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.
... the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them. [1]
Curious why you think this applies to the NDS but not in general.
“We definitely found that piracy was a significant factor in our Nintendo DS development efforts. When we approached publishers to propose potential game projects with them, most of them brought up their concerns about piracy at some point. Many publishers even cited the issue of piracy as a specific reason why they decided to back away from our game project, especially with it being an original intellectual property concept. The publishers’ fear was that, in a climate where piracy is commonplace, original games and new mechanics are far less likely to be successful than games based on previously successful mechanics, established licenses, sequels, and sports.”
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.
Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).
I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?
It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.
I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.
Eh, if I stab a guy every time you touch a tomato it is literally true that "touching tomatoes causes death", but the sentence does leave out a crucial part of the mechanism - that it's less the tomato, and more me and my stabby knife.
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.
> It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales
Which makes sense, things that sell well also are more likely to be pirated. Has it been shown that piracy causes sales to increase? I've looked around but I haven't found anything reliable.
There was one (not replicated) study suggesting that people who consumed more music tended to pirate more, but that's a correlation not a causation, and it doesn't follow that they would not have purchased or subscribed to even more music if the piracy option had not been available.
doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, especially when you are asking for their money. It may be a business, but it's till run by flawed humans whose irrational decisions will affect creators. So this perspective is important for a developer to know before pitching a platform.
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.
> Does every download equal a sale? No. Do some people pirate instead of buy if they can? Of course.
It's actually even more nuanced than that. Someone might have a fixed budget that they're willing to spend each month on games. It doesn't matter what it is, just that it's relatively small. Also, they may not be buying games every month, but they will never spend more than that in a single month. If with that budget they can buy a very small number of games (maybe not even one!), more often than not they will not take the chance with any games and will simply try to pirate them. Is that a sale lost to piracy or not? It's hard to say, because they might or might not have purchased a game if it was impossible to pirate; it depends on whether it fits in their budget.
I really think the reason Steam pretty much solved piracy on the PC is because of the expectation of timed discounts. If right now a game is just outside your budget, you know that 6-12 months from now you'll be able to buy it at a significant discount, so if you're patient you don't need to bother with pirating it and you can just wait. Now, some people will still pirate just to be able to play immediately, but piracy is nowhere near as rampant as it used to be on PC. If Nintendo implemented similar policies on its stores (as opposed to trying to sell 30-year-old games for $5) it could solve piracy on its platforms in a day, without resorting to this cat and mouse game.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.