Piracy is too mainstream

[legendofphil]

When piracy is prevalent on a system it tends to be blown out of proportion by the media, I highly doubt the projected losses are actually what is lost but we live in a world where people demand cheap goods and don't care about the authenticity or quality.

Floppy disc systems (amiga, PC, etc), CD (PS1, Saturn, etc), DVD (PS2, Xbox, etc) had/have high levels of piracy.

Just look at open air markets/car boot sales to see the levels, in my area of the country over 100,000 discs have been seized since December and it hasn't really slowed but the sale of copied games, music and movies.

For me the first mass market piracy was with the PS1 though I was aware of PC piracy at the time.

 

[Hadrian]

I thought it was always mainstream, didn't know anyone (who owned the machines) who didn't have a pirated PC/C64/ZX81/Amiga game in the late 80's early 90's.

I guess the PSX was the main cause of making it more "mainstream" on consoles, so its been that way for over 10 years and only because its cheaper to copy CD's. Had the N64 has a CD-ROM (or Nintendo went with Sony for the SNES and then later lost all their characters to Sony) then perhaps that would've been the big console of the mid to late 90's.

 

[wiki]

When piracy becomes mainstream ... this is not piracy anymore ...

That makes perfect sense.

/sarcasm

 

[CockroachMan]

Well.. true, the R4 made flashcards a lot more popular than they were before.. I bought my M3 Simply when it came out on January 2007, I had to import one cause I couldn't find any over here.. today, you can easily find a R4 card over here.. all my friends that have a DS have one..

Now.. about the ways to stop it..

* Make games approximately the same price around the world, it's only fair, right?
It's not up to Nintendo to do that, different countries have different taxes over games, the prices over here are absurd, mostly because of the taxes.. you also have to consider the state of the economy in that country, importation costs (not all countries can produce games), etc.. so, it's not really possible to do that..

* Release games at the same time around the world.
Sure, I don't see why Nintendo doesn't do that.. but third parties like Square Enix, Capcom and Rockstar also release their games on different times around the world.. So, it's also not up to Nintendo to fix that. Some games need translation, localization, etc.. and that takes time.. of course, the company could wait for all of the versions to be done and then release the game at the same time.. but that would delay the game on some regions where they could be already getting money.. not good for the company..

* Make games easier to purchase, an official flashcart maybe? I know there's already been one released but I haven't heard anything about it. I would say it's too little, too late.

Well.. they could do that.. make a flashcard and some kind of online store where you could purchase games.. but that doesn't really make games easier to purchase.. not everyone has access to fast internet or has the knowledge on how to download a big game, also some like to go to the store and buy it there.. these things apply specially to the public Nintendo is trying to get to now.
Anyway, the price of the games would be probably the same as on the real stores, and you would have to buy the Nintendo flashcard for that.. which would be probably overpriced :/

QUOTE

* Support homebrew from the beginning, officially.

Ok, that's something that Nintendo COULD do.. but we all know that most flashcard owners buy flashcards for the free games, not for the homebrew.. hell.. with this popularization of the R4, most flashcards owners don't even know about homebrew! So, this would not really help decrease piracy :/

 

[tjas]

Looking at the sale rates at the moment... No problemo!

 

[CockroachMan]

I thought it was always mainstream, didn't know anyone (who owned the machines) who didn't have a pirated PC/C64/ZX81/Amiga game in the late 80's early 90's.

I guess the PSX was the main cause of making it more "mainstream" on consoles, so its been that way for over 10 years and only because its cheaper to copy CD's. Had the N64 has a CD-ROM (or Nintendo went with Sony for the SNES and then later lost all their characters to Sony) then perhaps that would've been the big console of the mid to late 90's.

