seems like he means he wants to avoid piracy, not stop what is currently happening. Nintendo's is thinking that due to high piracy in china, if they sell their newest games, they'll be copied and sold illegaly in other more lurcrative markets (US, Japan). If you only sell china old games, nobody is going to bother to pirate them. So sell them SNES and make some extra bucks with no negative effects.
How's this justification for you: I like the products but I don't like giving up money. So I won't, unless I like the product so much that I want to finance future development of similar products from the same people.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Do the copyrights on games expire in the same way that copyrights expire on everything else? Or, since the company theoretically will still be around in [X] years, is the copyright thus interminable?
The GBA is a 32bit machine. Much more powerfull then the SNES, and not physicaly based on it at all. It's mostly designed for 2d games. but not based on the SNES's hardware.
Remember, the SNES was slow but had a lot of acceleration. The main CPU was just 3mhz!!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
./? Idiots? Wha? Where ever did you get that Ideal? baka..
stuff is extremely interesting, samir gupta here seems to have a long track record of bullshitting people. searching his name in google gives a whole lot of different samir guptas (i could tell they were different because of the headshots some of the sites had), and pretty much all of the links have to do with some sort of research... coincidentally (or not) he claims to be a researcher. most of the sites seem legitimate.
well, look for yourself..
i find this rather impressive, being able to find a huge coincidence like this and latch on to it. who is this guy? is it even a guy? what is he or she like?
it makes me shiver.
Does anyone recall those old game copiers? I.E. GameDoctors? They copied the rom offa the cart and put them on floppys. I remember when I got Donky Kong for Snes at blockbuster then putting it on floppy. Ah those were the days.
Okay, I'm wondering how many people are ignoring the obvious here. China among other countries are notorious for things such as piracy and such. If you think about it, so far the Gamecube is the only system that's escaped real piracy and modding. If you release a gamecube into a country like this, you'll have more people trying to copy things. So if you look at it that way, it prevents piracy by not giving the piraters a chance to make copies illegally, since the Chinese government wont do anything to stop them anyway.
Yeah, but it'll be in Chinese markets - not sold in the US. So it won't significantly impact the legacy market here. I'm sure there will be folks who'll want Chinese imports. Also, remember that we're dealing with economies of scale. A hot-selling high-priced cartrige in China might sell for the equivalent of US$4.
There are about 1.28 billion people in the People's Republic of China, and 300 million television sets. That's one TV for every 4.3 people. Thus, at least every other nuclear family in China has a TV, and given even slightly extended families, I'd guess that almost everybody in China who wants to watch red TV can watch red TV.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The most curious part of the interview is that Satoru Iwata says Nintendo is considering releasing older generation hardware to combat piracy, could this mean the big N is going to start making Super Nintendos again? Will there be new games?"
Who cares if there will be new games? The very concept of putting NES and SNES hardware and software back on the assembly line is teriffic news as far as I'm concerned!
Nintendo retired these consoles because they had reached the point where their sales didn't justify the cost of manufacturing them any more. But now we have the possibility of introducing these systems to a new, relatively untouched market. A market that may very well fund the continued manufacture of these consoles and cartridges. The NES and SNES markets will (with any luck) be self-sufficient again. Especially when you consider the advances in both hardware and manufacturing in the past decade or so (ie. they're cheaper to make than ever).
And if the cost of manufacturing the older consoles is being justified by the Chinese market, what could they possibly have to lose if they, say, start selling them in North America again? I'd finally be able to have my very own copy of EarthBound!
(WaReZ kiddies: No, ZSNES is not the same. It lets me play the games I wish I had, but I still wish I had them. If you can't understand the difference, I truly pity you.)
(Moral self-righteous twits: No, I will not mortgage my first-born on eBay for a used copy of the game. Nintendo makes no money off the sale of used cartridges. I'll buy it when Nintendo re-releases it.)
It's a lot cheaper to produce CD's and DVD's than it is to produce solid state storage (like a videogame cartridge). At the prices you can get pirated stuff for in China--depending on how you bargain, under 0.70USD for a DVD last time I was there--it just isn't economical for someone to produce illegal carts.
`which fortune`
If nintendo wants to fight piracy, wouldn't it be cheaper to create and patent their own opticle media? Something that a normal CD rom or dvd rom can't read? This would force pirates to actualy crack open the gamecube to find ways of ripping, not a fun task. Or am i missing something really obvious? Please reply.. .
