Nintendo | Nintendo Loses Major Anti-piracy Lawsuit In France
December 9, 2009 – 8:52 amNintendo, as you know, wants to make third-party flash cartridges anathema to its DS game handhelds. Some gamers want the right to use these cards, they say, to develop legal “homebrew” games. In reality, a majority of these flash cartridge owners design nothing whatsoever, and instead traffic in illegal software, downloading copies of DS games from torrent sites and using latchkey ploys to bypass Nintendo’s inbuilt anti-piracy strictures.
The debate over who’s right or wrong comes down to principles and practicalities. In principle, homebrew designers would seem to have the high ground under the “open development” precept: What’s different, they’ll argue, in theory, between a pocket-sized computer, and one that sits under your desk? In practice, of course, Nintendo can point to mind-boggling piracy numbers to make the argument that a preponderance of flash-cartridge owners are simply using the things to brute-force pirate stuff.
Scan the most popular pirate sites and Nintendo’s anti-piracy site, the company’s been involved in “over 600 actions (including customs seizures, law enforcement actions, initiating civil proceedings, etc.) in 16 countries, confiscating over a half million DS game copiers.”
Were I Nintendo, I’d nip the whole ‘design’ argument in the bud by extending a friendly hand to wannabe-developers along the lines of what Microsoft’s put together with its XNA game development initiative. Create an open, flexible, affordable path to indie/homebrew on the DS or Wii, and a mechanism for redistributing the really quality stuff. Currently, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops just to get accepted, and fork over between $2,000 and $10,000 for a dev kit.
$45-$50 for a flash card, or two to 10-large in development kit costs? If I wanted to try my hand at amateur game design, I know which I’d pick.
Follow me on Twitter @game_on
Nintendo, as you know, wants to make third-party flash cartridges anathema to its DS game handhelds. Some gamers want the right to use these cards, they say, to develop legal “homebrew” games. In reality, a majority of these flash cartridge owners design nothing whatsoever, and instead traffic in illegal software, downloading copies of DS games from torrent sites and using latchkey ploys to bypass Nintendo’s inbuilt anti-piracy strictures.
The debate over who’s right or wrong comes down to principles and practicalities. In principle, homebrew designers would seem to have the high ground under the “open development” precept: What’s different, they’ll argue, in theory, between a pocket-sized computer, and one that sits under your desk? In practice, of course, Nintendo can point to mind-boggling piracy numbers to make the argument that a preponderance of flash-cartridge owners are simply using the things to brute-force pirate stuff.
Scan the most popular pirate sites and Nintendo’s anti-piracy site, the company’s been involved in “over 600 actions (including customs seizures, law enforcement actions, initiating civil proceedings, etc.) in 16 countries, confiscating over a half million DS game copiers.”
Were I Nintendo, I’d nip the whole ‘design’ argument in the bud by extending a friendly hand to wannabe-developers along the lines of what Microsoft’s put together with its XNA game development initiative. Create an open, flexible, affordable path to indie/homebrew on the DS or Wii, and a mechanism for redistributing the really quality stuff. Currently, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops just to get accepted, and fork over between $2,000 and $10,000 for a dev kit.
$45-$50 for a flash card, or two to 10-large in development kit costs? If I wanted to try my hand at amateur game design, I know which I’d pick.
Follow me on Twitter @game_on
Click here to view rest of article from original site
|
|
|
Tags: Nintendo
You must be logged in to post a comment.