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The DS and Piracy
APZonerunner
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Right, first of all - let's all remember and regard the forum rules and abide by them - in other words, no discussion of piracy in any way that is encouraging it. This is a discussion about the ramifications thereof and what it could mean for the DS, not how it can be done or where you can join the scene or whatever.
But, yeah - R4 cards. Flash Memory for the DS. These things have been slowly taking off, starting out as a method of playing homebrew on the DS (which, incidentally, I hear is awesome,) but recently these things have been spreading to the wider public.
I don't know how the situation is in the US, but in the UK everyone and their mother now seemingly knows about the R4 card - but nobody's using homebrew.
For those of you that don't know, the R4 card allows you to download DS roms from the internet, put them onto a Micro SD card, plug it into the R4 and then access the card on your DS. All you have to do then is browse some menus and you can launch any games on the card. They're being pedalled online a lot as "hundreds of games on one cart" and whatnot with games pre-loaded, and other people seem to be quite happy to buy and download their own.
I'm shocked most of all because it isn't just gamer friends who have them - it's started to spread to parents. Many of the parents I know purchased a DS for their child for Christmas, but with no games and an R4 card. This to me is nuts – it's so rare to see normal parents openly involving themselves in piracy.
Of course, they don't know its piracy. According to people that work there, scores of people walk into my local game shop and simply ask if they have R4s in stock. Many people walk in and buy a DS and no games, stating quite clearly they intend to just get an R4 and be done with it.
Piracy has always been kept away from the masses in the past by the fact that modchips and various other stuff was required that voided your warranty and it put people off. But the R4 is so easy to use that even the casuals can use it, and because of that it seems to have the potential to really put a downer on Nintendo’s lucrative DS business.
So I start this thread with questions - Why aren’t they doing anything to deter this? Is there anything they can do? And is it really going to be that damaging in the long run?
I'm interested in both just what people think and the details on the legal standings of the whole thing - I'm presuming R4s are 'legal' and Nintendo can't simply stop the problem at the source, though I suppose they could go after the rom sites. Nintendo doesn't seem to be doing anything, yet the whole thing seems like a pretty big deal to me, especially with how widespread and popular the DS is now.
But, yeah - R4 cards. Flash Memory for the DS. These things have been slowly taking off, starting out as a method of playing homebrew on the DS (which, incidentally, I hear is awesome,) but recently these things have been spreading to the wider public.
I don't know how the situation is in the US, but in the UK everyone and their mother now seemingly knows about the R4 card - but nobody's using homebrew.
For those of you that don't know, the R4 card allows you to download DS roms from the internet, put them onto a Micro SD card, plug it into the R4 and then access the card on your DS. All you have to do then is browse some menus and you can launch any games on the card. They're being pedalled online a lot as "hundreds of games on one cart" and whatnot with games pre-loaded, and other people seem to be quite happy to buy and download their own.
I'm shocked most of all because it isn't just gamer friends who have them - it's started to spread to parents. Many of the parents I know purchased a DS for their child for Christmas, but with no games and an R4 card. This to me is nuts – it's so rare to see normal parents openly involving themselves in piracy.
Of course, they don't know its piracy. According to people that work there, scores of people walk into my local game shop and simply ask if they have R4s in stock. Many people walk in and buy a DS and no games, stating quite clearly they intend to just get an R4 and be done with it.
Piracy has always been kept away from the masses in the past by the fact that modchips and various other stuff was required that voided your warranty and it put people off. But the R4 is so easy to use that even the casuals can use it, and because of that it seems to have the potential to really put a downer on Nintendo’s lucrative DS business.
So I start this thread with questions - Why aren’t they doing anything to deter this? Is there anything they can do? And is it really going to be that damaging in the long run?
I'm interested in both just what people think and the details on the legal standings of the whole thing - I'm presuming R4s are 'legal' and Nintendo can't simply stop the problem at the source, though I suppose they could go after the rom sites. Nintendo doesn't seem to be doing anything, yet the whole thing seems like a pretty big deal to me, especially with how widespread and popular the DS is now.
