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Nintendo To Take On Piracy In 3-D
crimeandpunishment writes "Nintendo says when its new handheld game device with 3-D technology comes out, it will have beefed-up anti-piracy measures. For obvious reasons, the company is keeping tight-lipped on the specifics. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata says they're not only concerned about software piracy, but also a growing tolerance for it. He said, 'We fear a kind of thinking is become widespread that paying for software is meaningless.'"
paying for copies of software is meaningless
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Nintendo Takes On Pirates: IN 3D!
See this for an explanation why.
Short explanation of the link: Since pirates do not pay, they can download more than they could ever afford. So for a large part of what's pirated you couldn't force payment in any manner, since the money to do so simply doesn't exist.
I know of people who have enormous collections spanning thousands of movies, games, and music CDs, most of which they haven't even tried once. It seems that once somebody gets into that particular mindset they operate on a "Oh, this sounds interesting. *Adds to queue*" basis, and by the time it's done downloading they often don't remember what it was and why they have it.
Those people are largely unaffected by all this. If they can't get a copy of Nintendo's latest game, oh well, they have downloaded 20 others last week. And what they download is all pre-cracked already.
The people who it does affect though are the legitimate customers. I remember getting very angry (which doesn't happen very often to me), when I purchased Neverwinter Nights, and couldn't use it. Turns out the morons printed the CD key in a font that made B/8, O/0 and such indistinguishable. After 15 minutes I finally figured out one that worked, and I still don't know if that's the one I was supposed to use, or just a similar key that happened to work, and that will prevent somebody else from playing. I bet the pirates don't need to put up with that.
So don't buy into this protection nonsense, and support few people who view this sanely.
If you're tight lipped about the nature of your security, you have lost already. Best security is still one where the procedure itself is well known but it's still secure. If you rely on obscurity, you're prone to lose. Especially if you have no option but to give your "enemy" the secured device.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And interestingly enough, if the folks who are playing "Imagine Babysitter" and "Pony Lover DS" are paying customers and the folks who are playing "FFVI" or "Kid Icarus" are pirating it, that gives the company an incentive to produce more "Imagine Babysitter"-type games and fewer of the games pirates like. Especially if the games that people are paying for are cheaper to develop and produce than the games that pirates like.
You lose more to that than you ever did on piracy.
We are all God's parents.
Mod parent up.
"Hardcore" gamers bitching about shovelware and casual games should realize that rampant piracy makes developing a multimillion dollar blockbuster look a lot less attractive. It's a much better financial proposition to create low-budget games that cater to people who are less likely to pirate them.
Posting anon since I probably shouldn't be this specific, but the market for DS software has totally collapsed in Europe, particularly in Spain and Italy, where you sell virtually nothing. Titles in Europe are moving literally 10% of of what they do in NA. Many, if not most, major publishers are currently abandoning the DS completely, since the loss of Europe knocks out a huge chunk of their projected ROI.
Now, I'm in the radical camp that actually reads scientific studies and approaches new phenomena with an eye to determine how they work, rather than shut them down, so I think a lot of the focus on piracy as theft is misplaced. An R40, or similar "piracy" device, also makes your DS dramatically more useful since you can carry around a large library of titles at once. Even better for kids, obviously a key demographic, it prevents the tiny cartridges getting lost or destroyed. When they came out, probably 50% of the people I knew immediately got them, and many for their kids as well. (Note that this is a very skewed sample: I work at a game development company, so we're all pretty hardcore, often each of our kids has their own DS, things like that.) Many of these people started off determined not to pirate and just use it for the convenience. (again, skewed sample - we're voracious, hardcore gamers, but we make them for a living, so we take piracy a little more seriously. Doesn't mean we don't do it, but it often does mean we try not to.) Then they were just downloading the titles to try them out. And so on.
I think piracy is usually as much about convenience as free product. It's just like prohibition: if you try to prevent behavior that everyone sees as reasonable, people will ignore those rules and proceed to behavior they wouldn't have considered reasonable before. The best way to fight piracy on the DS is to give us an easy way to store games on the device digitally. You'll probably want to pair this with a digital distribution scheme, which is fine, and gives you a nice place to ensure that we get free demos of all games. Yes, this will mean that people won't buy the crappy games, which leads to lower licensing revenues for Nintendo, but the DS badly needs to have the wheat cut from the chaff to restore confidence in the platform.
These are just two examples, and more than this is needed to defeat the piracy problem, but the key is the strategy. Don't focus on preventing piracy, focus on your products delivering the real value that your customers want better than the pirates can. You've got economies of scale all over them, and if you don't know your own products and consumers better than the pirates do, you don't deserve either.
tl;dr
Massive piracy on DS ensures fewer risky, expensive titles like The World Ends With You and more of the easy, safe, "40 different versions of Imagine Babysitter and Pony Lover DS". The best way to fix the piracy problem is to give people what they want, which isn't really games for free.
Or not posting anon, since the box got unchecked somewhere along the line. Oh well.
Yep. Piracy advocates like to holler "vote with your dollars." Well, the dollars have been voted with and Imagine Babysitter and Pony Lover DS won.
I assume that's what they were trying to do with the DSi and DSiware. The trouble is, like Sony they've discovered that download-only games you can't sell second hand have a lower value than regular games, so the people who do pay for games (like me) aren't willing to pay as much for them. That in turn has meant that DSiware has been filled with crappy minigames.
