Nintendo Fights Piracy (by Robbie P.)
January 31, 2011, by Robbie P. - Piracy is one of the biggest enemies of the entertainment industry and may have started with the distribution of movies recorded in the cinema and distributed through VHS copies. As time went on, piracy began to become easier for the average person. Cassette tapes and CD Burners allowed people to record their favorite albums and pass them along to their friends; some people could even make a small fortune selling these pirated albums. It would eventually poison the video game industry as well.
I still remember discovering Nesticle for the first time during one of my grade 7 classes. Verdict was that I could easily play NES games for free and with little effort. I was amazed that I finally had the full library of Nintendo games at my fingertips. At the time I thought nothing of this practice of downloading free video games. It was illegal and I had no idea, nor did I really care. Fast forward to today and piracy is probably at record highs in the video game industry and is getting easier for the average consumer.
Nintendo recently released a statement concerning the state of piracy for its new handheld the Nintendo 3DS. David Yarnton, General Manager for Nintendo UK had the following to say about anti-piracy technology in the new handheld during an interview with CVG.
"We can't divulge any technical details on that but needless to say this is probably one of our best pieces of equipment in that respect. There are a lot of things we've learnt over time to try and improve the security and protection - not only of our IP but of our third-party publishers' IP as well."
It's good to know that Nintendo is getting serious about anti-piracy technology. In fact Nintendo has actively been trying to avoid piracy for years. Let's have a look back at Nintendo's various attempts to thwart piracy, beginning with the retro era. It all began with cartridges and the difficulty that one would have to endure to get unlicensed games to work on the console. Nintendo Entertainment System would feature the use of a special lockout that would prevent unlicensed and pirated software from running on the console. Eventually, unlicensed developers began including a bypass chip that would make the lockout chip irrelevant. This would lead to games that would feature 101 games on one cartridge, and other unlicensed software to reach the system. This ultimately proves that no matter the circumstance, it will be very hard to keep hackers at bay.
Fast forward to the 64-bit era and there would still be a cartridge based system for Nintendo's hardware. It is the general consensus that these cartridges combined with the efforts of the Playstation caused Nintendo to lose a large chunk of the market. N64 cartridges were expensive to develop and lacked the storage power of CD formats. Regardless of its disadvantages, it had an upside. Loading times were obsolete and piracy was just too expensive on the N64. Compare that to the Playstation which could easily be modified. It doesn't help that CD burners were becoming popular and PS1 games could easily be ripped and copied. Making distribution of pirated games the easiest it could ever be.
Ease of distribution takes me to my next point. If any distribution channel for piracy was going to be easy, it would be the rise of the World Wide Web. Videogames could already be easily be dumped, but now they could be shared across the Internet Emulation sites sprung up across the net making it easy for anybody to download a variety of emulators and games across a number of consoles. Dumping games was now somebody else's responsibility, all the user had to do was download the ROM image and install the correct emulator. PS1 games didn't even have to be ripped or copied by the user anymore; just download the correct file and burn to CD. Piracy would still have existed without the Internet, but it definitely made it more widespread.
Coming another couple years into the future and we have the release of the Nintendo DS. This device would also fall victim to piracy. Emulators were developed to run Nintendo DS games, but there is one particular device that would have a huge impact on piracy. A little device called the R4 would become the biggest enemy for Nintendo and developers alike. It offered the ability to hold 100's of Nintendo DS games on one cart. According to Softpedia.com, about 90% of Nintendo DS games in the US are pirated. That number is astounding, and if developers are losing those potential sales, I would also want to develop a solution.
A solution is what Nintendo proposes to the industry with its Nintendo 3DS. As the above statement explains, the Nintendo 3DS will be the best hardware to battle piracy. Not much is known about how Nintendo plans to battle pirates yet, but offering updates to the firmware is definitely a route they will want to take. Nintendo has already done this numerous times with the Wii and Nintendo DSi firmware updates. Each time disabling certain piracy functions that was exploited by hackers. I'm sure Nintendo has many other ideas in mind, but as of now it is all kept secret in true Nintendo fashion.
