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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?"
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.
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.
"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.