APZonerunner on
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Selling the thing with games preloaded is, of course illegal.
And as a matter of fact, if Nintendo were to find some company marketing/selling these things on the premise of using it primarily as a means to pirate, then Nintendo would have a legal cause of action in the United States.
Everywhere else, I'm not sure.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
This is wrong on so many levels...
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Even if it helped Nintendo, it still fucks over all third party developers.
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Yeah, not only is that a disgusting attitude but the PSP is easier pirated than the DS is, as you technically wouldn't even have to buy a device like an R4, just get the right firmware and stuff.
It's one of the reasons for the abysmal software sales figures.
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
Nintendo gets a lot of money from third party sales via licensing fees. Third parties benefit from sales of their own software.
The only one who benefits in a sale of an NDS unit and no sales of software is Nintendo, and then only in the short run.
NDS hardware may be profitable, but it's better for N and third parties and the industry and gamers in general that piracy not be prevalent.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
What about the third party companies that makes the games?
But that comes at the detriment to those who produced those games in the first place.
It follows that the benefit being sought here by the R4 is detrimental to what makes R4s+games enticing in the first place. With all of the money and effort into making good games, and then those games being taken illegitimately, it discourages companies from making these games in the first place.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
You can even play GBA games on them with the right expansion - a mate has one which allows you to play/save GBA, have rumble and the memory expansion all in one. Which is a pretty damn tempting package.
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
Running homebrew and running commercial games are almost entirely different processes. That is, a device supporting homebrew doesn't automatically make it work for piracy. Back in the day, some of them (i.e., Supercard) didn't even have (proper) support for homebrew, and developers had to hack their way around that to make stuff work. Running commercial games is their intended use, and homebrew is a happy side-effect.
Also, most (if not all) of the homebrew devices capable of piracy are made in China, and stores that sell them don't generally come out and say they're for piracy.
Is it really going to break the bank to pay $30 for Contra 4? Or Castlevania? Or Phoenix Wright?
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
People are cheap, man. And a lot of them have poor money management skills.
They load faster, and you never need to change cartridges. Which makes it more like an iPod compared to a portable CD player where you have to keep changing albums. I hate having to carry around a little box full of my current games I've got on the go, just to be legit, but there is no other choice.
It's worrying how damaging this could be, but at the same time, the PS2 was the most successful console last gen, and it was massively pirated by "normal" "casual" people. And it didn't seem to do it much harm. And likewise the DS software sales ride high in the charts, and even if non-gamers pick up an DS and an R4, at least they are getting into gaming. Which is good for the industry in the long term.
The real threat is the enthusiast (I won't use the term hardcore) using the device to play small scale classics like Layton, Geometry Wars and Phoenix Wright - and in doing so damaging the likelyhood of future niche games.
But then they'll only have themselves to blame.
And pragmatically the best thing Nintendo can do is focus on on-line play and (free) downloadable content. Things the copied versions can't (as far as I know) do.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
I guess it piles up. The reasoning isn't I'll pay for R4 instead of Contra, but I'll pay for R4 instead of every single game I'd eventually buy for the system.
This is a bigger issue for the DS than for the PSP because, by comparison, the PSP hack is rather low level, involving tampering with firmwares and stuff like that. Buying a neat package with a cartridge-like device is something everybody can do.
In the next hard iteration, though, I expect Nintendo to offer a more online-focused device that can do more remote surveilance of what's modded in it, like modern home consoles do nowadays.
They can.
I will offer this: The best thing Nintendo could do is release a bunch of games on one cart as well as offer the many amazing features that these mods offer such as mp3 playback, movie/tv playback, and the previously mentioned homebrew support.
This is a parallel to MP3 vs CD, in the way that Nintendo needs to step up and offer these things before they take off, but unfortunately they already have.
