Nintendo Still Loves DRM; The Internet Not So Much
from the like-an-anti-theft-device-combined-with-a-helicopter-parent dept
Of all the walled gardens out there, Nintendo's is one of the most bizarre. On the strength of its software legacy and its skill in capturing the handheld market, Nintendo has been able to erect a bizarre closed system that relies heavily on DRM and an almost self-contained "internet." It vigorously defends itself against infringement and views its target audience as innocents incapable of dealing with an open connection to the rest of the swearing, violent, bullying world.Long after the other consoles had moved on to CDs and DVDs, Nintendo held onto its proprietary formats in order to protect itself from piracy. Now that the others consoles on the market have shifted emphasis towards online services, Nintendo has reluctantly joined the pack. Of course, this being Nintendo, the online experience is hampered by its continued belief that its average customer is about eight years old. And the gaming experience itself is crippled by pervasive DRM.
At Ars Technica, Kyle Orland points out that Nintendo's online service is almost great, if it wasn't for all the roadblocks set up in a futile attempt to stop infringement. While Nintendo has made some vague promises about moving to a cloud-based save feature and allows each WiiU to have up to 12 separate accounts, the underlying DRM keeps the experience from ever being much more than a frustrating mess for paying customers.
As Nintendo's Wii U FAQ makes clear, "a Nintendo Network Account can only be used on the console where it was created." Thus, any games tied to that unique online ID will only work on the first system they're purchased and downloaded to. This is in essence the same setup that Nintendo used to protect downloaded Virtual Console and WiiWare games on the first Wii, a setup that not only utterly failed to stop piracy on the system but also caused headaches for many early Wii owners with faulty systems.Orland's first hand experience wasn't pleasant. He had over $400 of downloaded games he was hoping to move to his WiiU. During the multistep process -- which requires both systems be on and online -- his Wii crashed. Big bold letters everywhere during the process warned against turning off either system during transfer. The data being moved isn't the important part. What's absolutely essential during this move is that the licenses transfer intact. Orland couldn't simply re-download his games since the licenses were tied to his original Wii. Nintendo's tech support informed him that there was no other way to transfer license and account data to the WiiU short of sending the Wii off for repairs at his expense and hoping it returned in working order with all data (especially those licenses) intact. The final cost? $85 for the repair and a couple of weeks with $400 worth of games in limbo.
Tying downloaded games to a single system means there's no way for a user to access those games at a friend's house short of lugging the entire system along (yes, the Wii is a lot smaller and lighter than other contemporary systems, but still...). It also means a game downloaded to the Wii U in the living room won't be playable on a second system in the kids' room, even if the same password-protected Nintendo Network ID was used on both systems.
It also means that if your system breaks down, you can't just go buy a new one (or borrow one from a friend) and immediately recover your content using your account. Instead, you have to go through Nintendo's official repair process, waiting up to two weeks for the system to be returned just to maintain the system-locked license data—a caveat I learned about first hand recently. And in the extreme case your Wii U is stolen, it seems there's no way to recover your purchased games (Nintendo has refused numerous requests for comment on its DRM scheme). Sure, you can back up purchases to a USB hard drive, but thanks to this licensing scheme, those backups are no more portable than the actual bits stored on the Wii U's internal storage.
Even when everything goes exactly right, the license transfer process is still a pain. Chris Kohler at Game|Life runs it down thusly:
If you have tons of content — game save data, Mii characters, and downloaded software — on your old Wii, you’ll want to transfer them over to Wii U. The process is about as convoluted as can possibly be. You’ll actually need to alternate between your Wii and your Wii U, which means either hooking them both up to the TV or swapping cables. First you have to get an SD card. Then you have to put it in your Wii U to “prepare” it for transfer. (You’ll need an internet connection to do this so Nintendo can transfer the digital rights to the software.)Fun stuff, that. Plus, it requires an internet connection just to move your own files from one purchased system to another. Kohler points out that it takes about a half hour to pull them off the Wii and another half hour to load them onto the WiiU. But it's not just the time it takes. It's the ridiculous hoops the user is forced to jump through just to satisfy Nintendo's demands for a clean, closed, DRM-laden system.
