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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 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.
Doesn't matter how good the products are, if people want to pirate them, they will.
Now, if the packaging is sweetass, that's a different issue.
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
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.)
Well, given that he said "older generation hardware" that pretty much means that carts are a given.
However, all the old Nintendo hardware could be pirated - it's just more expensive and time consuming than it would be with any disc based medium. Also, almost all the common methods of piracy required special hardware.
Honestly, I think Nintendos largest concern is that releasing the GameCube there would result in massive piracy of the special mini-dvd format dics and the release of them to the rest of the world. Nintendo would hate nothing more than a stream of copied media coming out when they've worked so hard (and so far largely successfully) to keep GameCube piracy down.
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.
I'm not sure, but is the implication here is that people only pirate games if they aren't good enough to buy? I can maybe see that if you're arguing a "try before you buy" attitude, but it's pretty clear that the people most interested in pirating games are going to do it regardless of how good it is ... in fact, I'd say a great game is more likely to be pirated by your average 15-year-old k3wl w4r3z d00d than a subpar game.
Hypocrisy disclaimer: I download MP3s and will generally not buy an album unless there are at least two (for bargain CDs) or three (full-priced discs) songs on a CD by that band I like. I would, however, gladly pay for those songs if they were available singly in a DRM-free format. I don't know if there is an appropriate analog in the video game world ("I didn't pay $50 for the full game, but I'd pay $10 for just the first three levels if that was available(?)")
Either way, I don't think it's fair to say, "I liked your game ... but not enough to pay for it. The reason I am pirating your games instead of paying you is because I wish it was better, so it's YOUR fault." That sort of reasoning is akin to blaming women for assaults because they were being "too provocative" or some s**t like that ... that train of thought is just wrong.
"95% of all Slashdot
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.
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...
Actually, as another poster pointed out, it is probably more to do with the fact that the games sold in China will probably be a lot cheaper - and mixed with a lot of pirated games. IF the newset console is readily available in China, the pirated games to go along with it will crop up very quick. Thus, people in USA/Australia/Europe would rather import games/pirated games from China, because the latest games for the latest console would be readily available.
Pirating catridges isn't that difficult, and has been done for some time.
I.O.U One Sig.
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.
the quality of a product has no effect on whether somebody will buy it or not face with the choice of getting it for free or paying for it.
i agree. last i heard, dollar diplomacy didnt work if you tried to infuse a country with an outdated project...also, i dont see how this is supposed to accomplish anything, for either nintendo or the chinese economy. that is like dell selling cuba its 486's, which seems dumb for two reasons: 1) what the hell are they going to do with old systems to begin with, and 2) why even give them that... they are our economic rivals... at least thats my $.02
will calculate digits of pi for food
rainman
Really, I thought that the GameCube had a pretty good way to fight piracy.. they just use a non-standard propritary CD. How can you pirate something that you cannot re-create? There surely is a way, but it's not about the ability it's about the ease of it. If it's easy to pirate a lot of people will do it. If it's hard to pirate, a lot less people will.
"Those were clearly marketed toward the anti-communism sentiment prevalent in the US in the 80's. How would the Chinese take to that?"
Well, for starters, Rush N' Attack would probably be fine because the PRC hated the USSR almost as much (if not more) than we did.
Contra should be alright because everybody hates aliens. (I mean, really, how are you going to associate a giant, disembodied beating heart thing with communism?)
"Or even something say like GTA3... which very vividly portrays a modern western society (scary thought)."
It will do nothing more than cement existing stereotypes. Much like it did with you.
"For that matter, what kind of Chinese-only games are there?"
I would suspect that they're all bad, to the point where "focusing on a Chinese theme" was designed to be their only selling point. It's really hard to put a finger on what the really good games are based on. Is Super Mario Bros. 3 centered about Japanese culture? US? Wait, there are pyramids involved, maybe it's Egyptian...
"Damn, I wish I knew more about the culture..."
Don't worry, it changes every few decades anyway, with bloody purges in between.
Also, even if Nintendo were to lose 100% of the SNES in US market to the pirates, that's not much at all to have lost compared to what they're making off the GameCube now.
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...)
By keeping curent generation technology out of China, it's a lot harder for China to export anything that's useful to the US piracy market.
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.
I think the reason is that older consoles can be produced a lot cheaper and they can therefore sell so cheap that there isn't a market for piracy...
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.