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New Hardware Models Highlight Nintendo's No-Transfer Policy
An article at Wired discusses the difficulties involved in transferring games that were purchased and downloaded online when users replace their Wii or DSi. "Neither the Wii nor Nintendo’s portable DSi consoles have an upgrade path for downloadable content, since games are tied not to user accounts but to specific machines. It’s impossible for a user to copy content from an old console to a new one. Even some Wii owners whose machines have malfunctioned said it was difficult, or impossible, to get Nintendo to transfer the software licenses at its headquarters." One gamer, who bought the recently released black Wii console, explained that she got Nintendo to transfer her games, but needed to "mail both of her Wii consoles to Nintendo, and wait two weeks," hardly a convenient solution.
In Soviet Amerikka, Nintendo doesn't care about customers.
Gooood evening ma'am, my name is George Agdgdgwngo. All I require is your bank account details and sort code, along with your mothers maiden name. And ship me your Wii's. My address is The National Bank of Nigeria, Republic of Adgdgdgwngo, Nigeria.
How did she have time to get the new system, argue with nintendo, ship them both back, wait two weeks, and get her wii's when it just came out like 4 days ago?
This is simply just bad policy on Nintendo's part, this will only serve to drive people to piracy.
' “It shows extreme lack of foresight on their part,” says Wii owner Nathan Gillmore. '
or does it? Perhaps this is one of those additional revenue streams that Microsoft and Sony can't tap into because they happen to handle their store downloads The Right Way (TM). All three companies need all the help they can get, and this certainly doesn't hurt Nintendo... just their user-base.
The not so funny thing is, you can back up your downloaded DSiWare games to the SD slot, but you can't restore them to just any DSi, they're tied to the one you downloaded them from.
About the only use I can see for this is if you have bought a lot of DSiWare and want to free some of the internal storage. Even then, since you can re-download them as many times as you want (still on the same console), it's not very useful.
This
reminds me on the PS3 market place stuff up. where games stored achievements per console not per player.
http://snappeh.com/blog/ - My Blog, not that any of you care...
And this is why I'm stuck in the past. As long as the corporations control the data, I'm not going to buy it. I still buy all my crap on disc so that if my hardware fails, or the corporation suddenly decides to be a dick and disable some of it due to "losing the rights to distribute" or whatever on some stupid song embedded in it, I don't have to worry about it being taken away. If it's only available via digital distribution, then I guess I'm not the target audience, no matter how much of a gamer I am.
I'm also never going to pay for the "privilege" of playing online. XBox Live can fuck right off, and EA's premium pass bullshit means I won't ever be buying any of their games again. I'm not just talking about their premium pass titles, either. I'm talking about all of it. I won't support their fight against the used games market in any way whatsoever.
I've even sworn off of Blizzard with their announcement that they're killing LAN play on the sequels to the games that practically MADE LANs proliferate. I'm not going to say that the original StarCraft and Diablo games singlehandedly made LANs popular, but they sure as hell helped, and they were so supportive of it that they'd let you install spawns on your friends' computers so they could play too. Now that Blizzard is ALREADY filthy rich, they're just getting greedier? Fuck that.
Yeah, I guess I'm a curmudgeon. But dammit, I've got a gaming PC, an NES, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, GameCube, Wii, GBA, DS, and PSP. If the current crop of systems/companies piss me off enough, I'll just give them all the middle finger and go back and find the games I missed, or find some indie titles on PC that interest me.
If everyone else who gave a damn did the same thing, maybe it'd make enough of a dent in the bottom line for the companies to notice.
I've heard that the Wii may store information about which games you have purchased locally, on the Wii itself. Pirates have reported that after installing pirated games, they did not need to pay to get a free re-download from the Wii Shop Channel.
I have not confirmed any of this though.
With all three game console makers treating their customers like dogshit, there is no way I am going to bother with a console.
Microsoft bans people if they think their console is modded.
Nintendo calls piracy a "crisis" and appears jacks their paying customers around.
Sony puts out ROM patches to disable functionality and allow ninja-updates.
Hell with them all. Maybe someone can make an indie console that doesn't suck, get some non-name brand game makers and go to town. I don't know if an open console would sell, but I wonder these days.
...I got an idea: build an individual processor into each console. Generate the instruction set (and the corresponding compiler back-end) *randomly* for each individual console. So no binary would ever have the chance to run on another console.
Most games that you buy in the store require online activation these days anyway, and some even require you to be connected all the time (ala Ubisoft). So if you're not going to do use any cracks etc. at all, then you're just as screwed with physical purchases. If you're going to use cracks to allow you to play games if you can no longer activate it for whatever reason, then you have the same ability to play your downloaded games forever as well.
