Nintendo's Lawsuit Backfiring? R4 Demand Explodes
With Nintendo's anti-piracy/homebrew lawsuit in full fuego, products like the homebrew-capable DS flash cartridge R4 have ironically received the best advertising possible. Once restricted to only those in the know, awareness of these devices have now been broadcast to every budding script kiddie with a computer.
R4 prices in Japan have doubled in the last two days alone, and they'll continue to sell like hotcakes until/unless Nintendo shuts them down for good.
Piracy sucks, and the DS has certainly been a heavily-pirated device. But like Asterick, I believe that the access to homebrew features and additional functionality is a sad thing to lose. With flash carts the DS could become an iBook reader, a music and video player, and a great way to experience homebrewed DS games.
It's worth pointing out a bit of irony: while Nintendo's been getting a lot of flack lately for ignoring their core audience, this lawsuit appears to be one instance where they're paying very close attention to that audience... and potentially alienating it further.
Nintendo's lawsuit backfires: R4 prices, demand sky-rocket [Opposable Thumbs]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 1 August 2008
· Comments (11)
Other stuff like this: backfire, ds, lawsuit, nintendo, r4
The funny thing about this is that I don't own a DS anymore, but since reading about this device 2 days ago, I have actually taken some time to research the product. This is totally a situation that's going to backfire for Nintendo.
Soooo...I posted on the last article, and I thought I'd throw it out here again, that I totally went and bought an R4 out of fear they would be no more. I shared one with my ex a long time ago, and left it behind with that relationship. I still have all my handmade phoenix wright skins I made for it, and a fat collection of SNES games.
There was nothing more enthralling then having a portable emulator. I am now the proud owner of a *cough*modded*cough* PSP and nothing beats that kind of raw power. But I definitely loved playing Sam and Max on the SCUMM touch screen emulator for the DS though. Total draw right there.
Nintendo should be focusing it's energy on the Wii Storage crisis instead...and also porting more games to Virtual Console so I don't NEED a R4.
Just my two cents again.
There are better flash cards out there now than the R4, though I would guess the R4 (and thus the M3 Simply which is the same hardware) is the most widely supported.
This whole mess has made me think about buying a few more flash cards in the event that they become hard to find. I would assume that's what's going on in Japan now to drive the price up.
Nintendo's actions are not surprising, but still offensive to me; they claim it's about piracy -- and they do have a problem with piracy, as any platform with over 50 million units in the market does -- but it really all stems from their legal battle with Tengen 20 years ago. Even though they no longer own the hardware when they sell it to their customers, they want to still be able to control it. It stings them when they lose that control. They may have lost a lot of their corporate arrogance after being whipped for 10 years by Sony, but the need for control is at the very core of their corporate culture, deeper than even the drive to use characters with enormous eyes and dressed in primary colors. So they'll keep trying.
They'll continue to fail, as well, but in the mean time I'm tired of being tarred with the same brush as pirates merely for wanting to use my DS as the tiny, portable computer for which I bought it and will continue to use it.
This reminds me of a similar situation with the PS2 Hard Drive.
The price flux isn't a shock. As curious consumers fear that this will be their last chance to buy one, retailers are going to raise the price. Supply and demand.
How come both articles on this site only mention Nintendo being part of this suit? I think the real piece of news here is that *54* other software makers (including SquareEnix, Capcom, SNK, and Tecmo) are are in the same suit. We're not hearing anything about those companies "alienating" their core audiences. If the "core" audience are the ones that are pirating stuff as Tiny is suggesting, why should Nintendo (and other companies, for that matter) fear alienating them? They're essentially stealing games! What's in it for them to placate this audience? From a developer, publisher, and hardware manufacturer perspective, any audience that solely pirates should probably be alienated/ignored, "core" or not.
I agree that it sucks to be losing an "easy in" to homebrew. The scene has a lot to offer people; indie games, utility functions, multimedia players, and even a gateways for budding designers, programmers, and artists to becoming a "real" developers. But when the overwhelming majority of these products are used to pirate rather than participate in the homebrew scene as a user or contributer, the bad is outweighing the good.
I think that a lot of people (not naming anyone here, of course) hide behind the concept of homebrew in order to justify something that will allow them to pirate games. Homebrew can be a great thing, and if half of the people on forums/blogs that claimed to be part of it *actually* were and used/contributed to the homebrew scene, it would be an even better! As it stands right now, it's a simple justification for pirates to not pay for some of the cheapest games readily available on store shelves today.
I'm sure many pirates do hoist the homebrew flag, but if you were to visit actual homebrew enthusiast sites you would find little sympathy for pirates. Thankfully, suspicions of insincerity usually don't hold up in court.
The presence of all the other software publishers just makes the case more akin to the MPAA's failed attempt to ban the sale of blank videotapes 25 years ago because they *might* be used to record a movie off of HBO. Their sense of entitlement is pitiable.
I suppose I should clarify then, as I do visit homebrew communities. I'm big fan legit homebrew for the reasons I listed in my post, and most communities that do exist do a great job making sure that everything is as legally clear as humanly possible. That's not an easy job. If everyone with an R4 was like the guys at ndshb or dev-scene, this post wouldn't exist.
That said, I think it would be foolish to say that the majority of these devices are used for homebrew. This is a case of a bunch of jackasses ruining something completely legit for the people playing by the rules.
Awww, the one card I didn't want them to stop developing, buggary.
Ah well, it still supports all my roms, and the couple of emulators I like.
Ironically, this was the device that that almost convinced me to buy a DS when i was in Japan. I met a guy who used it to run a program to translate Japanese kanji.
I don't have near enough time to devote to portable gaming to justify the cost of actually purchasing the games. But I wouldn't mind downloading a couple of titles like under the knife or metroid prime hunters just to play a few minutes and get a feel for what I'm missing out on.
Piracy is often equated to theft but I think the ethics are more sophisticated than that. Software is different to a physical product (eg: a loaf of bread) in that consuming the product does not rob the seller the opportunity to sell that product to another consumer. Therefore, piracy is only problematic in that it prevents the sale of a genuine article.
Consequently, in *specific* cases where the consumer would *never* have purchased the genuine article in the first place then piracy actually has no economic impact.
Ironically, this was the device that that almost convinced me to buy a DS when i was in Japan. I met a guy who used it to run a program to translate Japanese kanji.
I don't have near enough time to devote to portable gaming to justify the cost of actually purchasing the games. But I wouldn't mind downloading a couple of titles like under the knife or metroid prime hunters just to play a few minutes and get a feel for what I'm missing out on.
Piracy is often equated to theft but I think the ethics are more sophisticated than that. Software is different to a physical product (eg: a loaf of bread) in that consuming the product does not rob the seller the opportunity to sell that product to another consumer. Therefore, piracy is only problematic in that it prevents the sale of a genuine article.
Consequently, in *specific* cases where the consumer would *never* have purchased the genuine article in the first place then piracy actually has no economic impact.
We're talking about companies whose employees will, with a straight face, call second-hand game sales piracy or theft. I fully expect someone to refer to bad reviews released during an embargo as theft eventually as well. Oh wait, one company already has.
It's all about redefining the terms to make behaviors you dislike seem unsavory to your intended audience at an emotional level; that was the idea behind calling copyright infringement "piracy" in the first place back in 1976 when software originally obtained copyright protection.