The Blade Itself
Release them here. And get Sega on board - man, I would have killed to have been able to play Warsong on my actual Genesis.
.iso through paid download.
This is a question I've long had for console makers: Why not create an emulator, package a shitload of games on the same disc as it, and sell it? Hell - you could even offer the
Sure, just like music and movies - there are people who simply wouldn't pay for it.
There's also a lot of people who would. I'll admit, I've downloaded games whose cartridges I don't own. The problem is - I couldn't find those cartridges back in the day. They're impossible to find now.
I have a hard time finding decent Sega CD and Saturn hardware. The games? Well, they're few and far between, aside from the massively craptastic ones. If used game places have a *good* game in stock, they'll have jacked the price up to the point where it's higher than it was when the game was new!
That's just Sega CD. If you look for anything earlier than that, good fscking luck. You're reliant on dodging e-bay fraud and looking in the local paper's classified section.
Selling an emulator and roms would be quite easy for game manufacturers. Hell - look at the lack of cost! No packaging, no cartridge/disc, no printed instruction manual.. Distribution? Toss it on a website and let it cook.
Now, of course, there might be legal issues with distributing games created by another company. (See all those wonderful licensing blurbs on all console games.) However, I think the console manufacturers could throw enough weight around to get game manufacturers to join on the bandwagon if they wanted to.
What the pr0n guy said.
I was in China in September, and I saw everything there. PS2's, XBoxes, GameCubes, GameBoy Advances, and all of the games.
What's this about -entering- the Chinese market again?
As far as I can see, they're already there.
Somehow I don't think that their sales will increase very much as a result of this...
Hasn't anyone thought of how many unsold N64's there are? I bet there's millions actually, I remember last year seeing dozens of the fruity colored N64's at a local department store chain and I know they weren't selling, poof I don't see them anymore, either they went in the trash or are sitting in a warehouse collecting dust. I've also seen tons of unsold N64's at wal-mart. I don't think the big N really want to admit how big a failure the N64 was.
Piracy in China is not necessarily casual copying of games, like in the US. Rater, in China, most games you find are bootlegs of originals. There are still companies making bootleg NES games, and some interesting unique titles.
Of course, general copying of games is pretty rampant too. There are countless Chinese-made devices for the SNES that allow you to load games off a floppy disk. There are N64 devices that let you play games off CDs, Zip disks, and hard drives.
Perhaps Nintendo wants to forage into this market because the old games are no longer generating profit in Japan / US / Europe / Australia, so why not try China, where a little piracy of old stuff won't sting nearly as bad?
I predict that you will die before the copyright on any proprietary video game you have ever played expires.
It's the fault of legislators like Sonny Bono who push ever-increasing copyright terms through legislatures.
For 95 percent of published works, is there a real benefit in copyright beyond the 28 year maximum term established by the Copyright Act of 1790?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even though he mentions selling systems "several generations old", that doesn't mean they'll use the same form factor, IE, possibly shrinking them. There is no reason they couldn't make an NES with the width and depth of a GC at the original NES's height. Why would they? I don't know. I'm ranting.
What would be nice is reproducing older games. I don't own an old Nintendo Console (just an Genesis and Game Gear), but finding games is starting to be difficult, especially since most are preowned. Why couldn't the big N rerelease the NES? (The SNES wouldn't be a good idea since the GBA is getting a TON of ports).
Ok, I'll be quiet and just wait for the Game Boy Advance SP now.
Moore's Law.
If you can't beat the competitors with horsepower, smack 'em with low power consumption.
Well shiver me timbers! Ye'll walk the plank ya yella bellied landlubber. Avast!
Of all the consoles, the N64 and Dreamcast have the best games available.
Isn't that frickin' ironic?
Simple...Chinese waters have a high incidence of piracy because young Chinese men haven't Nintendo to occupy their time. We should applaud Nintendo for their efforts to combat crime. We should also hope that they will begin actively marketing their products in other unstable parts of the world, including Israel and the Arab states, where young men likewise have little to do but hate and kill one another. What works against piracy will surely work against terror as well. Praise to Nintendo!
hehehe... I don't know....
Older console releases YOU!!!!!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
I believe that Nintendo will sell the old consoles because it KNOWS it cannot fight against piracy. They will make the money on the hardware.