Actually, any game put on an R4 is fully capable of online play. I don't really know about downloadable content, since that hasn't really been done yet (The only thing I know of is Professor Layton with its weekly puzzles.)
Well in the uk they are $40 to $75 and if a kids gotta save up for them, then you can imagine him saving uo for an R4.
For many young (and old) people the amount of money available for leisure activities is far smaller than the amount of time they have to fill. And whilst I don't condone it, then maximising that money to raise their quality of living can't really be considered evil.
For example the amount I've seen someone pirate is always is directly proportion to the amount they consume. The trouble comes when one avenue of creativity (musics, ds games etc) get screwed for the forms that are harder to pirate.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
And yes, it's true, I know countless people that aren't in to gaming but have a DS and an R4 card. Hell, if I get a DS I'd likely get one not just for the homebrew but so that I could copy my games on to one card. Carrying around one card is much easier.
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Unfortunately, this is just as big a problem with the PSP as it is with the DS, even if not as commonplace; I've seen PSP owners that have full games on their Memory Sticks same like these DS pirates are using R4s, probably.
And if this leads to a snowball effect that begins to harm the consoles like it did the Dreamcast, I'm going to be quite annoyed.
I'm fairly sure this is possible. I know my friend downloaded the puzzles for Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I'm not certain about wi-fi play though.
In my hands, the R4 is used for media, music and homebrew ONLY. Obviously it's true that a large number of R4 users pirate games left, right and centre, yet i don't think that the device itself should be banned, as there are a good number of people creating content for it from scratch.
What i'd love to see is a more clearly delimited separation of these two issues; all too often, when you see R4s for sale, it's also associated with sites offering roms etc., which is plainly no good. It should be marketed on the strength of its capabilities, i.e. music playback, DSorganise etc., accompanied by more promotion of the fantastically talented coders who make up the homebrew community (who i'd appreciate even more than i already do if they'd release a PDF reader...)
Anyway, just my 2 cents- i know that a lot of people couldn't care less about homebrew, but for me it's something pretty special- a bunch of guys and girls making amazing stuff in their spare time, releasing it for free so that others can share in the fun.
Which would suck for me: between Moonshell, DSOrganize, and ScummVM, I've been using homebrew on the DS more than I've been playing commercial games lately.
It is really surprising, though; I've never seen anything like this take off with Joe Everyuser before. Usually having to import crazy shit from Hong Kong turns people away.
I own that particular device. It's got twice as much RAM as the official Opera browser pack, letting me play the homebrew port of Quake 2 (needs 16MB of extra ram and the Opera pack only has 8), so don't tell me that the company that makes it only cares about piracy, although no doubt it's their biggest concern.
It's still a big problem with the DS, but remember that the more popular a system is, the more prevalent the piracy. They go hand in hand.
Widespread piracy leads to high hardware sales numbers and relatively low software sales numbers (obviously). The Dreamcast had, basically, the reverse: nobody was buying the system, but software sales were high considering the low-ish install base. Piracy didn't kill the Dreamcast; Sega's incompetence killed the Dreamcast.
I'm not sure, but I can tell you this --
The problem with GBA piracy was not that there was a single 1 cart piracy product;
the problem with GBA was that China was churning out fake GBA cartridges with cheap internal memory and selling them in mass to Asia and overseas. Unless you knew what to look for, you couldn't tell the difference from a bootleg GBA game and a legit GBA game.
Yes, there were devices that let you dump a hundred GBA games onto 1 card and steal 'em all, but I don't think it was as easy or as common as the DS ones are. But really, the prevalence of bootleg GBA games coming from China was the GBA's biggest problem.
So bad, in fact, that it seeped into the Used sections at EBStops over here.