To put numbers to it, If I can buy Zelda on the DS for $29.99 and sell it used for $20, you need to sell me the full Zelda as a download for less than $10. I don't think Nintendo are willing to do that, which means the digital distribution scheme is a non-starter.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Dear Nintendo,
I am a paying customer. I do not pirate DS games. But I do transfer my legally-purchased games to my CycloDS Evolution because there's no way in hell I'm going to carry around 40 different cartridges when I can just carry one (and the ability to use cheat codes comes in handy occasionally, too). Recently, however, I was tempted to just start pirating games again. Do you know why? Because your God damn copy protection on the latest Zelda game left it unplayable on the CycloDS, while the cracked version available online was fine!
You ridiculous attempt at stopping piracy didn't turn any pirates into customers, it just made your existing customers start considering piracy! Thankfully, the CycloDS team has since released an update to evade your stupid piracy-detecting-game-breaker. But please, Nintendo, don't fall into a situation where the pirated product is better than the legitimate one. Because if you dick me around to the point where I still have to search through the Internet to get the product I bought to actually work, I might just start skipping the step where I buy the game in the first place!
Oh, and I might as well mention that the only reason I haven't bought your DSi is because the CycloDS won't run on it.
No really, check them and come back.
Oh, what's that? The crappy games aren't being pirated to the extent that the amazing ones are? What are the user reviews on the most popular pirated games? 7/10 or higher, usually. What about My Little Pony: The Farm 19? That being torrented AT ALL? No?
Sorry, but pirates aren't pirating games that are 'total crap'. Why the hell would they waste their time on a game that sucked? No; they're pirating the fun games that they want to play, not that boring games they hate.
Usually I am on the side of piracy, but this is not justifiable. Plain and simple: they don't want people playing their game that they spent 50 million making for free. When they see that a large quantity of people are pirating their game, they'll balance their options: lose money on a blockbuster, or gain money on shovelware. The only gamers losing out are the ones that complain when you can't see the nose hairs on the guy you shot through a scope; and if their asses didn't pirate in the first place they wouldn't be losing.
While I'm on the subject, I may as well go all out.
Pirates don't pirate lousy games. Why? Because no one wants to play that game. The games being pirated the most are fun games. So, what message are you really sending the game companies? They see a heavy amount of pirating on their top games, and not as high revenues as there should be to offset it. Greed or not, would you exactly be happy if someone trimmed off even a few dollars from your paycheck? Hell, the average adult bitched when their taxes go up 7%; how would you feel if you saw that several thousand people weren't paying you $60?
But wait, they can't count piracy as a lost sale! Maybe not. There's no way to tell if that person downloaded it and then immediately deleted it. However, if they pirate a game and then play it for 60-70 hours, I'd sure as hell consider that a loss. Stores like Target offer full refund returns if you come back in 30 days with the receipt. If pirates bought the game and returned it, they wouldn't technically be paying. Yet they pirate.
Are they pirating out of protest? What a ridiculous notion. Don't play the game if you don't like it! If you're complaining about a companies evil tactics, you prove nothing by continuing to use their product! That'd be like bitching about McDonalds whilst stealing burgers from them.
They spent several years working on a game, based on reactions from the gaming community. Trends and the like. They spent millions on the tech needed to make it look cool enough for people to buy, because regardless of what the /. community says, the bulk of gamers do want insanely good graphics on top of good gameplay. At the end, they spend millions on advertisements to pump up the hype for a game. But wait! They notice that their previous game had a high piracy rate. So, they spend millions more on DRM in hopes that it will stop piracy.
Well, the gamers see the DRM and freak out! Clearly they must boycott this game! So, they "boycott"; as soon as it's released, the legit players buy it while the pirates crack it and play it. The game companies lose money, and determine stronger DRM is needed.
So, yeah...wow, I had a good karma run. I think I just defended game companies for installing DRM. Pretty sure that means I'm doomed.
I wish I had mod points:
To put numbers to it, If I can buy Zelda on the DS for $29.99 and sell it used for $20, you need to sell me the full Zelda as a download for less than $10. I don't think Nintendo are willing to do that, which means the digital distribution scheme is a non-starter.
This isn't restricted to video game companies - ALL content publishing companies underestimate the lure of "right of first sale" has on a good-sized portion of their customer base. The ability to turn around and re-sell a book, game, movie, TV boxed set, comic book, whatever is built into some of their customers' purchase plans right from the beginning. So they don't view that $50 purchase as a $50 expenditure - they see it as maybe a $35 expense and they're going to get back $15 when they eventually sell it. If they can't re-sell it then it isn't worth $50 to them because it was never worth $50 to them in the first place. It was always a $35 purchase in their eyes.
Pricing might have a little something to do with it as well.
I believe titles are quite a bit more expensive in at least parts of Europe.
Picking up one of the latest Pokemons here in Sweden will set me back about $55.
At those prices I expect a pretty fantastic game as it's more than I've spent on any game in the last 10 years.
Normally I pick up bargains on Steam or one or two almost-launch titles at just below $50.
I own a DS and I'd like to sample and play quite a number of games, but the DS for me is a much more casual platform and something I'll mostly use when I travel.
I gave up sampling games at $55 and gave up the DS altogether, quite a few others went with pirating instead.
I have no clue why Nintendo thinks this sort of pricing is actually anywhere near the perceived worth for these games.
We have less disposable income than the average American.