Comment by fundmondawyaya
4 years ago
Nintendo is probably still feeling burned by the NDS.
It was a fantastic console, and fairly open. It had two ARM CPUs (one per screen), and there was a terrific homebrew scene. Some of my first embedded C programs were for the NDS lite. It had ebook readers, paint programs, a toy Linux port, the whole 9 yards.
But, that openness also made it open to piracy. The way you loaded code onto the system was through "flashcarts". They were shaped like game cartridges, but they had a microSD slot on the top and an internal MCU which often ran a firmware that could load game ROMs from the filesystem, and even add features like cheats and save-states.
The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
It was sort of a sad situation. The ability to write your own software for a handheld game console was amazing in the 2000s, but that openness ended up suffocating the platform.
> The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
Do you have a source for this? All the data I've seen shows piracy really doesn't impact content creators in a meaningful way.
Curious why you think this applies to the NDS but not in general.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
Here's one studio's opinion
https://nintendoeverything.com/dreamrift-on-how-ds-piracy-af...
That page seems to summarize as "publishers worry about piracy, so they reject original content and force sequels/sports/crap" (... that makes zero sense to me, but to continue) plus "an original-content game maker will stop developing for the DS when publishers force sequels/ports/crap".
And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.
I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.
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I wouldn't take any publisher's opinion seriously. It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales, yet the RIAA is still trying to stop youtube-dl from existing. I have to assume these pencil pushers in the game industry are equally ignorant, until hard data proves otherwise.
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I don't have any primary sources, but in a nutshell, the problem was ROM sites.
You could download every NDS game ever made, in every region, in a few days.
Small indie ROMs might be 2-16MiB, but the big Pokemon/etc games went up to 128MiB. With 8-64GiB microSD cards, you could fit a library of games into one cartridge.
Personally, I think that most of the people who pirated NDS games would never have paid for them, so there may not have been many lost sales. But I also can't deny that the small game developers got royally screwed, and IMO the 3DS may have suffered from a dearth of creative small devs.
All the people I knew that had a DS (3 friends) had bought an R4 (a cartridge that allows pirating games). One even never bought a single NDS game because of that! This is of course "anecdotal evidence".
What is not anecdotal evidence are all the game console manufacturers spending millions to prevent piracy. It means that they estimate that piracy must at least cost them millions. And whatever game console manufacturers are loosing due to piracy, it's costing gaming studios at least twice as much (due to the 30% - 70% revenue sharing model).
I had a similar experience as a child, it's really hard to oversell how easy it was to pirate games for the nds. The r4 was easily available for $20, and each game cost $35.
I know the internets favorite argument is "piracy doesn't hurt sales", but imagine a scenario where you go to McDonald's and they give you a choice at the registers, pay, or don't pay. Either way you get your meal. That's essentially how easy it was to pirate for the nds.
Does every download equal a sale? No. Do some people pirate instead of buy if they can? Of course.
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My anecdote is the opposite, all my friends with DSes had no idea these things existed. The friends who would pirate games used PC exclusively.
I got a DS with an R4. But if there hadn't been an R4, I don't think I would have bothered getting a DS to begin with.
A quick reminder that study wasn't "suppressed", it wasn't released because it's confidence rate was so poor that none of its conclusions would have passed peer review.
It admitted a 45% error margin in its own conclusions, which pretty much make them indistinguishable from statistical noise.
You should reconsider your trust in any news outlet that ran a story on this study without noting this.
> The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games.
Nintendo sold just shy of a billion software titles for the DS, far more than the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance combined. So when you say "dramatically shrank"… compared to what?!
They've been burned since the NES. The piracy cat and mouse game is as old as consoles.
Even the NES had circuitry against running games that were pirated, unlicensed or for the wrong region. There were workarounds but it didn't get cracked for over twenty years.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8PYE8A-WEw>
I don't think it gets quite mentioned explicitly in this video, and don't I know if it's what the parent comment was referring to, but I recently learned the interesting detail that this lock system was invented for the international NES, and was not a feature of the original japanese Famicom. And apparently Nintendo did have a bit of a problem with large numbers of bad unlicensed games in that market.
This apparently was a small motivator in the development in the japan-only Famicom Disk System, a floppy-disc-like drive addon, which did use a protection system that amusingly was based around trademark law. There was a number of other interesting elements about the Disk System, but I'll suppress my desire to vg history ramble :)
The flash cart era was particularly bad since these carts were so easy to obtain (sold in retail stores) and the internet was available to download games from.
These days they have mostly won through DRM and tying in online multiplayer which can not be pirated.
That reminds me, I recently watched a video on "Bob's Game".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s_Game
The dev was operating at that homebrew level, developing his own IP, but he was unhappy with anything less than the "peace of mind" that came with being given the official tools and access to the platform afforded an established developer. Ironically, he was concerned about piracy of his game, yet it was the openness to piracy that allowed him to even develop it for that platform in the first place.
Huh, I remember the NDS having a huge library, was Nintendo really having trouble getting people to develop for it?
I bought the switch fully expecting such devices to be available within a year or two … how naive of me.
They should adjust the business model to address market demand. Be a platform, not (just) a console.
Works great for Apple and Play!
Wouldn't that "platform" need DRM to attract third-party developers too?
Yes, this is the issue GOG continuously ran into in order to maintain their DRM-free philosophy. DRM is a move made to please publishers, not comsumers.
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Being just a platform didn't work so well for Atari (see the crash of 1983). And both the Apple and Play stores have a terrible reputation for allowing (nearly) anything on their stores, which is something that Nintendo would want to avoid.
App stores are the worst of both worlds, IMO.
On a PC, you get the freedom to install what you want.
On consoles, you get a certification of quality, integration, and style for the console. Everything fits with well-defined hardware as well. And since it's just video games, it's not a huge deal if it's limited, you can always install indie games on your actual PC.
With an app store, you just get shovelware that is unduly promoted combined with a gatekeeping what software you can run on your device, which could have otherwise been open.
Apple has put a lot of effort into making app piracy very difficult on their platform, arguably more than Nintendo.