[B]esides being time-consuming, there’s also a big missing feature. If you had games already stored on an SD card and not on the Wii’s system memory, you have to move them back to the Wii or else you can’t transfer them. But if you have games stored on the SD card in the first place, that’s probably because you ran out of memory on your Wii (not hard, since it only has 512 megabytes in there). So you are screwed. The transfer process will move over all of the digital licenses, but to get those games onto your Wii U, you’ll have to individually download every single one again from the digital store, which will take forever.This is what you're in for when you deal with a company clearly more interested in pirates than customers. As pointed out earlier by Orland, all the ridiculous DRM crammed into every spare corner of the Wii did very little to stop piracy. Apparently, Nintendo's decided that the original Wii just didn't have enough DRM and has taken it to the extreme with its latest console. The worst aspect of its convoluted "license transfer" system is that the more you've purchased, the longer it takes. Nintendo's concern that someone, somewhere might make off with a free game has turned it into a company that punishes its biggest customers the hardest.
Then there's Nintendo's half-hearted "embrace" of the connected experience, which it approaches with the enthusiasm of someone guilted into hugging a highly contagious acquaintance. True, some of this standoffishness isn't solely Nintendo's fault. It has worked to capture a younger audience than the other consoles and as such, it is stuck following the privacy restrictions handed down by various governments in order to protect children from a variety of online menaces and nuisances. Staying in compliance with these regulations, along with its half-hearted (and deeply suspicious) approach to all things "internet", means the actual "connected" experience approaches surreality. Back to Chris Kohler:
I signed up for Nintendo Network, Nintendo’s first (!) ever attempt to create an account-based online service for its players. I clicked through the Terms of Service, skimming them. As you do. OK, I’m not going to post anything offensive, no problem. I enter my details into my profile and throw Game|Life’s URL and my Twitter handle in there so people know it’s me. Big mistake. Minutes after I posted my profile, I got a message saying that I had posted prohibited content and that Nintendo had blocked my profile pending a change. The hell? Turns out that you are strictly prohibited from posting anything on Miiverse that might allow someone to personally identify you. It didn’t specifically call out Twitter URLs, but I guess those must also be banned. Nintendo clearly doesn’t want any stories in the press about harassment (or worse) stemming from people meeting on Miiverse. So it is doing everything it can to make sure its members do not know who each other actually is.In essence, the Miiverse is a great place to meet complete strangers but a terrible place to hang out with friends. How on earth an entire Miiverse full of strangers is supposed to prevent harassment or any other internet-related abuse is beyond me. It would seem that kids would be safer hanging out with people they know, rather than a bunch of avatars who could be anybody.
It gets even stranger. Over in Europe, where the privacy protections for minors are even more severe (and confusing), full-grown adults are finding themselves treated like kids playing hooky.
European Wii U owners are reporting being unable to buy or watch trailers for mature-rated games in Nintendo's Wii U eShop. Eurogamer reports that they are unable to access the pages for ZombiU or Assassin's Creed 3 during daytime hours, even with no parental controls set. Instead, they're greeted with the message "You cannot view this content. The times during which this content can be viewed have been restricted."Customer service offered this response:
Dear customer, we would like to let you know that Nintendo has always aimed to offer gameplay experiences suited to all age groups, observing carefully all the relevant regulations regarding content access that are present in the various European countries. We have thus decided to restrict the access to content which is unsuitable to minors (PEGI) to the 11 P.M. - 3 A.M. time window.Well, Nintendo's outlook is definitely brimming with optimism. Either it feels a very small minority of WiiU owners are above the age of 18, or it thinks 4 hours a day is plenty for selling mature content. Nintendo's not going anywhere anytime soon, but the focus of its business seems to have shifted to attempting to prevent bad things with much less emphasis being placed on providing good things. Fear may be a powerful motivator, but it rarely produces good work.
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Also part of why I moved to open source products only.
