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?"

Comments

"Fighting" piracy

[mrbrown1602]

By re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo can shutdown ROM piracy by claiming that the games are actively on the market.

Re:"Fighting" piracy

[entrippy]

Nintendo are the one company (at least that springs to mind) that can completely legitimately claim that it still gets use out of its ROMs.

Now, whether or not you think "abandonware" is a valid concept, you have to agree that if the software is still doing the rounds then it's not "keeping old software from dying" it's "piracy". Now, where you stand on piracy is a different matter, but the FACT of the matter is that Nintendo use thier old ROM's.

Recent examples include the E-Reader for the GBA that lets you play old games and the various unlockable ROMs in Animal Crossing.

Why, by the way, do you think Nintendo would want to shutdown ROM piracy just for the hell of it? Why do you think they would spend the money to deploy SNES's into China *just* to crackdown on ROM piracy?

Nintendo cracks down on ROM piracy because they plan to use the IP as they see fit (bonuses for other games, deploying old hardware into new regions) and because they therefore view it as piracy, pure and simple.

You don't get some god-given right to copy software just because it's a few years old. You might like to, but that's not the way it is. If you wanna pirate, that's your call - but don't call it anything else.

This is not a critique of MrBrown, by the by, just an expansion of the points he brought up.

Re:"Fighting" piracy

[farnsworth]

By re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo can shutdown ROM piracy by claiming that the games are actively on the market.

By not re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo has nothing to lose by people pirating roms because the games are not on the market.

More than likely, they are counting on the difficulty of copying cartridge media.

Pricing

[Apreche]

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.

What kinds of games?

[goingincirclez]

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.