Nintendo Blames Piracy For Huge European Sales Drop

[Antari]

Its sounds more to me like Nintendo would like to be like Germany during WW2. Everyone must be forced to play their games, and charged for it. Anyone not standing in line to play the games is guilty, and will be shot at dawn. Heil Nintendo!

Or as Nintendo actually feels it, they are essentially perfect. Why wouldn't anyone want to play every single piece of junk they put on the market?

 

[Soxafloppin]

That of they have saturated the market, I mean everyone and there dog has a Wii/DS.

 

[HavoK 09]

maybe stop making re-re-re-remakes of another remake or downing the prices to match their game quality would be a better way to fix things up.

sick of hearing about "new" pokemon games with crazy prices wher nothing relevant really happened, and im not even going to talk about mario...

 

[FolkLikePanda]

Well I'm glad none of my friends use them * dives through window *

 

[Nazrel]

Let's just call nintendo Spain. A fat, gluttonous country that has been exploiting the new world ever since it 'discovered' it years before. Suddenly, pirates start attacking their ships in the new world. Oh noes!

Well, actually there are alot of comparisons you can make between nintendo and spain. Both of their policies have been known as barbaric and inhumane. Empires built on the blood of the locals. Not the smartest bunch but controlling the largest population.

Please elaborate, I may not be up to date on all the stuff Nintendo has done, but nothing come to mind that remotely justifies that analogy.

 

[hypothetical fact]

In June 2009, Nintendo monitored ten websites offering illegal game downloads and determined that its software had been pirated 238 million times, which it claimed translated into roughly $10.7 billion in lost sales.

Cue pirates "explaining" how not all pirated copies equal lost sales and ignoring just how big the number is.

You are ignoring just how big the number is. This is Nintendo blaming Europe alone for half of their global profits. Or in other words they spin a big wheel and multiply the number by a billion to get alarmist responses.

 

[JonnWood]

its software had been pirated 238 million times

been pirated 238 million times

238 million times

 

[WickedSkin]

Maybe they should just release better games?

 

[Caliostro]

Yeah, that's totally plausible... OR, alternatively, the "gimmick" got old now and people are waiting for games that don't suck... Also plausible...

 

[JonnWood]

Let's just call nintendo Spain. A fat, gluttonous country that has been exploiting the new world ever since it 'discovered' it years before. Suddenly, pirates start attacking their ships in the new world. Oh noes!

Well, actually there are alot of comparisons you can make between nintendo and spain. Both of their policies have been known as barbaric and inhumane. Empires built on the blood of the locals. Not the smartest bunch but controlling the largest population.

Please elaborate, I may not be up to date on all the stuff Nintendo has done, but nothing come to mind that remotely justifies that analogy.

It's based entirely on the claim that they've "abandoned hardcore gamers", and they're popular now, which makes gamers hate them. Like it's Nintendo's fault that there are about nine million Petz games. I also like that the same hardcore gamers are constantly crying out for their favorite franchises, but simultaneously complain that Nintendo doesn't want to innovate.

By the way, Nintendo has debuted 25 new properties in the past six years. What were you other guys saying about sequels?

 

[Sevre]

Ahem, before we begin pointing the finger at piracy I'd like to point out that Ninty doesn't release it's games in Europe for a good while afterwards. We're still getting 2008 games coming out here in Europe.

 

[scotth266]

Potential lost sales Nintendo. You can count it all you want, but potential does not mean the pirates came into your money vault and stole 10.7 billion.

No, but it does mean that pirates stole an amount of IP worth 10.7 billion in lost sales.

Now that we've dispensed with the semantics...

And they don't even make games for the PC. Yeah, that's right, they're starting to blame console piracy

Do you think console piracy is any less relevant? Because it's remarkably easy to pirate Wii games... after all, New Super Mario Bros was uploaded a week before its release.

 

[Rect Pola]

Pro-piracy argument is a funny one of self-entitlement and rationalizations. But they do have one real argument that really has some teeth.

Normal people feel cheated by playing it straight.