Lost sales in both hardware and software in an attempt to prevent lost sales of software = epic fail
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funny, that...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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I will not be getting a WiiU because of the bullshit that Nintendo's doing with it. IF I ever get a WiiU it will be several years from now from a used game shop (or flee market or whatever) for a few bucks to be added to the collection but not played.
I guess we know why the WiiU didn't completely sell out like the Wii did on it's first two release dates.
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Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
You can't argue with success. ... But you'll try to say it can't possibly be working! More cognitive dissonance.
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Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
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Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
Then why do you argue with the success of anyone who makes a go of alternate business models?
Hypocrisy thy name is..........
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Re: Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
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Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
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Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
Citation needed, oh blue one. Let's see your example of a DRM that's actually reduced piracy, while not putting intelligent customers off touching the product with a barge pole or destroying the value for paying customers.
"How many times has Mike "Streisand Effect" Masnick said that good ideas often don't succeed until given a few tweaks?"
DRM is not a good idea, unless you're a game company that needs a scapegoat to excuse falling sales, of course. otherwise, it damages sales and affect legally paying customers without affecting pirates. That's not good.
"You can't argue with success."
Cite said success then we'll agree - but you have to be willing to discuss your evidence first. Try me.
For what it's worth, I own a Wii, which I bought during the console's initial release, but there's no way in hell I'm touching a WiiU until things like this are rectified. That is, at least one sale has been lost as a direct result of this crap, I'm sure there's others.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
If you measure success by how many people have been convinced to buy, then it's a success. Yes, it wasn't the DRM that convinced people to buy, it was the rest of the system. But Steam is the closest thing to successful DRM that exists.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
But that was my point (and one that ootb for which predictably avoiding direct questions) - no consumer has ever bought a product because of DRM. However, I can testify to the fact that many publishers have lost sales as a direct result of DRM. Since its entire stated function is to prevent piracy and thus remove lost sales as a result, all DRM is a failure if more people avoid it than would have without the DRM.
Alas, this is an impossible metric to accurately measure, so some publishers are doomed to the cycle of idiocy ("we're losing sales? more DRM!", never realising that the DRM itself was to blame for lost sales).
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
Make it a big enough pita that a non tech savvy person can no longer do it with ease, their thinking is that person will be more likely to buy it if they want it bad enough.
Not everyone is going to take the time, or have the means or inclination to download, so if making a copy isn't easy they will either buy or pass. The people who refuse to buy due to DRM are a lost cause in their eyes and were never factored into their sales forecast anyway.
Considering the company with some of the worst DRM in the industry's history sold 7 million copies of Assassins Creed 3, I doubt they are that concerned with the people who refuse to buy DRMed media.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
In other words, it's a very complicated situation but it goes further than "people who buy despite DRM" vs. "people who refuse to buy due to DRM". Costs and problems are caused directly due to DRM that they might not be aware of, and whatever the figures that are measurable DRM definitely causes problems other than the one it's designed to address.
"Considering the company with some of the worst DRM in the industry's history sold 7 million copies of Assassins Creed 3, I doubt they are that concerned with the people who refuse to buy DRMed media."
I think you're conflating several issues here. First of all, most 360 and PS3 players don't come across DRM problems, especially when buying in disc format. I suspect that the number of console players far outweighed the PC games - how were the PC sales compared to previous titles? IIRC, the DRM for AC3 wsn't anywhere near as odious as that on AC2, which caused so many problems that Ubisoft had to backtrack somewhat. If removing some of the DRM problems led to people actually buying more, then so be it. But remember it's mainly the PC market that most of these people whine about piracy on, and that's the market that's been dropping as a whole. IMHO, DRM has as much to do with that as anything else.
I disagree heavily with Ubisoft's DRM stance, but that doesn't mean I refuse to buy their games if they're any good (and I do like the Assassin's Creed games). The DRM has lost them sales of certain titles from me, and I have zero interest in buying either digital or PC-based content from them as a result of their DRM. But if I saw a cheap console copy of AC3 somewhere, or receive it for Christmas, I wouldn't be unhappy. There's just no way I'm installing it on my computer or paying full price for it. Remember, it's the full price PC market that they're whining about being the one dropping...
