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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."
People are going to pirate your software, no matter how hard you try to protect it, there was even devices for the original gameboy.
People are going to copy software, and find an excuse for it, they always have, and always will.
company X is bad, Company x charge to much...
A hacked PSP with LARGE ISO's, some up to 1GB, is just as common as someone with a Nintendo DS and an R4.
Recently, I was going on a road trip and was looking for somethings to keep myself and others entertained. I borrowed a friend's DS and bought a couple games for it. I ended up dropping about $60 on 4-5 games that I had heard of or seen commercials for.
Afterwards, I wished I had skipped it. Only one of the games was played to any degree by anyone. The others were trash/shovelware that got old after 15 minutes. Also, it frustrated the hell out of me that the games featured only 1 save slot, prohibiting anyone from starting new games.
I thought I was back in the stone age of gaming. Until they get with the program, they've lost me as a portable gamer.
It's called an R4 card, though there are others too.
ilovegeorgebush
flash carts
/standard rant about Slashdot editors
As a CycloDS owner, I can say that exactly zero (0) of the roms I have are pirated.
Why did I get a flash card if not to pirate?
Primarily, my upgrade to the lite left the gba cart sticking out, which made it less than convenient to carry with anything but the plug in the gba slot. Next was the convenience of not having to bring anything more then the DS itself while still having access to all my carts. Also some used games can't easily be restored to a clean state. The ripping process and separate save files solves that problem.
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.
Ah yes, that old yarn never gets old. Whenever we want to justify our theft we don the Robin Hood costume.
It won't help much, but it would be a step in the right direction to offer the comodity of having all games in a single cartidge (or simply to a static internal memory).
Maye a system like Steam that downloads any game you own to your DS from any computer with internet access.
Just an idea.
You actually use all 50 carts? I've got enough room for 12 in my bag and rarely ever use more than 1-2 of them.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
('about $60 on 4-5 games is about $7 a game)
Where did you learn math?
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Not to mention consumer greed. It's all the industry's fault, or at least those damn flash cart manufacturers. They provide a product like that, how could we possibly have the free will to say no?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
If someone wants more games than he or she can pay for, isn't it fair to call that consumer is greedy?
Do I really want to download "Strawberry Shortcake: The Four Seasons Cake?" I think not.
Now that consumers can get pretty much any digital media without compensating the copyright holder -- films, music, videogames -- what is a copyright holder to do?
Right now they've found they can use cryptographically signed copies on a closed system. That evens the playing field for pirates and content providers for now, because people find it unappealing to hack their hardware and risk loss of support. That's what's happening in consoles through their virtual shops, and that's what'll happen with the DS.
People pirate X-Box 360 games, PS2 and Dreamcast games, and emulate Game Boy Advance and Super Nintendo games. From a 750kb ROM to a full 4.9 gig ISO file.
Anyone with a 'decent' broadband connection can leave a torrent or PSP program on overnights and grab any game they want relatively easily.
Size has never stopped most people from pirating games before who want to pirate.
People segmented PC games into .rar/.zip files and shared them on IRC or USENET well over a decade ago. Those games were ten times the size of a single DS game and that was then.
I purchased Golden Sun I and II for my Game Boy Advance when they came out but only opened them for the manual, the games are sitting in a box never used. I downloaded the ROMS that same week and played them off of an emulator. Full screen, my own controller, save states, etc.
Yes piracy sucks for game companies but for keeping old cartridge games alive I use ROMS always. And I own the original game at least.
I was thinking the same thing!
His Brain Age must be, like, a MILLION!
I just pooped your party.
What Nintendo should do is find a way to meet the demand and profit from it. They should put out their own flash cartridge and set up an online downloading service to allow customers to download games at a reduced cost, like what Amazon did with MP3's.
Amazon's DRM-free service has taught me that I really don't mind paying a dollar to own the right to play a song I like, in a format I prefer. I'm simply unwilling to pay $15+ for a CD that probably only has a couple of songs I want. Similarly for DS games, I'm simply not willing to pay $20 to $30 for a hard copy of a game, if the hard copy is less "functional" and more inconvenient to obtain and own than the pirated ROM version of it. Give me a $5 to $10 downloadable version of DS games I want, and it's a no brainer.
The Slot-1 Secret -- this piece from early December '08 looks not only into rampant DS game piracy but how Nintendo rendered this piracy moot by shifting toward new audiences. The latter point is far more interesting, as the R4 topic is otherwise old hat.
