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Nintendo Asks For Government Help To Fight Piracy
Nintendo, in its annual report to the USPTO, has requested help in dealing with piracy overseas, both from the US government and from several other countries in particular. China, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Paraguay are listed as the greatest contributing nations to piracy of the company's products. Nintendo suggests, for example, that "Chinese customs officials must stop shipments of game copiers and other infringing products out of China, and China should work in the coming year to eliminate barriers to its enforcement laws," and that "the Spanish government implement laws protecting the creative copyright industry and enact laws against Internet piracy."
Most of the people who copy games for their consoles get the console and the necessary devices for copying games just because they know they can copy the games if they get it all.
There is no guarantee those people would get the console and any games if they couldn't copy them.
I've got a chipped gamecube and a DS with flashcart and could kinda get all of the games for both systems but then all I do is play WC3 on my computer anyway ...
I'm just not that into console gaming, I don't even play the games when they are free ffs, why would I play them if I had to pay for them?
Atleast Nintendo makes money on the consoles to so they have got my support anyway.
Parents getting said devices for their kids which would indeed get a couple of probably crappy games may be another story though.
My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.
....see mine. I have two kids (2 & 4), sometimes I play Wii Music / Wii Fit / Wii Play (Fishing!) with the older. It's too troublesome to lock all stuff away all the time (and sometimes I just forget to remove the disk from the console), so I've already thought a few times about modding the console to be able to backup the games before the kids manage to destroy the disks accidently.
As it is, they won't replace my scratched disks, so I don't have so much simpathy for them.
I doubt Wii games are what the O.P. was talking about. I think he/she/it was talking about older systems.
For instance, how many people signed the online petition to have Nintendo translate Mother 3 and release it in the US? I believe well over 100,000 people signed it. Yet Nintendo refused to translate and release the game over here. So, fans of the series took matters into their own hands and translated the game themselves. If Nintendo would have released the game, they could have made a ton of money off of it, but instead, it is now being "pirated," instead.
I have a bad feeling about this...
Then the answer would seem to be to make new games that are actually more fun to play than the old ones. People wouldn't be playing the old ones if the new ones were that much more fun. I think the biggest problem with profit in the game industry right now is that nobody focuses on playability aka controls and game mechanics. The few companies that do for example blizzard make record profits whenever they release a game.
It seems to me that China is such a shithole, that it would be completely unethical to waste time dealing with piracy at this point. Let's stop slavery, let's stop human rights abuses, let's enforce workplace health and safety standards.
Moaning and whining about how a few people are getting games for free in a country like China is like complaining that Hitler stole your parking spot.
It's been a long time.
if you don't want to buy the games (for whatever your reasons may be) then don't play the games.
I want to buy the games, but Nintendo doesn't want to sell the games for any of several reasons. One is the No Export For You mentality even if there's a fully translated prototype (Earthbound for NES) or even if it's been released in another anglophone market (Kuru Kuru Kururin for GBA; Pinocchio for Wii). Another is that games from a smaller developer can't get published unless the developer has already released another commercial title on Windows, and some developers aren't fans of the genres that Windows gamers have historically preferred. What is the alternative to piracy in this case?