NES, Genesis and SNES piracy was already common over here.. I had a lot of NES and Genesis games.. none of them were originals.. by that time, I was too young to understand what was the difference there

 

[Vater Unser]

Nope, an official flashcard would not be a good idea...
Nintendo would most likely not significantly lower the prices of online-distributed games (see Virtual Console), even though the publishing costs would be exponentially lower, so we'd end up paying more for less...
To be more precise, Nintendo could offer the games online for about half the price as regular retail games and still make about the same profit (if not even a bigger one)...Now, who believes they'd actually sell the games for half the price? They simply won't. We'd be the ones getting screwed by not getting a physical copy of the games, and paying even higher prices when compared to the production/publishing costs...

And would it actually stop piracy? Hell no!
Most pirates who still buy Nintendo games occasionally do so because they want a physical copy shining brightly in their vitrine...
Let's be honest...the main reason most of us pirate is because we can only afford few games and still want to play all of them, and we simply don't want to pay up to 60€ ($90) or even £50 (= one fucking hundred US dollars) for crap...
The only way to stop piracy is to offer the games for free, which is of course not an option (and not a good idea even from a gamer's point of view)

I believe piracy is also a reason why Nintendo is making so many games targeted at older audiences lately - older people have plenty of money to buy the whole Touch Generations collection, they don't question if they're actually getting a good value for their money and don't know how to pirate in the first place...Thus, big bucks go to Nintendo from cheap productions like Wii Fit (does anyone really believe the development costs of Wii Fit can even be compared to those of a fully-fledged next generation game?)

If you ask me, the only way to reduce piracy to a reasonable level is to stop screwing gamers, and of course, come up with a more secure copy protection (which will again be broken eventually if gamers feel like they're getting screwed)

 

[Playset6199]

I get pissed off when people take the moral highground on piracy, just because there is a new cheap cart coming out, piracy isn't some exclusive club, you have no more right to pirate than anyone else, if piracy becomes more mainstream, so be it.
If you are one of the people complaining, why don't you go and buy all your games? 99% of us don't, leaving us with no reason to complain.

 

[Psyfira]

When the R4 made the Electronics bestseller list on Amazon. Yep I think that's when it all went wrong, I even had a colleage ask what one was the other day when it flashed up out of the blue on Amazon's "search failed, buy a completely unrelated bestselling item instead" screen. Scary stuff.

* Make games approximately the same price around the world, it's only fair, right?

It's not up to Nintendo to do that, different countries have different taxes over games, the prices over here are absurd, mostly because of the taxes.. you also have to consider the state of the economy in that country, importation costs (not all countries can produce games), etc.. so, it's not really possible to do that..

You're right, there will still be a price difference and it'd be fine if those were the only factors pushing up the price. But even taking taxes and import duties into consideration they still charge a lot more on top of that on the shelves than they should

 

[cory1492]

I get pissed off when people take the moral highground on piracy, just because there is a new cheap cart coming out, piracy isn't some exclusive club, you have no more right to pirate than anyone else, if piracy becomes more mainstream, so be it.
If you are one of the people complaining, why don't you go and buy all your games? 99% of us don't, leaving us with no reason to complain.

Ah, but I do so long for the days where "wats a... hex editor?" was never a question posed by a flash cart owner

 

[NeSchn]

Piracy is becoming too mainstream

Agreed 100%.

 

[Dunny]

long post, sorry

Nice post, and you've obviously hit the nail pretty much on the head - even if you are 20 years too late.

The R4, yes, has made piracy easy to such an extent that anyone (including his dog) can do it. I myself have an R4 and 2gb cart, stuffed to the gills with commercial content.

But it's not a revolution in bringing piracy to the masses. Go back... what, 20-25 years? Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s and other 8bits all used cassette tapes for their storage. Games written in BASIC at the time were easy to copy; you just hit BREAK and SAVE the contents of RAM out to your own tape. Games had more and better protection systems in there to stop you doing it, but then the twin-cassette deck (affectionately called the "wog box" round our way) hit the high street, and suddenly everyone had C-90s stuffed with commercial games. Kids swapped them in the playground, scruffy fat blokes sold them at car-boot sales. And yes, everyone in the magazines of the time (as there was no internet, you see) was complaining about the "explosion" in piracy, and how it would all end in tears.