.02
Just my
This has less to do with the difficulty of copying older ROM games than it does with protecting the current 'virgin' market for modern games.
If Nintendo creates a market for regular copies of modern games in China, it will also create a much larger black market for illicit copies of those games in China. Right now GameCube games are difficult to reproduce because in the places where they are sold IP piracy is not the norm and the demand for cracking that egg is relatively light.
They release GC in China and the chinese WILL figure out how to pirate GC discs. Once that infrastructure is in place, the cat is out of the bag for the rest of the world, too.
Modern game market in China -> Illicit modern game market in China -> Cracked GC games flooding into the rest of the world.
Grammar.
Contra was the most popular game along with Mario in 80's china console. I still remeber having numerous fun sessions with my buddies during summer break when I was in high school.
Maybe that will disappoint you a lot, but Chinese gamers are just like gamers around the world. They will simply pick games because it's fun to play with. And no, Government has not much influence over what people play, since 98% gamers get their games from priated market anyway.
Regarding your question, there is not too much home-grown games in China . Piracy has simply killed off most home-grown game studios. There is a few home-grown games set up at ancient China might falls into your "pure fun in context to them, but would have no chance of being appreciated over here" category. But I think it's more a knowledge of history thing instead of Culture thing, and I've saw American players who know that part of history like those games.
Oh, by the way, GTA III was 2002's #1 seller in China pirated console game market . And GTA III: vice city has been sold out around the country.
It is known as Green Beret elsewhere.
See link.
http://www.mame.dk/gameinfo/rushatck/
This is how cultural difficulties are often solved in the video gaming world.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Chinese hacker has managed to mod a SNES console to run Red-Hat 8.0...
Now watch this drive.
This is all part of a brilliant war strategy against Iraq. Remember a few years ago when Saddam Hussein was buying Sony Playstation 2s to reassemble into military computing devices? This is pretty much the same deal, only his top lieutenants will pass out from lack of oxygen when they have to blow on the Nintendos to get them to work. With them incapacitated, the U.S./Japan coalition easily prevails. For Great Justice!
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Manufacturing costs for the SNES or even the N64 are going to be incredibly low by now. Even the cartridges. Of course they'll need to be, they'll still cost a larger proportion of the average chinese salary, than the current round of consoles do of the average salary in the (more) developed world.
You probably believe Palladium is designed to protect your privacy and security, too...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The only way that software piracy will be stopped is if software publishers stop putting up prices so high.
Heck, A lot of kids at my school have CD Burners and will sell anybody a copy of the Sims for a mere $5 Australian Dollars. When will software publishers get the point?
I honestly don't think selling Super Nintendo's will do much good. Any one who wants to play an old SNES game justs gets an emulator, and transfers the rom to disk.
In japan they sell the original NES and SNES, but with a different shell and at a huge discount, or rather, cheaper-than-original-cuz-it-costs-F'ing-less price.
As for pirates, they will get the JP gamecube and pirate it all they want.
But those with PCs already have every NES and SNES title, so Nintendo really is probably just entering slowly, before deciding if to go big.
China has more people under 13 than North America(including Mexico) has in total. China's productivity is growing faster than anyone elses. Chinas education system is strong in sciences. There is a big difference in living standards between the coutry and the city, but that is shinking fast.
If Nintendo chooses to sell old hardware to China, it might work for a while, but china will be demanding the most cutting edge products very soon, and with more money than any other market.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Didn't the Iraqi government buy up all the PlayStation 2s in some US cities a few Xmases ago, to use for missile guidance systems? (Or possibly to spoil US kids' Christmas, because Saddam's a meany.) Or is that more Kuwaiti-incubator-baby material?
I heard some years ago (in the late 1990s) that someone was still manufacturing Commodore 64s for sale in China (or possibly Latin America), where few people could afford modern computers. Anyone know anything about this?
If they're making C64s for mass use these days, how closely are they keeping to the original designs, and how many cheap-enough improvements have they added? Are they building them all on one chip, or using the original small-denomination RAM chips? Do they have any funky modern enhancements, like ZIP drives which pretend to be 1541s or integrated USB ports/IP stacks or whatever?
going to start making Super Nintendos again? Actually, here in Japan you can walk into most gameshops and purchase a brand new NES or SNES. These game machines are redesigned NES and SNES machines (or should I say Famicom and Super Famicom ?), meaning they are much smaller than the originals, and are still being manufactured by Nintendo. I think the only major Nintendo console not being produced in one form or another is the N64.
i'm surprised no one posted.. oh well, here you go:
the chinese market will pirate whatever they have. instead of pirating gamecube (which hasn't been done in a big way) and nintendo lossing big revenue around the world, nintendo will give them some game console which is highley pirated already, and the chinese will buy it, as a console is a lot cheaper then buying computer to run mame/mess...