The only advantage of the physical media is that if your hard drive dies, you don't lose your purchased game (you just reinstall from disc). But that advantage is pretty much completely mitigated by the fact that it's very easy to back up digitally-distributed things, so if you're concerned about losing it there's no reason you can't put a copy on a USB stick, burn it to DVD/BluRay, put it on an external HDD, etc. And if you store it a different location, it's even protected against physical loss like fire or theft.
Kudos for taking the financial stand, I'm not sure it'll have the desired effect though. Big media seems to put any drop in revenue down to piracy, and never seem to consider even for a moment if they might be selling a product in a form people don't want to buy.
Did you know, that if you install a mod chip, you can buy games on one console, and transfer them to another?
It's probably a violation of Nintendo's clickwrap EULA, but it's still legal, because Nintendo's EULA is unenforceable. Hey, you payed for the console, so you own it. You can do whatever you want with it, including click "agree" to a EULA you don't agree to.
Agreeing to the EULA might give you the right to click the "agree" button - but you already had that right, being the owner of the console, and all the contained software.
When you agree to the EULA, Nintendo gives you permission to click the button. But, you don't need Nintendo's permission to click a button on your own hardware.
It is Nintendo's misconception that the customer agreed to the EULA. If the customer really did agree, wouldn't they have signed it? Until the customer signs the EULA, they have all the regular fair use rights granted by copyright law, including the right to copy it to an unlimited number of their own devices, for their own use.
Nintendo's technological locks can't stop copying, and neither can their legal locks. Installing a mod chip in your wii doesn't take 2 weeks, like sending it to Nintendo does, and probably costs less than the shipping (my modchip was only $20).
Just link your shop account with your Nintendo.com account and you can re download anything. Simple as that. It's an ounce of prevention. NEXT.
If you cant allow unrestricted access then allow the USER to decide which of a certain number of machines
to authorize the software/music/games/etc. Tie the accounts to the user and allow the user to redownload
their purchased content on their new upgraded machine.
Apple doesn't do the last part...yet but if they were smart they would.
Why? Its adds value to purchasing music from Apple, if you dont have to worry about backups. It adds value
to the concept of authorizing machines beyond apple simply being a control freak.
unless you're over 120 years olds, which i doubt, you weren't around for nintendo's inception.
Blazing Spiders
You're not alone. I do the same thing. Old classics and indie games give me plenty of entertaniment. But unfortunately most people are ignorant about the issues with DRM or simply don't care.
Ah ignore that post .... I confused two threads sorry
Oh you're so manly! Japanese kiddie software? Wow! You must have a really large penis!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
With bannerbomb it can be done using just software, it takes just a few minutes. The DS has the same problem, a $12 flash card will allow you to play pretty much any game ever produced. Nintendo's got two problems, their stuff is retardedly easy to pirate, and there is so much shovelware out that people are almost conditioned to try a game before they buy it.
Well I do the same, but the problem is that for each person like you or me, there are 1000 who don't give a crap. And that, in a nutshell, is why you and I don't matter.
Funny how I've NEVER had any transfer problems with my DS flashcart.
Way to go Nintendo, keep encouraging your users towards piracy!
Most games that you buy in the store require online activation these days anyway
S/Most games/Most PC games/
For all their other faults console games seem to have mostly avoided that crap so far.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I couldn't have said it better myself. That's why the most recent games I play are almost a decade old. I can play them when, how, and where I want. Period. No way in hell am I going to pay some company to tell me how I can play their game.
They waited to release the black Wii until the white Wii sales started to stutter. But if people want to get a black Wii, there is no way in hell they are going to rebuy all of their previously downloaded content. It's a PR disaster in the making.
The only possible outcomes are people really are: People with no downloadable content will not notice, people who no about the problem will not buy the new Wii, Nintendo is going to have to deal with a surge of deathmatches on technical support with the final outcome of a lot of returned Wiis.
Now Nintendo like a lot of companys like to try to maximize profits, but it seems like they are just walking into this like blind idiots. I just can't see how this will turn out well.
I personally have not bought any virtual console games and have only spent $20 on WiiWare. If I want a SNES game, most of them I will just get off of Ebay or a local flee market. Regardless, I am considering calling into Nintendo to talk about the plight, making sure to frame the argument that so that I'm basically saying, "I have money to give you guys, but you apparently don't want it." After all, we all know that Nintendo makes money off of the sales of their systems too well.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Or you could just do what I did and hack the WII and back everything up to USB hard drive. I think hacking it was more fun than any of the games I've got for it.
