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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.'"
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.
I'm kind of hesitant to reply. I see a kind of discrepancy, but I'm not quite sure how to explain it, or how to rectify it. So I'm just going to do my best to describe what I see.
As it stands, buying software is kind of like buying music. And neither is really anything like buying, for example, cake. While a lot of slashdotters support Software as a Service, very few, if any, would support Music as a Service. Why? We want to own media content, but we don't really care about owning software, just using it. But both are very similar. We can't ever actually own either. Other people own copyrights or patents on them. In both cases, when we "buy" the product, we're actually just buying a license to use that product. We don't own the product, we just have a license to use it under certain conditions. Same goes for games.
Now I've just described what IS the case, not what OUGHT to be the case. I don't know what the case ought to be. On the one hand, I hate not being able to copy my music across devices. I hate having to be connected to the internet to be able to play a certain game. On the other hand, people who create useful/entertaining/valuable things should be compensated for it, if they so wish.
SaaS solves the problem by giving control to the software publishers. The client only gets to use the software when he pays for it, and on the publisher's terms. Would the same model applied to music or games not work? Why wouldn't it work? Is it just a conceptual problem (i.e., we have this idea that we should "own" music or games that we pay for)? What if it was marketed appropriately (i.e., just honestly tell people that they're simply paying for a license to play the game or listen to music on the licenser's terms, instead of implying that paying for it = owning it), would that solve the problem?
Thinking about all of this is making my head hurt. I have no idea what the actual solution should be. There are arguments to be made on every side, and I'm not in a particularly good position to make any of those arguments. I just wanted to get the conversation started.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS? How would that be fundamentally different from MaaS or GaaS?
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.
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.
No, there's no right to compensation for creation. The creator may set their work for sale, and I may choose to buy it, but that's it.
And if you choose not to buy it, you should not be able to use it. The use and the compensation are thus linked.
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.