Im not saying that it justifies piracy, but the only reason that i bought my ds was knowing that i could drop around 60$ and hold all of my games on one cartridge. If Nintendo simply dropped the cartridge and added a micro-SD slot with an xbox live/steam download system it would be great. My Greatest pain with portables is that once you begin carrying multiple games they are suddenly less portable due to needing a case or holder for the games
I will take advantage of this post to ask a question I have been asking myself, has anyone done a USB cable charger for the NDS? I travel a lot in and out of Europe and hate to take the European, American, English converters (not to mention the difference in voltage).
Last time I looked in Google there was one page with a DIY project mentioned , however the page was not available any more (and archive.org did not got it)...
I have also looked for it on stores without success...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
When the Nintendo DS came out, RSA made it well known that its code protected the games Now I don't hear so much from them about this. Maybe it's not their best example of protecting data?
Thus the release of the DSi. Not only will it lock out R4 cards for classic DS games
Locking out R4 cards and comparable cards locks out amateur developers. From the article:
What handheld platform should homebrewers be developing for instead?
Nintendo has produced seven generations or so of handheld game consoles. Not a single one supported region codes until the DSi. It stands to reason that if Nintendo wasn't trying to lock out pirates with new protection technology, there's a good chance the region codes never would have made it into this system.
DSi is also the first Nintendo handheld to enforce parental controls based on a rating system, and each region has a different rating system. For instance, ESRB ratings are meaningless in the European market, which largely uses PEGI.
For me I am rather sick of [shovelware after the first two years of a Nintendo handheld, so] I reverted back to PC gaming, [...] a mid range card does it mostly!
The topic of the article is handheld video game systems, and the closest counterpart to those in the PC gaming world is a laptop. Unless the situation has changed dramatically since I bought my laptop, laptops don't have video "cards" that the end user can easily replace. What price range of laptops would you say come with "a mid range card"?
They are useful for building a house to put your ds into, didn't you know it's the new "in thing" to do...
Thanks for the info which shows that despite the DS massively outselling all other consoles it doesn't have a single game in the top five software sales.
Remember easy piracy may be a good selling point for hardware the same may not be true for software.
I modded my xbox (250gb hd, xeniumgold chip), and it doesn't even HAVE an xbox game on it. I did it to put on all my emus and about 300-350 DivX movies I ftp to it over from my PC. Also, the controller and such is so easy that my girlfriend and house guests can figure out how to watch movies, or play old emu games without me having to walk them through installing ZSNES and using bittorrent on a pc.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
You actually use all 50 carts? I've got enough room for 12 in my bag and rarely ever use more than 1-2 of them.
You think people with 40GB iPods actually listen to all that music before their battery needs to be charged again? Or would a better solution be to throw 30 CDs in your bag and lug those around with you?
Physical media is a burden, plain and simple.
On the GBA, I play the pokemon games from time to time. My pokemon cartridges are so worn from overuse that they often just reset if I shake them a little. They weren't meant to last, that much is certain.
On the SNES, I play two games, a Fire Emblem game and the Clocktower game. These two I do -not- own, but this is partly because the games were never sold in America (my Japanese is not very good, which would lead to ultimate frustruation in playing a game, while I can get English translated ROMs), and partly because my SNES no longer works.
The Gamecube emulator I only have for Animal Crossing. I purchased Animal Crossing when it first came out, and once we moved, I lost it. I kept looking, until I found out my friend had my copy at her house...which is about 12 hours away. So, until she can come visit, I play it on my computer.
I am, therefore, a horrible thieving pirate, because I did not buy new pokemon cartridges (actually I did, for the older games, and then they wore out too), did not purchase a new SNES and import two Japanese games, and did not buy a new Animal Crossing disk.
The big advantage I can see would be this...
From personal experience, the carts are so small they are practically designed to be lost. In chosing to carry even a couple around, you are probably going to misplace one every so often (even more so if the DS owner is a young child).
Having only one cart, which you never have to remove from the DS and keeping the originals safe at home seems like a good idea. At least for the customer... the manufacturers may have other ideas.
[The Universe] has gone offline.
A quality mod cartridge and a MicroSD card cost no more than three or four games
I bought one with a 4GB MicroSD for about $16. That's less than most single DS games.
