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Nintendo And Sony Move To Curb Piracy
Nintendo and Sony have made fresh moves to curb piracy on their gaming platforms.
Nintendo has expanded its anti-piracy team with the appointment of Neil Boyd as European anti-piracy counsel. Boyd joins the platform holder from Warner Brothers, where directed the firm’s anti-piracy strategy. He will be assisted by Jonathan Tully and Matthias Damm, Nintendo’s European anti-piracy legal advisors.
“Creating a pan-European anti-piracy team shows how seriously Nintendo takes the threat of videogames piracy and our willingness to take action against criminals who are making money out of the infringement of games developers’ copyright,” said Jodi Daugherty, Nintendo’s senior director for anti-piracy.
Sony has also implemented new PSP anti-piracy measures. According to SCEA’s director of hardware marketing, John Koller, the PSP Go’s lack of an external battery will combat PSP firmware modding previously enabled by the Pandora battery.
"You won't be able to rip your games and play them on the system, the firmware precludes that," he told PS Insider. "There's no external [PSP Go] battery, so there's a number of protections put into place on the system."
While the internal battery may help to stem PSP software piracy, it will also mean that systems in need of new batteries will have to be shipped back to Sony.
The DS and PSP have both suffered from high levels of software piracy. Last year John Hillier, manager of ELSPA’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit, claimed that up to 90 per cent of DS users were playing pirated games because of the R4 chip, which bypasses the DS's security system allowing users to play games illegally downloaded from the internet. Nintendo responded by saying that Hillier’s claims were overblown, noting that while such copying devices “cause Nintendo concern, they have not reached the mass market as indicated.”
Sony has gone as far as to call PSP piracy levels “sickening,” with SCEA’s senior VP of marketing, Peter Dille, suggesting that piracy has taken out “a big chunk” of the handheld’s software sales. Dille added that PSP piracy had made it more difficult to convince third party developers to support the platform. One such developer was Ubisoft, which only recently announced plans to fully back the PSP again following the emergence of "new ways to control piracy" on the platform.
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When it comes to music, movie and videogame piracy, people from the business tend to assume as a matter of fact that they're losing money because of pirate copies. This means that everyone would actually buy what they download. What if anyone ever bought almost anything, not even the hardware, where not for the piracy?
As it has been already said before, I think piracy has helped more than harmed the current status quo in videogaming's balance of powers.
the good thing about TT cards is that kids play a lot different games and talk about them at the school yard.
I'm just hoping for the industry that they talk about the great games they've played to kids without a TT card ;-)
I've never seen a kid using a DS that didn't have a TT card in it.
It's said for the industry but I totally agree with that! It's almost like you're not one of the cool guys at school when you do not use a TT card - LOL
I've never seen a kid that did.
Although, fair dinkum, I do have a hacked PSP. BUT, I use it almost exclusively to play emulated Genesis, SNES, and Turbo Grafix games.
And to my argument about quality games, I have dozens of pirated PSP games. I've played maybe half of them, and none for more than an hour or so. I don't want the games even when they're free. That's a big problem.
"You won't be able to rip your games and play them on the system, the firmware precludes that."
Just like everything else they've done has precluded it. In fact, piracy doesn't even exist on the PSP anymore! It's all a myth because of Sony's tech-ninjas.
"The DS and PSP have both suffered from high levels of software piracy."
And yet the DS is the best-selling game system in history (including speed as well as installed base).
"SCEA’s senior VP of marketing, Peter Dille, suggesting that piracy has taken out “a big chunk” of the handheld’s software sales."
The near total lack of interesting titles has nothing to do with it. I bet piracy also ruined the UMD movie revolution. And moreover, the attach rate for the PSP isn't even terrible! It's over 4-to-1. The Wii only has an attach rate of 5.5-to-1. Is the piracy on the Wii sickening?
"One such developer was Ubisoft, which only recently announced plans to back the PSP again following the emergence of "new ways to control piracy" on the platform."
Total sack of shit. They have been fully supporting the PSP from the very beginning. They'll release four games in 2009, released four in 2008, eight in 2007, and eight in 2006. Poor sales? Maybe it had to do with the quality of the games. Something tells me that sudoku isn't going to be a million seller. Or perhaps that all of the AAA titles they released for the PSP (Hello Tom Clancy) were crap ports from full platforms.
None of these bone heads have ever made a cogent argument that piracy harms game sales. The only bits of evidence that can be dug up imply that piracy either helps game sales or is simply representative of interest in the title. I remember the most rampant piracy back in the days of the Commodore 64. I didn't buy ANYTHING back then. Yet everyone seemed to make it just fine to where we are now.