It never did, and there's no reason to suspect that this will either.

The 16bit computers came along, and we were back to square one - only the elite could break the protection on the new games.Then came along twin-disk copiers, X-Copy pro software etc, and again it was an explosion of piracy and - oh, my god - more dialogue in the popular press about how it would all end in tears.

Then the consoles came along. They enjoyed relatively small amounts of piracy compared to previous systems, as most of them had cartridges which, being physical, were difficult for the home user to copy. Nintendo released the N64 after the success of the NES and SNES, and again, piracy was quite small compared to the storms raging around the Amiga and PC.

CD/DVD copiers came along, safedisc, securom, starforce and others tried to defeat them on PCs, but the internet had arrived in full force and cracks/hacks/downloads reigned supreme. Oh my, but there is still a lot of concern that it will all end in tears.

Throughout all this, Nintendo has managed, through the use of cartridges to deliver content, to avoid a lot of the piracy. But now that's all ended, and what the other games producers and hardware manufacturers have suffered throughout the 80s and 90s, Nintendo has brought to it's door - and has to deal with it. And deal with it they shall, but the pirates will always be one step ahead. It's the nature of the game, so to speak.

You can't stop piracy - as long as you're charging for your content, people will find a way to get it for free. It doesn't matter how little you charge, people will not want to pay. Whether or not they can (I probably could, but I'm not going to) is immaterial.

D.

 

[NeSchn]

Great post, The only thing I pirate is DS, because they are easy to get a hold of, and easy to use. Plus it saves me money (I'm only 15) and gives me bragging rights to my friends (W00t!). Now with all these flashcard noobs it makes me want to snap my cards and half and start buying games again. Damn noobs.

 

[elfsander]

Piracy is becoming too mainstream

Agreed 100%.

Everyone says that piracy is wrong and that pirates are evil. I think it's evil to ask insane prices for games that aren't worth playing for more than 2 hours.

 

[Extreme Coder]

If it brings nothing new to the table, and the market is already saturated with cheap cards, then IMO it's not a good idea :/

 

[Agjsdfd]

Piracy is becoming too mainstream

Agreed 100%.

Everyone says that piracy is wrong and that pirates are evil. I think it's evil to ask insane prices for games that aren't worth playing for more than 2 hours.

Thats the whole point.
Some ppl play every shit(pirates everything), and some people just wanna try it out before buying.
From all these years, I cannot say I have liked more than 20 NDS/GBA Games.
I own the ones I really liked, such as Pokemon(every single version).
I even have original japanese and german versions of Pokemon Games as collection.
I also own all GBA Zelda games + FFs.

I do avoid any kind of cheating or piracy on the games I like to play.
Anywayz yah:
You do not have to buy flashcarts, if you dont condone piracy.
But anywayz.. as said only for testing purposes or Homebrews.

 

[DarkUli]

Everyone says that piracy is wrong and that pirates are evil. I think it's evil to ask insane prices for games that aren't worth playing for more than 2 hours.

This man speaks the truth.

I'd buy my games as well if I was a bit better financially (If the whole goddamn country was better financially) and if most of them were actually good.

 

[scubersteve]

Reading this article made me think about Pacific Mall.
It's a mildly-famous asian mall in markham (a little east of Toronto).
They sell everything related to flashcarts for tons of profit.
DSTT = $60
Because of this mall, Toronto is very piratey (they sell other pirated things, among flashcarts).
Fortunately, the vendors are constantly being raided by the cops, and some people are in millions of dollars of debt.
That's what you get for making pirating mainstream.

 

[peppers]

I do not use the devices for piracy but the more people who do the more likley Nintendo or outhers will jam a potato in my flash pipe. For this reason I would be happyer if these devices needed complex soldering ability.

 

[xJonny]

It's already easy enough for any Tom, Dick or Harry to play pirated games on a flashcart (*ahem* R4 *cough* *splutter*) so, I don't think it's helping too many people who are into this scene as it were.