Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales

eurogamer.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales

#11

Post by bananaandapple »

jbermudes wrote: post #4
Jach wrote: post #2

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 worke…

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 agai…

This just proves that you shouldn't allow others to run unsigned code at your console in the beginning.

A basic DRM has to exist, otherwise nobody will buy any games and just copy them.

Re: Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales

#13

Post by kabdib »

Jach wrote: post #2

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 worke…

> possibly even inconveniencing game devs

Game devs are probably /happy/ to see security APIs. It means more money for them before their titles are pirated.

Secondarily, nobody in the gaming biz really cares how much game devs suffer. [You think I'm joking. I'm really not.]

Re: Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales

#14

Post by masklinn »

dagw wrote: post #10
Jach wrote: post #2

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 worke…

I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release. So as long as they can make the DRM good enough to keep the game from being cracked for a week they've scored a pretty big win.

> I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release.

pretty much any "blockbuster" sales chart shows this.

There are basically two behaviors in sales, especially in gaming: blockbusters, heavily front-loaded games where north of 50% of total sales can be made in the first week (if not the first weekend) and "games with legs" which just go on and on and on and on.

Most games lack the broad appeal to have legs (Nintendo games are a pretty common exception) and are thus very front-loaded.

Re: Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales

#15

Post by Jach »

Jach wrote: post #2

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 worke…

Replying to myself as sort of a reply at various other repliers: if you're arguing that DRM helps "slow down" piracy for the first week or however long a game is expected to sell well, you're now going against the article's major premise that piracy doesn't affect the sales all that much. Furthermore, this is a console we're talking about, the costs of pirating are relatively harder than just going to a torrent site and finding an EXE (that you may or may not trust) or something as simple as an MP3. We have distributors like Walmart showing shiny game cases to many people every day. A single game is 4.37 GB ( http://wiki.nintendo-scene.com/index.php?title=Wii_Disc_Back... ). Lastly, DRM does not imply sales at all. (For those of you who forgot: http://www.wolfire.com/humble )

The best strategy in the first place for game companies is to create something people want, as Nintendo admits. Whether you have DRM after that is irrelevant, because people will buy regardless, and people will pirate regardless, which makes Nintendo's whole DRM stance very peculiar, and now I wonder if it's just trying to make third party manager-types feel better.

Post reply on HN