

Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales  - Xero
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-10-08-nintendo-piracy-not-behind-poor-sales

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Jach
While it's great that they realize piracy isn't the reason, I don't understand
why they want to bother with increasing security measures that will
_inevitably_ get broken again by an already tiny minority. It just increases
the system dev time and a portion of the cost of the system as a whole among
their customers, possibly even inconveniencing game devs if they have to
follow some sort of API for DRM (I haven't worked with Nintendo gear, so I
wouldn't know).

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jbermudes
That's an excellent point. The homebrew scene is often the one that does all
the hard work and the pirates reap the rewards of the broken security systems
(Notice how the security system of the PS3 wasn't broken until well after the
Other OS feature was removed and the community wanted it back).

With Nintendo however, they've had a history of absolute control over their
console and I think that it's been working against them in the long-run. In
fact I remember a specific instance with the Wii where the homebrew scene had
discovered a security flaw that was not necessary for homebrew but could be
exploited by pirates and the folks who discovered it even attempted to contact
Nintendo to let them know and to also extend an "olive branch" to them to let
them know that the homebrew scene isn't trying to break the consoles for
piracy's sake. Of course Nintendo gave them the cold shoulder and it was
exploitable in the wild for a while until it was eventually caught by
Nintendo's engineers and patched in a routine update. The only problem is that
Nintendo's updates have sometimes been known to cause problems and it was
ironically enough the homebrew scene that had the fix.

~~~
rquirk
I'm not sure that the homebrew scene is quite that heroic, sadly. The DSi came
out over a year ago and there is still no practical way to run your own code
in DSi mode, giving access to the camera, extra RAM, internal storage,
improved Wi-fi, etc. There is a hack [1] to run code in DSi mode, but this has
already been fixed in newer DSi and XL models.

IMO the reason this has not been cracked wide open is that there are not
enough DSi-only commercial games to make it worthwhile for the folks that
create cartridges used mainly for unauthorized copying. Being able to copy and
run DS-only games is enough.

[1] <http://davejmurphy.com/dsi-mode-homebrew-anyone/>

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Balsamic
Although I do not disagree with what is being said here, do not overlook the
fact that Nintendo, as content distributor (WiiWare) and arbitre of several
distribution platforms have a vested interest in downplaying the role of
piracy. They are certainly not an impartial observer.

~~~
masklinn
More than a content distributor, Nintendo is a major developer (via its
numerous first-party studios) and publisher. While not an impartial observer,
their businesses would peg them on the side of "any piracy is a problem" more
than "piracy is not a problem".

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bluedanieru
He then added "...but playing games from outside your region will remain a
pain in the ass."