Emulation for GBA games was pretty common, but it didn't directly interfere with the GBA's (and DS's and PSP's) greatest asset - portability. Yes, people could pirate Metroid Fusion via emulation and play it on their home PC (or modded console), but they could not play it on the go. (not until people started pirating via emulation on the GamePark and I guess now the PSP)
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Which is total fucking bullshit on so many levels. I understand that a lot of people like homebrew, but that's not why the device exists. The company that makes the r4 frequently releases firmware updates to circumvent game security (I think Phantom Hourglass was one). It's just so fucking easy. My neighbor has a DS with a ram expansion and 2 gig SD card. With that, he can play every DS game, GBA game, SNES, ScummVM, Genesis, NES, and probably more.
Kotaku probably won a handful of people over just publishing the story. Your average DS user (read: children) don't know what an r4 is nor do they have any intention of seeking one out. It still takes a bit of nerdery to know what they are, get one, update firmware, find roms, etc. It's not that hard, mind you, but it's enough of a hurdle to not bring the DS market to it's knees.
People that say the R4 isn't primarily a piracy tool are either extremely naive or intentionally ignoring the obvious. I'd like to see what a gaming market would look like if piracy was simply impossible to pull off. That's the kind of magical world I'd like to live in.. someday.
Actually, most of these devices have official compatibility lists with commercial ROMs and release updates to support them, which sort of breaks the homebrew angle. It is legal in many places to copy software you own, so hardware to use copies isn't automatically illegal, though.
Hopefully, it won't come to that since I know there are plenty of people who buy the games legally.
Bingo. People will spout more bullshit than a used car salesman so that they can keep their piracy.
Anyways, the average person clearly doesn't care that they're doing something extremely illegal. So as more and more people learn of such things the negative effects only going to get bigger. Until governments get off their asses and find a way to go after downloaders, the problem is only going to get worse.
Actually, they are very illegal since they bypass the security features. Most places it is legal to do whatever you want with the copy you own, but purchasing something that violates the DMCA is in no way legal.
I still think that it is far worse on the PC namely because all the releases people get on the internets just require burning them on a CD/DVD. It doesn't involve buying anything you don't already own, most likely. Depending on the version of PSP you have, you still need to buy a game or something to utilize the exploits, and the DS you still need the R4. If there was a way to limit features, i.e. on Xbox 360 Microsoft can check if your system has been modded and ban you from Live, I think there would be a dip in piracy. Until then, if its easy, if its cheaper than buying a game or two, it'll keep growing.
Furthermore, I believe it is easier to pirate games on the DS than the PSP. While it is usually more expensive (since you have to buy an R4 or whatever), the only thing you need to do is copy the roms over to your flash card.
The PSP, on the other hand, has many different versions of firmware. To be able to figure out how to pirate PSP games you have to spend at least an hour or more reading poorly written forum posts, etc. The fear of bricking your PSP also prevents some people from even attempting it.
The only thing companies can do to prevent/curb piracy is to make it a lot more convenient to buy the retail game. Just look at console vs. handheld pirate rates for proof of this. It also wouldn't hurt if the pirating the games didn't offer more features than buying them (ie: all the cool stuff you can do with custom firmware on a PSP).
Damn, though, this is depressing.
I only know one guy who pirates, but he's exactly the tech-savvy sort I wouldn't have thought applied to most DS users.
It's at best a legal gray area. Bypassing a firewall is definitelly illegal, and so is cracking, but Nintendo has a history of losing lawsuits about people running unlicensed software on their hardware.
Look, this is all part of a huge debate about copyright, its purpose and its enforcements. Even forums have a hard time telling apart "valid" discussions from "piracy encouragement". This is definitely a transitional period. We're now witnessing growing pains the way the invention of printing caused many to medieval guilds. Copyright will be redefined at the end of this process, and you can bet it won't be through nice, clean concepts like "bypassing security is not legal".
I still think the only way companies are going to beat this kind of thing is by keeping an online watch over their hardware like they're already doing in home consoles.
When the masses can buy a ROM loading device that works straight out the box, that's when the big companies start to get rightly scared.
To be fair, a lot of the posters there, like a lot of the people here, are part of the hardcore market and probably are interested in the homebrew scene. Heck, I don't even own a DS and even I'm interested in it.