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However, I doubt that it directly achieves what DRM's supposed primary function is (stopping piracy). The benefits passed on to consumers due to Valve's relative lack of paranoia over copying almost certainly reduces piracy, but I don't personally believe that the reduction is directly down to the DRM.
Ultimately, if game publishers stopped being so scared about their users ripping them off that they make their software unusable for many, the problem of piracy would be greatly reduced. Steam is a great step forward, but it doesn't stop piracy.
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Re: Change to "Nintendo's is one of the most" SUCCESSFUL!
Which means never. What else is new?
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I installed the OS, drivers, and Steam. I logged into Steam, typed in the code from the e-mail that's intended to prevent account hijacking ("We've never seen you log in from this machine before"), and told it to install my games.
Then I watched some TV. After it was finished I copied my configuration files and started playing.
Assuming everything up to installing Steam was a sunk cost, the hardest part was waiting for the downloads. That and digging around for the configuration files, I guess.
I have my issues with Steam, but this isn't one of them. Once I've bought them I can play my games anywhere. A co-worker and I once traded some in-game TF2 items on our lunch break; he logged into my laptop, did the e-mail thing, I logged into my desktop. Biggest problem he had was remembering his user ID and password.
Totally portable and nearly hassle-free.
If I'd ever thought about buying a Wii, this article just killed the last remnants of any such desire.
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Yeah, it would be. And when you get your check from Nintendo for posting this comment, we can get together and LOL the night away.
RECOMMENDED READING (by the same author):
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110522/15562714383/open-letter-to-sony-ceo-howard-str inger.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110518/03135114315/sony-ceo-howard-stringer-month- long-hackathon-merely-hiccup.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121006/15375020630/xbox-drm -punishes-more-paying-customers-actually-restricts-purchasing-options.shtml
http://www.techdirt.c om/articles/20121105/21564420943/microsoft-patents-tv-that-watches-back-counts-heads-charges-admissi on.shtml
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Ever notice that almost all NES games are in the same grey cartrages? There are a few special ones like Zelda that were gold. This is because they had DRM preventing someone from making unapproved games. Nintendo had strict control over the game market and only allowed a certain number out in a year. Of course even back then someone cracked it and there were several games made without Nintendo giving the OK.
So really there is nothing new here. It is just the frantic flailing of a company realizing it has lost one of its most loved possessions, total control over their system. Maybe they will realize that they never really had that and embrace a new world. I sadly doubt it though, more likely they will just die a slow death.
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There never will be a DRM here in my home.And I mean ever.
I will ripoff something rather than get something that has DRM.
Anyways I am quite happy with the physical things I own.
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Hang on Hang on
Wii - was a chip from the GameCube, then the on screen hack allowed you to play directly from an USB HDD.
DS just takes a card that has a micro SD in it to load all the games you could ever want.
I've not tired there latest things, but I can bet it will be just as easy to get a pirated version of everything. Most likely in a lot more convenient way.
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Re: Hang on Hang on
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No hdmi, weird, propretary connections which insured maximum heading when integrating it into the rest of the system. Wiimotes, Motion plus, nunchucks...asssorted asshattery and nonsense....
Realized that even rooting it to play some homebrew games was difficult and could brick it.
Couldn't even use it to stream music from the rest of my network.
Decided there and then that i'd never bother with another nintendo product. we're getting an ouya in the spring, and they'll be playing mario brothers on pc emulators.
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I won't transfer from our Wii
Nintendo cared so much about not allowing game saves and downloaded games to move to the Wii U that they made it worthless to move games to the Wii U.
I was gobsmacked that the process was one way only and one time only.
Wii compatibility on the Wii U is worthless to me, they just as well could have left the feature out.
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Sigh... and you know what this reminds me of? South Korea and Australia's draconian rules combined that just refuses to treat adult gamers like adults.
Anyway EU gamers can fight back against this nonsense?
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Stop doing it to yourself, and it will stop happening to you.
