Gosh, between this and the Monster Hunter/Bayonetta exclusivity purchases, Nintendo must have hired someone new to keep an eye on the outside world. In this case, there's a great deal of interest in ridiculously hard classic sidescroller levels, especially in mario games, as anyone familiar with rom hacking or let's play knows. If they can get a handle on producing this sort of DLC regularly, they'll get the attention of some of the real gaming royalty, the enthusiast hackers and programmers - never mind about the hardcore.
They still have one hell of a long way to go for their console platforms to be considered inclusive and progressive, but these are good signs.
That does look nice - you have to appreciate how basic the guts of the thing are. I've got a real soft spot for the DS Lite, despite the many revisions since. I'll probably do this if I ever lose a shoulder button, or something like that.
Seems like some pirates actually do buy things that are good, right?
The other myth about video game piracy is that it is a new thing. The culture of game sharing was very much in swing back in the 1980s, in the days of the 5 1/4 floppy disk, on B&W old school macs and actual IBM PCs, not to mention the many other awesome types of machines back then, none of which were really mainstream at all. Commodores, Amigas, weird russian computers recording on audio tapes, famicoms, etc. Your school was lucky if it had 1-3 of them, with maybe 1 kind of software. The block you lived on probably had 0.
Many gamers and game designers would not have developed their current interest without piracy - even just from a distribution standpoint. I'd venture to say that not only is piracy not currently destroying the market, it played a huge role in actually developing the market in the first place. We could have been a much less playful culture right now, if early anti-piracy efforts worked better.
You know, I used to work in an office during my 20's. Can't say I miss it.
I wouldn't presume to speculate about this case from the evidence on hand. But I would warn anyone who hasn't had that sort of job yet - in terms of other people's behavior and level of interest in the actual work, it's much more like high school than it is like college.
Ideally, we'll reach an equilibrium where game consoles tend to get completely hacked right around the time that the next generation machines come out. That way, gaming history still gets preserved through the internet, and the industry takes less of a hit from piracy.
Eventually, there will be no working NES's, Commodores, Spectrums, and Ataris, for example. And I suspect many in the industry do gain insight from beign able to examine how early game designers did things. Without piracy that software record would be fragmentary at best.
Well, it's an opportunity where Origin, the Eshop, the Windows Store, and others which don't have a particularly robust indie empowerment mechanism yet could distinguish themselves relative to Steam. I like a lot of what Steam does, but a little competition never hurts. And neither does choosing to charge for a service. 'Merica, right?
Hmm.. I thought from previous reports, the deal was that they made a crazy statement about moving entirely towards Free To Play, thus eliminating the need for DRM at all?
Hopefully they've backed away from that statement and are testing the idea of 'if our games don't harass legitimate customers, we will have more legitimate customers.'
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