I admit that I find it a bit sad that everybody think that flashcart owners use it solely for game piracy. I agree that piracy is attractive when you get one, but the fact that you don't have to swap and carry all your legitimate games cartridges (I have about 12 games) when travelling is very convenient. At least Nintendo is going through Digital Distribution with the DSi with the help of an SD card, so this is a good step in the right direction. Let's just see if they will do it right once it comes to America.
Second paragraph of the TFA: "It's a sad fact of human nature that people tend to want things for as low a price as possible."
Huh?
Why would that be sad part of human nature?
Aren't all living organisms essentially opportunistic?
I know this is not really live or die kind of situation, but.....
I have a DS Dev Kit at home (I'm a DS developer :-), but I want a flash cart to put the main DS games I play on one card.
Where's a good online place to order from?
Thx
This hits the nail on the head. I already paid 200 euros for my DS lite, and now these people have the fucking gall to say that I should pay 30 euros for each game too?
If it weren't for being able to warez, I wouldn't have got myself a DS. I'd be a person who doesn't have a DS, and doesn't pay for games -- compared to what I am now, a person who has a DS and doesn't pay for games. Since Nintendo is making money from each DS sold (4 megs of asymmetric memory and otherwise veeeerrrry limited hardware tends to do that), I hardly see myself being a serious wrongdoer here.
I'm sure I could easily download games, etc... however the real value I'm taking away from this is people that have bought the microsd cards and have backed up their roms onto them. I don't know how many times I've had to scour through my wife's van to find a DS game that is just tiny and falls into all sorts of areas.
It'd be nice to be able and the the kids games, consolidate and not have to worry about that.
The geek in me says it'd be cool to develop for the DS, but the realist says I'm too damn lazy!
and now these people have the fucking gall to say that I should pay 30 euros for each game too?
I know! Paying for the fruits of people's labors... what a concept!
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Summary:
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.
Why is the pirate's greed not mentioned as the #1 reason? Inferior games and industry greed don't force people to pirate games. Pirates just want something without having to pay for it. Simple and selfish.
While there may be some truth to region locking on games being done for the sake of price discrimination, the situation is nowhere near as severe as it is for DVDs (at least, outside of the anime industry).
In a lot of cases though, there are legitimate reasons for region locking games. Mostly due to the additional work involved in localization. This includes not only translations of text and audio, but also making sure the context of these translations are both kosher within the cultural values of a particular region and make sense to the end consumer. This can include not only altering onscreen text or spoken words, but also body movement, scene layout and even background props. (This is a common issue when attempting to localize certain kinds of content between countries like the US and Japan, where context of words and actions are translated versus what's actually being said and done.)
The process of localization in this manner can often be time consuming and costly to do adequately. The quality of a title's localization efforts can mean the difference between the success or failure of the title itself within a given region.
It's not a huge stretch to suggest that mass importing of a foreign title could potentially prevent future out of region titles from being localized if that title's localized counterpart doesn't sell well. At best, a future title might still be localized, but at a far lower quality due to budget concerns.
Personally, I like my games to be localized at the best quality possible.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The company pays its employees. I have no obligation to pay the company, either as a player of a game they made or as a non-player of that same game.
You have an obligation to pay them to obtain the fruit of their labor for yourself, unless someone else paid them for you. This is not a new concept. The lengths to which people will go to justify stealing software confound me.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I do not. This obligation is utterly misguided. Do you pay those who make roads each time you drive on those roads they made? Aren't you obligated to, in order to access the fruits of their labour? Road stealer.
As you should know, theft is a distinct thing entirely, distinguished by its bereavement aspect. Copyright infringement is, economically speaking, no worse than ignoring the game altogether. "The lengths to which people will go to justify their protestant self-whipping and catholic guilt confound me."
I do not. This obligation is utterly misguided. Do you pay those who make roads each time you drive on those roads they made?
Oh, please. If you really wish to justify your desire to steal games, you need to come up with an analogy that actually works. I do, in fact, pay the people who make roads on a regular basis, in the form of taxes. I pay for upkeep on existing roads, new roads, all that. Furthermore, your analogy suggests that I claim you should continue to pay for games after you own a copy, which is false. You'd better damn well pay for it the first time, though, much like you have to pay your share if you wish to drive on the road. After that, it's been paid for once, so you don't continue paying for it in either case.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard