Piracy and the Wii, Part 1
Those of you who might have been planning to get the Pal version of Mario Cart and get it running on your Wii using Wii Freeloader, think again. Apparently, Nintendo has struck again with more copyright protection goodness. Which bring up an important question, should Nintendo be fighting with people who have modified Wiis at every turn?
On one hand, Nintendo is looking at things like this: 1) Hacks like the Wii Freeloader let people download games without paying for them. 2)
Paying for games gets Nintendo money, and keeps third party developers happy. 3) If you could download games with no hassle from Nintendo, surely everyone would. 4) If everyone downloaded games, instead of buying them, third party developers wouldn’t invest in making good games. 5) Without third party developers, the Wii will probably flop like the GameCube.
On the other hand, lets examine these 5 points. 1) Hacks like this also allow us to make backup copies of games and play games we may rightfully own, but happen to be from a different region. 2) No matter how rampant piracy gets, there will still be a very strong market for games. 3) There will always be people that want to own the original, or support the game developers. Most people buy games legitimately when they have the money, and the ones that don’t aren’t going to buy the games no matter how hard you make it to pirate. 4) The PS and PS2 are to of the most thoroughly hacked consoles in history, but both of them sold tons and on top of that both of them have hundreds and hundreds of third party games. 5) True, but if you sell the most consoles, you’ll lure the third party developers, and like it or not, the fact that people can pirate games on your console is a selling point. The Playstation sold many, many more consoles than the N64 and one of the main reasons for that if because the Playstation could be hacked to run burned CDs while the N64 could never be hacked thanks to the cartridges.
It is a sad fact, but the Playstation3 will undoubtedly get a huge boon in sales as soon as it is hacked. In fact, it might be enough of a boon to put it above the Wii when added to other factors like price drops. Sooner or later, it’ll be hacked. The longer it takes, the more people will try. Right now, since there aren’t many Blu-ray burners out there, and since Blu-ray itself hasn’t been hacked, it might be awhile. But when it comes PS3 sales will rise. If I were Sony, I’d be hoping that the PS3 gets hacked. Unfortunately, Sony has a long history of being pretty hard on copyright (despite the fact that they owe success of the PS1 and PS2 to it)
Tags: wii cheats, mario kart, rock band, nintendo wii game, nintendo wii fan club