The more these companies shoot themselves in the foot and piss off the average Joe, the sooner this nonsense will be over.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well put, mate. I've come to the same decision myself.
It seems like every day another company is showing up on my "No Buy" list, but you know what? Who cares? Just like you, I've got a gaming PC and consoles going all the way back to Pre-NES. Just on the PSX and PS2, I've got over 300 games I could replay.
It would be more correct to say "it would be very difficult to copy the games legally".
People like you make me sick!
This is why companies are getting away with shit like this!
You have new hardware, but it takes a week to get your software working, and you think it is just fantastic!
This is just plain wrong! I shouldn't even need analogies (car or otherwise) for anyone to see this is wrong, and you're all smiles! If you think being treated like shit is great, you deserve to be treated like shit! Unfortunately, so many people like you cause the rest of us to get treated like shit, and we're a bunch of whiners for complaining about it. *sigh*
How can steam get this right and the big N can't??
On the flip side, it's nice to be able to redownload anything I need (rather than trying to find the disc). It's nice to be able to fire up steam on a new laptop and just have it install everything automatically. I've never heard of any game or game content being remote disabled (XBLA recently stopped selling a few titles due to licensing changes, but people who already bought them are unaffected). I've had a hardware failure, but the DRM didn't give me any problems as the licenses were automatically transferred to the new box.
To be honest DRM in games has never really caused me any problems so I just don't care about it. DRM in music on the other hand, that drives me nuts.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Same thing with the Wii and its downloadable games. It'll tell you that you're not allowed to play that game if you try to play it on a machine that didn't buy it.
I've purchased many cell phones over the years. Have you ever tried to take a ringtone you purchased for one and re-get it for another? It doesn't happen. You have to call the carrier and bitch until they give you credit or something of the sort.
Same goes for games, etc. Even with my Blackberry storm, after wiping it clean and updating the firmware (wiping out all of my apps etc), you aren't able to get the apps again without paying. This happened to me for a Garmin produced weather program I purchased. After cleaning my BB out (to regain room and speed.. thing sucks after a few months) I couldn't just download it from the App World. It was a $10 or $15 application.
Knowing I couldn't just re-download and activate via the App World on the SAME PHONE with the same BB pin and all, I knew there was no way it was going to happen with a replacement BB after mine went bad.
People ignorant about upholding their rights will lose them. In DRM and in democracy. Same reason, same course.
Upholding rights is costly and entities ignoring or waiving rights can always undercut the exchange that preserves more rights.
Therefore, unneeded or unwanted rights will quickly erode. Gaining them back is extremely costly. Arm, leg, first born or life costly, sometimes.
But people are currently giving away their on-the-job passwords (whose secrecy protects their jobs and livelihood) for bars of chocolate, so any fight is helpless.
"On the flip side, driving drunk has never really caused ME any problems, so I just drive drunk and not care about it."
"I have never been shot, so it's okay that everyone gets a machine gun to play with"
"I have never fallen off that bridge, so a handrail is clearly not needed. Only fools would fall off from a bridge with no handrail"
I largely agree, that's why the only downloadable content I buy has been very inexpensive so I don't care enough. I did have one ugly experience that soured me. I bought "Lost Cities" for xbox 360 from the downloadable arcade (don't know if those are the right words, but you get the idea). That was a great game, but then one day my HD died. I bought a pretty expensive replacement and then I went to download all the things I had earlier. It was mostly okay, pretty much all the games I cared about I was able to redownload, there were some videos I could not find again or had been free before and now cost something, so I skipped those. None of that bugged me enough to be upset at all. But I simply could not find "Lost Cities." It was easily the game I had played the most before but I had not played it in a while.
After a bunch of google searches I learned that when Activision bought Vivendi/Universal there was some fall-out that prevented people from buying "Lost Cities" anymore. This was many pages in of google results. So I called Microsoft and they could not do a thing. I expected them to refund the MS points but they said they could not, I could to fax a letter the fellow suggested, but I did not, I assumed it would just get ignored or rejected. (Maybe I should have tried, that might be unfair.) Also they could not do anything like extend my Live Gold for a free month or anything like that. That really surprised me since I have bought two 360s and have had 3 repairs and it was pretty routine for MS to throw in a free month of Gold card as a band aid.
