While it's great that they realize piracy isn't the reason, I don't understand why they want to bother with increasing security measures that will inevitably get broken again by an already tiny minority. It just increases the system dev time and a portion of the cost of the system as a whole among their customers, possibly even inconveniencing game devs if they have to follow some sort of API for DRM (I haven't worked with Nintendo gear, so I wouldn't know).
That's an excellent point. The homebrew scene is often the one that does all the hard work and the pirates reap the rewards of the broken security systems (Notice how the security system of the PS3 wasn't broken until well after the Other OS feature was removed and the community wanted it back).
With Nintendo however, they've had a history of absolute control over their console and I think that it's been working against them in the long-run. In fact I remember a specific instance with the Wii where the homebrew scene had discovered a security flaw that was not necessary for homebrew but could be exploited by pirates and the folks who discovered it even attempted to contact Nintendo to let them know and to also extend an "olive branch" to them to let them know that the homebrew scene isn't trying to break the consoles for piracy's sake. Of course Nintendo gave them the cold shoulder and it was exploitable in the wild for a while until it was eventually caught by Nintendo's engineers and patched in a routine update. The only problem is that Nintendo's updates have sometimes been known to cause problems and it was ironically enough the homebrew scene that had the fix.
I'm not sure that the homebrew scene is quite that heroic, sadly. The DSi came out over a year ago and there is still no practical way to run your own code in DSi mode, giving access to the camera, extra RAM, internal storage, improved Wi-fi, etc. There is a hack [1] to run code in DSi mode, but this has already been fixed in newer DSi and XL models.
IMO the reason this has not been cracked wide open is that there are not enough DSi-only commercial games to make it worthwhile for the folks that create cartridges used mainly for unauthorized copying. Being able to copy and run DS-only games is enough.
I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release. So as long as they can make the DRM good enough to keep the game from being cracked for a week they've scored a pretty big win.
> I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release.
pretty much any "blockbuster" sales chart shows this.
There are basically two behaviors in sales, especially in gaming: blockbusters, heavily front-loaded games where north of 50% of total sales can be made in the first week (if not the first weekend) and "games with legs" which just go on and on and on and on.
Most games lack the broad appeal to have legs (Nintendo games are a pretty common exception) and are thus very front-loaded.
DRM, practically speaking, isn't about prohibiting piracy as much as postponing the point at which a game is pirated until after it has made the bulk of its sales.
Replying to myself as sort of a reply at various other repliers: if you're arguing that DRM helps "slow down" piracy for the first week or however long a game is expected to sell well, you're now going against the article's major premise that piracy doesn't affect the sales all that much. Furthermore, this is a console we're talking about, the costs of pirating are relatively harder than just going to a torrent site and finding an EXE (that you may or may not trust) or something as simple as an MP3. We have distributors like Walmart showing shiny game cases to many people every day. A single game is 4.37 GB ( http://wiki.nintendo-scene.com/index.php?title=Wii_Disc_Back... ). Lastly, DRM does not imply sales at all. (For those of you who forgot: http://www.wolfire.com/humble )
The best strategy in the first place for game companies is to create something people want, as Nintendo admits. Whether you have DRM after that is irrelevant, because people will buy regardless, and people will pirate regardless, which makes Nintendo's whole DRM stance very peculiar, and now I wonder if it's just trying to make third party manager-types feel better.
Although I do not disagree with what is being said here, do not overlook the fact that Nintendo, as content distributor (WiiWare) and arbitre of several distribution platforms have a vested interest in downplaying the role of piracy. They are certainly not an impartial observer.
More than a content distributor, Nintendo is a major developer (via its numerous first-party studios) and publisher. While not an impartial observer, their businesses would peg them on the side of "any piracy is a problem" more than "piracy is not a problem".
