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

[Z00L00K]

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

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.

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: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.

Backups on the DSi

[Mornedhel]

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.

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:WTF

[theeddie55]

unless you're over 120 years olds, which i doubt, you weren't around for nintendo's inception.