So that really irked me. It dawned on me then how they could take something away like that game. I just assumed that with the MS approach I would be able to redownload whatever I wanted for a few years at least, but it seemed like that was not the case in practice. Admittedly it's rare though. So I just treat anything l download as pretty ephemeral to me and do not download anything that may be too valuable (so no more $10+ downloads for me, only up to $6 now, I buy a lot of TG16 VC). I was also upset about the customer service too, I could sort of see MS not being able to refund the MS points, seeing as they gave a cut to Vivendi/Universal already which they could not get back, bit to not even give a free month of Gold, something I had bought two years of already, that was pretty low. It's like they wanted to drive home how ugly this no media/download only stuff really can be.
If it's only available via digital distribution, then I guess I'm not the target audience [...] If the current crop of systems/companies piss me off enough, I'll just [...] find some indie titles on PC that interest me.
I thought most indie PC games were sold as downloads, not as retail disc+instruction+box bundles. And PC games tend to lack couch multiplayer; what do friends visiting your home do while waiting for a turn?
I'm also never going to pay for the "privilege" of playing online.
Will you also refuse to pay the one broadband ISP for your area to unblock inbound ports so that you can play online?
If the current crop of systems/companies piss me off enough, I'll just give them all the middle finger and go back and find the games I missed
Unless the games you missed are unsupported in modern operating systems. Sure, DOSBox can run MS-DOS games, but games for Windows 3.1 don't run on 64-bit Windows, games for Windows 95 or 98 that didn't consider NT 4 have problems under Windows XP and Windows 7, and Apple no longer sells anything that can run games for Mac OS 6 through 9. Sure, the Retrode can copy Atari 2600, Genesis, and Super NES carts to your computer for use in Stella, Gens, and Snes9x, but a lot of classic consoles remain with no convenient UMG v. MP3.com-compliant cart dumper.
People ignorant about upholding their rights will lose them.
Worse yet, it is in the interest of the mass media to keep the populace ignorant of their rights. Here's why.
Maybe someone can make an indie console that doesn't suck
Three words: Acer Aspire Revo. It's a Windows PC with a fairly weak CPU like netbooks and the Wii, but like the PS3, it has an NVIDIA GPU. Hook it up to your HDTV with VGA or HDMI, put the included mouse and keyboard on a TV tray, plug in a USB hub for optional gamepads, and you're set. Add an optical drive and it'll play PS1 games; add the Retrode adapter and it'll even play your Super NES and Genesis cartridges.
I've posted this before but it bears repeating here. I my case, my apartment was burgled, and my Wii was stolen. I bought a new one and called Nintendo. I did not have to re-mail both Wiis like in the story (which would have been impossible, of course). I explained the situation, and I was instructed to write a small letter with the police report and serial #'s of both Wiis. They transferred it. Now, I admit the certainly not very convenient, but its a far cry from shipping a pair of Wii's to Nintendo.
If it's only available via digital distribution, then I guess I'm not the target audience, no matter how much of a gamer I am.
Some digital distribution is entirely DRM Free.
http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/
http://www.wolfire.com/humble
Many indy games certainly are.
http://www.torchlightgame.com/
I've even sworn off of Blizzard with their announcement that they're killing LAN play on the sequels to the games that practically MADE LANs proliferate. I'm not going to say that the original StarCraft and Diablo games singlehandedly made LANs popular, but they sure as hell helped, and they were so supportive of it that they'd let you install spawns on your friends' computers so they could play too. Now that Blizzard is ALREADY filthy rich, they're just getting greedier? Fuck that.
Apparently you connect through the lobby (requires an internet connection), then do LAN play locally. Not the best solution, but meh. I can understand, considering all the pirated copies of their other games that are in use. However, understanding doesn't make it any less annoying.
My little brothers' Wii stopped reading discs, I shipped it to Nintendo and they told me that fixing it would cost about 100 since it was out of warranty. Fine, it costs something because it's out of warranty, but that's little bit too much for fixing an old machine. So, I told them to ship the machine back and I bought a new Wii for 182,30. I started transferring game saves from old machine to the new, and got this message "You must first play this game on your Wii Console to move save data" http://files.myopera.com/Leevi/errors/mustplay.jpg _ really, I have to play every bloody game before I can transfer the saves, what a waste of time, you have to jump through some hoops to get it done, but you can still do it. Except you can't transfer some saves http://files.myopera.com/Leevi/errors/cannotbemoved.jpg If I would like to have those game saves transferred, I would have to send both machines to Nintendo. That is not very (eco)logical and there is absolutely no reason to do this, if Nintendo would be a nice company they would just update Wii software so people could do the transfers themselves.
not to buy a wii ... or a ps3 for that matter
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
ditto! I am just one step ahead of you (I went back to PC games already). After my xbox red ringed (AGAIN) I gave up on it. If I want this much hassle I might as well end up with something I can keep in the end...