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.

Comments

Bad Policy

[syrce]

This is simply just bad policy on Nintendo's part, this will only serve to drive people to piracy.

Re:Bad Policy

[Moryath]

I'm surprised that there aren't hacks available yet that would take care of that issue.

There are, but if you use them, you're accused of being a pirate.

This is true even if you extract the WAD files from your own machine, delete them from that machine, and then reimport them to your new machine.

But at least Nintendo could have resolved this in a more user-friendly manner if they wanted to make it easy and still limit piracy.

And why would Big N resolve this in a user-friendly manner? They want the money of forcing people to re-purchase everything should a Wii die out of warranty. They hate their customers and have crazy-insane people who see "pirates" in every shadow designing their consoles - it's why they had insane licensing schemes as far back as the NES, why they stuck with cartridges on the N64 which turned that into a pretty-much-forgettable box, why they continued to burn developers with the Gamecube, and why the only developers developing for the Wii right now are pretty much Nintendo's in-house studios, Sega (and let's face it, they might as well just get bought out by Big N anyways now), and a bunch of shovelware guys making aerobics games and button mashing Mario Party ripoffs.

Re:Bad Policy

[Ephemeriis]

But at least Nintendo could have resolved this in a more user-friendly manner if they wanted to make it easy and still limit piracy. HASP modules is one solution. Each console equipped with a key allowing the user to move the key to another console in case there is an upgrade or a warranty problem.

You don't really need to make it that complicated though.

You've already purchased those games on-line, through Nintendo's storefront. You've got to have an account or a credit card on file or something. Why not just use that information to authenticate and download the games to new hardware?

It's simple enough to do... It isn't some technical hurdle that Nintendo just can't get over...

The basic problem is that if they let you re-download your games, you don't have to buy new ones.

Re:Bad Policy

[Moryath]

Oh you've got to be kidding. They had the lockout chips on the NES to prevent *third party manufacturers* from producing games.

Nope. The lockout chip had a minor impact with forcing development companies to use Nintendo's fabrication plant at highway-robbery prices, but it was conceived with the idea that "pirate companies" (based in locations like Russia, Hong Kong, and Brazil or even showing up in places like Akihabara right in Japan) would be unable to copy the cartridges easily. Today, these same companies Nintendo was worried about can slap quite literally the whole NES/SNES library into a small memory card, jack it into one of a dozen NES/SNES-on-a-chip implementations inside a cheap knockoff playstation-ish controller with a battery bay and a set of RCA leadouts, and you get shit like this.

They stuck with the cartridge format on the N64 because, despite people's tolerance for awful load times on the PlayStation, the CD just was not ready for the kind of experience that Nintendo provides.

By which you mean what, precisely - games that have crappy polygon outputs with no textures? A dozen pokemon turdbombs?

They bled developers on the Gamecube because Microsoft and Sony waved wads of cash at dev studios to get themselves exclusives

BZZZZT! Try again. They bled developers on both the N64 and Gamecube because developers were tired of getting jerked around Nintendo, tired of Nintendo trying to charge them out the yin-yang for proprietary fabrication plant usage. Here's a hint: Final Fantasy VII went to the Playstation not because of the media, but because Squaresoft was fed up with Nintendo's wanting them to censor the fuck out of their games, and it's no coincidence that the only bones they've thrown Nintendo since have been the kiddyfied crap-tastic "Crystal Chronicles" series.

The bleeding continues on the Wii because of some inexplicable desire by the major studios to compete with each other at the ultra-high end HD segment in some sort of pissing war, rather than going with the platform with a 50% market share.

Nope. The bleeding continues on the Wii because it's a gimmicky console. They can make games for a pair of consoles that, collectively, carry higher penetration than the Wii does singularly. They can make games for a pair of consoles between which porting is actually rather simple these days. They cannot, *easily*, backport the same games to the Wii's "two gamecubes duct-taped together" architecture, and nobody really knows what to do with the Wii's motion controller, as evidenced by the fact that the various games with motion controls either do it (a) really badly or (b) attach a stupid fucking gimmick to it, like having you shake the controller instead of just hitting Button B in order to launch a special move.

Sure you could claim it has "50% market share." The problem there though is that it has the wrong kind of market share. Want to know the average number of games bought a year by a Wii owner? TWO. Average games bought by a 360 or PS3 owner? SIX. Most of the "market penetration" of the Wii is units bought by grandparents who just keep it around either to use Wii Fit or Wii Tennis, and that's all they play when their 6-year-old grandkids come over.

Hey speaking of which - tell your grandparents hello and give your grandma a big kiss on the cheek when you visit them to use their Wii, wouldja?

Re:Good business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if it hurts their user base enough that they stop buying Nintendo's products, then it will certainly hurt Nintendo. DRM on things like DVDs has been in the realm of "who cares" because most non-pirates usually don't have any practical problems with it, and pirates (and people who want to legitimately copy/recode the disks) have been able to break it relatively easily. When the problem starts to affect the majority of users, it changes from a theoretical problem that "complainers" bitch about to an actual problem that normal users will get pissed about. That's when the company will start to be seriously hurt.

You can talk about the "Slippery Slope" all you want, but the reason that Apple's DRM has been reasonably successful is that it doesn't annoy the majority of its users. The 5PC limit is high enough that most people don't notice it, and you can even reset those 5 PCs every so often to make up for old PCs you forgot to deactivate, etc.

Digital Distribution is the wave of the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Digital Distribution is the wave of the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A week later!

[Anonymous Coward]

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*