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Piracy and the Nintendo DS
Graffitiwriter writes
"With the average DS game weighing in at about 30-60MB (well within the reach of anyone with a half-decent broadband connection) gamers now have an alarmingly easy route to free games — a fact that Nintendo is all too aware of. Pocket Gamer takes a look at how piracy affects the Nintendo DS console, along with the reasons so many gamers turn to piracy to play their games — including the slew of inferior games, availability of flash carts and industry greed."
Pocket Gamer takes a look at how piracy affects the Nintendo DS console, along with the reasons so many gamers turn to piracy to play their games â" including the slew of inferior games, availability of flash carts and industry greed."
Which sort of leaves out the obvious. People are cheap, and given the choice between having something for money or for free, many opt for free.
It's kind of naive the way you blame pirates for the excesses of the industry. As if any kind of "lock out" can stop people in it for the thrill combined with nearly endless freetime, or an audicence of many people who are willing to pirate because they just want nice things for free.
On the other hand, such lock out can easily prevent honest customers from exercising their rights (first sale), and create difficulties for them that they just won't easily resolve. May even drive some to piracy to avoid all the headaches.
Region codes have nothing to do with piracy, they exist solely to support price discrimination by region and prevent first sale doctrine. There's a reason Australia's otherwise-draconian DMCA-equivalent explicitly allows disabling DRM to eliminate such structures.
My solution to the crap the industry pulls is more on the stop playing games side than the piracy side, but it's pretty easy to see how this goes.
Way to drink the flavor-aid.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Its a very wide spectrum. I know very few people who modded their Xbox 360s, because if they get caught MSFT disables them from playing online - a pretty severe punishment. Most consoles are similar - they require you to hack hardware (i.e. soldering) with expensive mod chips that void the warranty.
The DS, on the other hand, is ridiculously easy to pirate. A 15 dollar cart from dealextreme, a 10 dollar microsd card, and a 1 hour bit torrent download can get you 50 of the most popular DS games - built into your DS. It's more convenient, far cheaper, and you can play games even before they come out. It doesn't void your warranty and isn't traceable.
I personally bought the DS because of its ability to be hacked, but not for pirating. I run a lot of homebrew on my DS, including a very capable Nintendo emulator, an e-book reader, and a few open source games.
True. But morality and legality never have been identical and never will be. One more case study of how the best we can only hope for is a crude approximation.
But then again, pretty much everybody is committing hundreds of "crimes" per day, the justice is all in the enforcement.
There's nothing immoral with ROM dumping a game YOU own and playing it on your computer, no matter what industry propaganda may claim otherwise.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The vast majority of people who use flash carts use it for piracy, plain and simple. Trying to deny this is just naÃve. They may also try a homebrew app or two, but they would never have bought the thing if it wasn't for piracy.
Furhtermore, Nintendo has absolutely no obligation to support homebrewers.
And I say this as a homebrew developer myself.