If you think the DMCA is bad, wait until the Chinese government decides to stop piracy.
The concept of piracy is different in China. 'we' as westerners see piracy as downloading warez off the internet, and burning a copy, and maybe giving it to a friend.
..in exactly the same way that you dont copy the cartriges yourelf, but buy them pirated. ..i'd hate to be the PR executive who tried to muscle in on the triads :D
piracy in china is walking to your local market and buying something, incredibly cheaply. run by the triads mainly, and they're not short on cash. you dont buy DVD-R'd movies, you buy stamped silvers.
Do they really think they'll be able to confine the users to the older hardwre? LOL, hell, a majority of the next gen hardware and software is already pirated through Kowloon! They aren't gonna sit there and watch the world play PS3's and GameTriangles while Japan tries to filter them 8 bit machines...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I know Nintendo carts were pirated successfully a few years back, so I think that Nintendo's intention to fight piracy by releasing older hardware in China is probably centered on two assumptions : 1.) The technology has already been paid for by the rest of the world when it was first released so any money made rereleasing it now is gravy, and 2.) most of the big entertainment consumers (the US, Europe, Japan, and Canada) have graduated to later generations of game consoles, so there is no demand for the export of SNES priated material. China was/is notorious for suplpying the world with pirated CDs , CDROMs, and DVDs, so I'd imagine that Nintendo thinks that while this may not eliminate piracy, at least it will localize it.
I'm sorry man, i'm not usian nor english, so i didn't expect you count numbers that way.
When the rest of the world or even scientists think in billions, we think in 10
The longer nintendo waits to more people in China will not buy their games because they have already played them on an emulator.
If I can't go to the store and buy it, I should be allowed to copy it.
ender-iii
Maybe it would easy the suffering of those in chinese slave labor and death camps. Yeah, the chinese seem to want to replace nazi germany in the modern age.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA Nintendo sells China.
A billion's always been a 1000,000,000 in the British Commonwealth too.
Afterall a thousand's not a hundred hundred, it's just ten hundred, so why do people think a billion's a million million just because a million's a thousand thousand.
There's actually a patern to this
10 x 10 = hundred
10 x 100= thousand
1000 x 1000 = million
1000 x 1,000,000 = billion
Yep. And how many people noticed The Legend of Deng Xiaoping? Deng Xiaoping? Err...you mean the key Chinese revolutionary figure and former leader?
Cheers,
Ian
One has to consider that the older NES games were less violent. Moreover, perhaps it is an alterive motive as to get games past the party censors, and -- consequently -- be more profitable.
"Due to piracy problems, we are studying several marketing methods, such as selling machines several generations old, rather than the latest models."
This is a long long way from selling old hardware.
I am expatriate living in Shanghai, China. I am posting this from a cyber cafe here. It's obvious to see why this is such a dumb idea for Nitendo and will destory Nintendo in China forever.
For most Chinese, cyber cafe serves as their introduction to computer, Internet, and compuer games. The machine I am on right now is a PIII 800 with Nvidia GeForce. The usage cost is about US$1 for 4 hours. It's 2AM on Sunday morning and the place is packed with young people in their early 20s. Most are playing games, some are watching movies and surfing the net.
The availabe games on this machines:
Now the picture should be clear. Chinese are introduced to computer games with flashy 3D graphics and online gaming. None of people in this room except me have any idea what games look like before 3D acceleration and Nitendo is nobody to them. With their first game experience with such hardware setup and game titles, Chiese customers would hardly be impressed even with next generation GameCube, let along the NES.
Moreover, China and Japan have a really bad history. In general, Chinese hate Japanese. If Nitendo actually bring NES to the Chinese market, all it takes is an editorial in People's Daily provoking the memory of Sino-Japan war history and paint the sales of NES an insult for the Chinese people as second class customers. It will make Nitendo notorious in China and ultimately destory any chance for Nitendo in Chinese market.
