Nintendo Battles Makers of the R4

eldavojohn writes "A neat little device called the R4 allows for homebrew on the DS ... and as micro SD prices fall, it is becoming easier and easier to put on these cartridges binary dumps of games people don't have the right to play. Which is why Nintendo will see them in court. Note, it's not just the console maker pressing charges, it's also Capcom, Koei, Square Enix, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, and Sega. Is this truly a case of fighting piracy, or is it also an attempt to stop homebrew from stealing the market?"

Comments

Seriously?

[Robert1]

I can't tell if the article summary comment is tongue-in-cheek or actually serious. I should hope that it isn't the latter, its tough to believe people are really that delusional. How can a game written by 3-4 teen/early 20 year olds hope to compete against games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists? The cost and man-hours necessary to complete a modern game have effectively shoved small time developers out of business. Its not like they were muscled out, the technology and cost just ran away from them. Today, an amateur game maker can realistically hope to make games equivalent to those seen 15 years ago. How much market share will the 800th clone of pong or snake or RPG Maker-esque rpg really take away from licensed games? How fun is it, really, to play yet another generic 2d platformer?

Don't lie to yourself, nobody's clamoring to buy this to play any of those games. This is designed for piracy. I guarantee >95% use it exclusively for getting non-homebrew games.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Sir_Dill]

Devils Advocate Fair use argument:

I have 10-15 DS games. Traveling with them is a real PITA. Either I am hauling around a manpurse or pockets full of cartridges.

The ARRRR4 would allow me to load all of my games to a single cartridge thus reducing the risk of theft, loss, or damage. Sure I can always lose it too but I find its generally easier to keep track of one thing, especially when that one thing "lives" in a larger one thing than it is to keep track of lots of little ones.

For the record I am not deluded. I know that one of the primary uses for these things is piracy, however that is not their ONLY use. Further arguments on that subject would be semantics.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[drcagn]

He never said that there wasn't any good homebrew on the DS. He said that the reason why Nintendo fighting the R4 is piracy.

I really doubt Nintendo would go this far over homebrew.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Hoknor]

Any amount of cartridge swapping creates new oppurtunity for misplacing of said cartridge. How many games does somebody need to own before it is considered an acceptably large amount of games that space saving is allowed?