Nintendo Asks For Government Help To Fight Piracy 296
Nintendo, in its annual report to the USPTO, has requested help in dealing with piracy overseas, both from the US government and from several other countries in particular. China, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Paraguay are listed as the greatest contributing nations to piracy of the company's products. Nintendo suggests, for example, that "Chinese customs officials must stop shipments of game copiers and other infringing products out of China, and China should work in the coming year to eliminate barriers to its enforcement laws," and that "the Spanish government implement laws protecting the creative copyright industry and enact laws against Internet piracy."
But..... (Score:4, Interesting)
.....if we piss off the Chinese by demanding they stop copying games or exporting copying hardware, they won't loan us 2000 billion in dollars. And then what will this poor, debtor nation do? No, no, we can't afford to make demands of the people giving us money to survive.
High Taxes increases Piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
At least in brazil its the truth. Super Mario Galaxy, for example costs 46 dolars on amazon.com. If you try to buy it in brazil, it will cost 260 reais, which is about 120 dolars. Its costs 2.6 times more than if you were buying it on the US. Whats the reason for this? Taxes and filthy lucre. I dont know why it doesnt happen with computer games. Left 4 Dead for PC, for instance, costs 45 dolars on Amazon.com. If you buy it in brazil, it costs 99 reais, which is about 45 dolars. Thats why computer games piracy has decreased in brazil and console games piracy is still the same. Charge a fear price and everyone will buy the game. Charge a pornographic price and we will pirate it.
Required Background Reading (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect most people would be surprised by the sheer amount of piracy there is for games on Nintendo's platforms. So here's some background reading on the issue:
"In South Korea, many video game consumers exploit illegal copies of video games, including for the Nintendo DS. In 2007, 500,000 copies of DS games were sold, while the sales of the DS hardware units was 800,000." [wikipedia.org] Yes, you're reading that right; the attach rate for DS software in Korea was at one point less than 1.0, fewer pieces of software were sold than hardware devices, which is a tell-tale sign of use of piracy devices.
As for why that is, Gamesutra has a short but insightful article on the matter [gamasutra.com]. DS flash carts (what Nintendo is calling "game copiers") are cheap, and the South Korean people are turning to them in part as a solution to not being able to afford every game they want.
Nintendo's biggest fear here is that other countries end up like Korea, with rampant piracy and few legit customers. Nintendo does make a profit on hardware, but much of their profit is still on software. Furthermore their 3rd party game developers who don't make a profit on hardware would love to make a profit at all, and bad/no 3rd party support just makes Nintendo's hardware and software sales that much worse. I can't see why Korean piracy levels world-wide wouldn't kill the DS, or any other console for that matter. I understand Wii piracy through mod-chips is also pretty rampant in South Korea, although I do not know to what degree.
With that said I don't know why Nintendo is going to the US government about this. Certainly it's reasonable to ask the government to clamp down on this in the United States, and perhaps even apply some pressure on China where flash carts are made with relative impunity, but I don't see the point in listing the other countries. I don't see what stake the US government has on piracy in Spain, for example.
And I'll close this out by admitting I'm a pirate. I have an R4 flash cart with many games and exactly 2 legit games (1 of which came with the DS) when I could easily afford to be completely legit. I'm exactly the kind of person Nintendo is worried about. There are many more like me, I'm afraid.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, but my actions don't result in lost sales since I don't even play the games when they are free, I would definitely not buy and play any games costing the amount of money they cost now.
While I can see Nintendo's point, I wish they'd... (Score:5, Interesting)
....see mine. I have two kids (2 & 4), sometimes I play Wii Music / Wii Fit / Wii Play (Fishing!) with the older. It's too troublesome to lock all stuff away all the time (and sometimes I just forget to remove the disk from the console), so I've already thought a few times about modding the console to be able to backup the games before the kids manage to destroy the disks accidently.
As it is, they won't replace my scratched disks, so I don't have so much simpathy for them.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:4, Interesting)
Same for Xbox, it was a total failure until people could chip it and use the HDD for games vs the un-cracked Gamecube for instance.
Piracy is the reason Microsoft got into the console business at all.
And yes, guess it helped DS vs PSP somewhat to since PSP games could be up to 1.8 GB in size and 2 GB memory cards cost a lot of money back then.
And I also agree that if you don't make money from all the products you're doing something wrong. Somewhat unrelated I can get a new Xerox 6110 N printer for less money than the amount of toner it ships with ... So when you have run out of toner it makes just as much economical (and/or service) sense to trash the whole printer and buy a new one ..
It took a long time to crack the Gamecube, the DS uses some RSA signature or something such, and the DSi got an updated copyright protection, so I don't agree that they don't try to protect the content. And even if they didn't they shouldn't have to, people should respect their rights. But to claim losses because people violate their rights?
How to stop copying.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple: Stop putting games on a media which can be copied in any home PC.
Make game CDs a bit bigger or something so they don't fit in a standard drive for recording.
PS: "Spain"? Oh, sure, Spain is a major international cause of lost profit. Not. Spain has a sensible law regarding copyright, that's all.
Re:While I can see Nintendo's point, I wish they'd (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the only real sympathy I have with making copies. Children scratch the hell out of discs. Please go back to cartridges with the next consoles. I hear 8GB NAND flash (the same size of a dual layer DVD) is now about 40$
With the next consoles, please allow the cartridge to be copied to the console itself.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
The USA is not your mom (Score:3, Interesting)
I can absolutely dig Nintendo's position on large-scale bootlegging, but isn't Nintendo a Japanese company? Let them ask their own country for help leaning on China. We already have enough people bitching about America acting like the world's policeman.
Seriously? Piracy? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that China is such a shithole, that it would be completely unethical to waste time dealing with piracy at this point. Let's stop slavery, let's stop human rights abuses, let's enforce workplace health and safety standards.
Moaning and whining about how a few people are getting games for free in a country like China is like complaining that Hitler stole your parking spot.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the problem with piracy here? I think that the prices are freaking high, legal nintendo games/consoles/accesories can get priced around twice it's price in USA, also a single Wii game usually cost more than what you get on minimal wage in a month.
Re:While I can see Nintendo's point, I wish they'd (Score:3, Interesting)