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Just wait for homebrew.
I'll probably do the same with the WiiU. Hopefully it won't be as long, considering that Smash Stack still works and that the Homebrew Channel has already been ported to the WiiU's sandboxed Wii mode.
Should I have to do this? No. It *is* a headache. But it's a headache I can live with to play games that I like to play, games which you cannot find on other consoles or the PC. Aside from PC gaming, the only console I've touched in years has been the Wii. My wife still plays GameCube and N64 games - she was just playing MK Double Dash the other night.
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Why give them money?
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Wii U FAQ
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I disagree a little, and personally, i don't blame Nintendo.
Also, nowadays people take for granted that a gaming console should have a lot of features that are present in their rivals, but sometimes you don't have the option of implementing it because you don't have the patents for such implementations, and licensing them would increase the price of the plataform beyond your target price.
So yes, Nintendo may be pissing a lot of people with their decisions, but they seem to have resigned themselves to taking the hits, and moving ahead. Hope it works for them. Jim Sterling at the Escapist Magazine had a great episode about the Nintendo gamble sometime ago, and how the console gaming plataforms had to begin preparing to compete against the smarTvs. Also, it was throught his show that i ended coming to Techdirt.
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According to Wikipedia, the Virtual Console offers a grand total of 403 games for ten older systems in North America. Games on the VC only allow saving if the original game allowed it and you're limited to using Wii compatible controllers. Not to mention that the emulation isn't always accurate. Last Ninja III for the C64 was withdrawn because bugs in the emulation made it impossible to complete.
By contrast you can download emulators for dozens of systems, download thousands of games, save at any time you want and in most cases, enjoy well tested and bug free emulation. You can use most any controller you want and in many cases, there are even ways to hook up the original controllers to a USB port.
Once again, the unauthorized version is superior to the authorized one, but yet people continue to pay...
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- In the mid-to-late 90s, I discovered NES emulators. They ran very well on my even-then modest computer. I also tried a SNES emulator. It ran, but it was still the current-gen system at the time, and my computer wasn't powerful enough to run it well.
- In college, I got a computer and a controller. I was able to pirate NES and SNES with ease. I prided myself on being able to store every NES game ever released in the US with ease on a single CD. SNES, too. I experimented with GB emulators. They worked, but I wasn't too interested. I attemped N64 emulators, but they were still slow.
- During the Nintendo DS era, I got a SuperCard. I was pirating current-gen DS games, as well as GBA games. I played Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission for the first time and liked them.
- I currently have a modded Wii. It has a SNES emulator, an NES emulator. I have USB Loader GX. The N64 emulator works well too. I got to play Rush 2049 and bring back some memories with a college buddy one day. Oddly enough, I've never bothered with pirating GCN games. Not for any particular reason, though.
- I even pirated VirtualBoy games one day. I got an emulator that would do side-by-side stereoscopy. So, there I was... playing that Mario & Luigo VirtualBoy game cross-eyed on my laptop.
So, there you go. Nintendo systems are more hackable or piratable than any other system, yet they're the ones who try the hardest to prevent it.
I'll add that I love Nintendo and have given them more money than any other competitor over the years and I will probably continue to do so.
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You forgot about region locks...
They're quite effectively punishing people for knowing multiple languages by forcing the purchase of foreign systems.
With the new focus on downloadable games, this makes even less sense. Bypassing region locks is the main reason I'm eagerly awaiting Nintendo's latest systems (3DS and Wii U) getting hacked wide open!
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Bugs vs. Features
If you buy a product and later discover it has a hidden problem, you're usually pissed off and want a replacement or your money back.
Here we have the problems built in intentionally, publicly advertised, perfectly documented with examples when they already happened and how often, and people are still gonna break their legs on the way to shops to buy this crappy pieces of shit from the same marketing weasels....
As Dogbert would surely say, "I'm gonna make a company selling crappy shit to gullible morons, and then I'll convince them it's their own fault the shit doesn't do what they expected it to do!" (and he'd make millions of dollars on it a few comic strips later).
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