3DS: Optional 3D, Piracy
In an interview with Forbes, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revealed a crumb's worth of details regarding the upcoming 3DS, which will be on display at E3 next month.
First up was the issue of piracy, on which Iwata says that it is a serious concern for Nintendo, and little wonder that is, considering its campaign against the R4 (which led many other publishers to follow suit). He doesn't reveal more details, stating simply that it would give hints to those who engineer these forms of piracy--a step he does not wish to provide them.
In an effort to allay possible fears of the 3D craze about which some may be fans, others less so, he also mentions that it is possible to turn off the 3D function in games. This of course brings into question how many games will actually require the 3D features, and if it is just an added bonus for some games. Then, from the development side, how many will actually take advantage of the feature? Curiouser and curiouser.
VorpalBunny
Posted to Miscellany on 10 May 2010
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: 3d gaming, nintendo, nintendo 3ds, piracy, satoru iwata
To be honest I'm glad. Piracy is becoming way too common, on the DS especially.
Sony managed to keep the pirates at bay for over 3 years by giving hackers a half-crippled Linux installation to play with. Pirates can seldom figure out stuff without the hackers' work preceding them, so they've been stuck this whole time.
Nintendo's best bet at preventing their security from being compromised is to do something similar. Maybe cripple access to the GPU or whatever the 3D technology is, but make it possible for a determined user to run his or her choice of harmless but unsanctioned software. Palm adopted a similar tactic with the Pre, and so there's this huge homebrew community who's utterly dependent upon "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" to get their code installed under WebOS. Some of the homebrew apps make it into the official catalog eventually, while stuff like the Terminal which I use every day are no threat to Palm and no interest to less technical users.
When you sell someone a device, it becomes his property, not yours. Make it somewhat hackable and the hackers won't need to do the things that the pirates can later use.
Of course, in Nintendo's case, two of the first things that would get ported (a NES emulator and Doom) would be things Nintendo perceives as a threat.
if they're going to be putting out quality 3D games that are fun to play i'd be more than happy to pay (as long as they keep it reasonable)