I really hope Nitendo be smart about Chinese market. I workship Shigeru Miyamoto. I have already pre-ordered Zelda for GameCube from the states and can't wait to play it. I hope my Chinese friends will eventually have the chance to appricate the art of the master game creator.
For one thing, gamecube disks read from the outside in, which makes them hard to read in regular players, and makes the data quicker to load on Constant-angular-velocity (CAV) drives.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The fallowing is not true: Remember, the reason for DVD region codes is so that if a copyright-lawless region started pumping out auathorized copies of the locally available DVDs, those DVDs would be useless in an American Region 1 player. (So, that's the reason why the lawless land that is Antarctica gets its own DVD region...)
Region coding is iplemented to alow price fixing of DVDs. Region coding also to stop people from being able to buy a disk in one region and and sell it in another, where the film is still in theaters..
Suck my 2+ dick.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
1.2 billion without TVs in china compared to the few hundred thousand who replace older TVs or upgrade to HDTV or whatever in the United States. The market FOR televisions is much larger in china. A TV in china is only $12
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Think about it this way, numbers in the form 10^n where n is congruent to 0 mod three (i.e. n%3 = 0) are named, numbers in the form 10^n where n isn't congruent to 0 mod 3 are un named, except the first three. That way you can do something like 10^6*10*2, since 10^8 is unnamed, but those two are. This lets us say any number. For example:
10^0 = one
10^1 = ten
10^2 = hundred
10^3 = thousand
10^6 = million
10^9 = billion
10^12 = trillion
10^7 = 10^1 * 10^6 = ten million
10^11 = 10^2 * 10^9 = hundred billion
etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most Chinese people have little money; many work for under $5 a day. That means that if Nintendo revives a cartrige based console in China, its games won't be as counterfieted as a CD based system, but they'll be more expensive, ruling out many people. Maybe Nintendo could bring back one of their old consoles, but with a CD drive so they could sell their old games for a few dollars apiece. It wouldn't cost much more than a portable CD player, require very little R&D, and the games would cost little enough to reduce counterfieting somewhat.
look kids, there may be 800 trillion people in chinaa but the reality is a lot of them live way out in some mining town where they don't have tv's or anything else related to modern civilization. They are really, really poor. The people in china buying game boys will be the people in the urban areas. And there is a lot higher tv to person ratio there.
In the past copyrights expired. Software would eventually be discontinued this left the users on obsolete hardware in a bad position and if not for expired copyrights they'd have no software at all.
Today copyrights are eternal. This makes it a tricky job to discover what is or isn't 'safe'.
Abandonware is any software no longer sold or distributed. It's offically nonexsistant to the company who owns the rights.
Atari VCS abandonware is safe as Atari junked all it's archives etc so they have nothing to form the basis of an ownership clame.
But not everyone has and should a software maker want some quick cash they need only go after visable abandonware sites.
On a side note you realise that Windows (r) 286 would be public domain by now is copyrights expired?
As would the first releaces of GCC.
What we need is a law stating that if software is abandoned for a set piriod of time it's public domain. Other nations may already have it that way hence this move by Nintendo.
I don't actually exist.
Yeah, my favorite games are Castlevania I-III and Contra, and Mega Man 1-6, and the original Final Fantasy. So, anyway, I don't think pirates like video games too much. Har, Har, Har.
And I've had my +2 dick a lot longer too.
I do use your site often though, thanks for it.
how about Sega/nintendo buy back all those old games for there 8/16 bit machens, code an
mulator and bundle and sell them for $50...
I meen they have made there billions off them
allready.. how many ppl would buy them.. i sure
as hell would..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Look at what I wrote...
How can one say there is a larger market for consoles FOR televisions in China than in the United States.
I like you, you got a nice website. But read my post. I am talking about televisions, I don't give a rats ass about the market for televisions. The reality is Nintendo doesn't make televisions, they make video game systems. One comes with a a screen, one needs a television. The market for televisions in China may be huge, but that doesn't matter to Nintendo. The reality is 80% of chinese do NOT have televisions. That means the market for video game devices which require televisions amongst those people is small.
We are talking about how Nintendo can get money from each and every chinaman in china. That isn't going to happen with a Super Nintendo. Hypothetically speaking however, Nintendo could put a GBA in the hands of every Chinaman in China.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Hello there.