As things currently are, turning to the dark side is very rewarding. There's not spending money, a tiny chance of getting caught, and best of all, bypassing the DRMs and limited downloads. People who play it straight are not only treated like criminals but are expected to let "doing the right thing" be enough to ignore the throngs getting away it.

To borrow from the Dark Knight, "Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded." I've always thought THAT was a wiser weapon in this war than punishing the ones who can't break the code.

 

[GL2814E]

I wonder how badly their sales would dip if they made a game that people wanted to pirate...

Cause I get the feeling that Nintendo hasn't been putting out the kind of games pirates want really...

 

[Jeronus]

I love how everyone thinks Europeans just realized that Nintendo makes bad games and stop buying them. That is insulting to Europeans. I mean we all have known for years that Nintendo has tons of shovelware on the Wii. I can't believe the Europeans just figured this out. I love how people are willing to insult an entire continent of people just to take a jab at the Wii.

Anyway, I think the piracy threat in Europe could be real. Look at the facts:

American sales drop = 11%
Japanese sales drop = 7%
European sales drop = 50%

In case the Xbox and Playstation fanboys haven't figured it out, that's a huge difference. I think jumping to the conclusion that Europeans are just now starting to smell the shit on the Wii doesn't really do enough to explain the drop in sales. There might be a serious problem with Nintendo sales in Europe. It might be piracy but it is damn well not the fact that European gamers can't tell the difference between shitty games and good ones. I love how European fanboys are making these same comments and don't realize the underlying insult they are making when they type such stupid shit.

 

[Phenakist]

I blame the recession for increased piracy.

But seriously, why are Nintendo complaining they're still making HUGE profits just because they aren't a bit bigger than that isn't a reason to complain.

 

[halfeclipse]

]

In June 2009, Nintendo monitored ten websites offering illegal game downloads and determined that its software had been pirated 238 million times, which it claimed translated into roughly $10.7 billion in lost sales.

Cue pirates "explaining" how not all pirated copies equal lost sales and ignoring just how big the number is.

No, take a second here and contemplate the absurdity of that number. Set the average cost of a game at $100 (probably low then this) and that means 170 million sales. That is slightly under 1 game per DS and Wii unit in the world, from Europe alone. That number has to be off in some fashion or in the highly unlikely chance it isn't, Nintendo has done something very very VERY wrong.

 

[gim73]

Let's just call nintendo Spain. A fat, gluttonous country that has been exploiting the new world ever since it 'discovered' it years before. Suddenly, pirates start attacking their ships in the new world. Oh noes!

Well, actually there are alot of comparisons you can make between nintendo and spain. Both of their policies have been known as barbaric and inhumane. Empires built on the blood of the locals. Not the smartest bunch but controlling the largest population.

Please elaborate, I may not be up to date on all the stuff Nintendo has done, but nothing come to mind that remotely justifies that analogy.

Perhaps you kids are too young to remember back in the days of the NES when nintendo had a monopoly on video games. Stuff like the nintendo 'seal of quality' whereas if you lacked it you could not sell your game next to official nintendo games (or even in the same store). We live in a world where there are M/R18 ratings for video games, but back in the day nintendo just censored everything they considered offensive and if you fell outside that you didn't get their official seal and couldn't sell your game. Hell, the damn thing didn't even ensure quality. There were alot of crap games for the NES with this and a few great games without it. Try Tengens Tetris if you want the best version.

Other reasons for a third party licensee to NOT release a nintendo game:
Licensees were not permitted to release the same game for a competing console until two years had passed.
Nintendo would decide how many cartridges would be supplied to the licensee.
Nintendo would decide how much space would be dedicated for articles, advertising, etc. in Nintendo Power.
There was a minimum number of cartridges which had to be ordered by the licensee from Nintendo.
There was a yearly limit of five games that a licensee may produce for a Nintendo console.

That's right, two years. No simultaneous releases here! Also, many of the licensees warned nintendo that cartridges were going to be prohibitively expensive for the N64 based on the level of memory required for that generation of video games, but nintedo refused to pursue cd based technology for that generation. Pretty much: nintendo treated their third party licensees like crap and it was no big suprise when most of them went over to sony in the mid ninties and really haven't been back. The only really reasonable item off this list is the third one, because nintendo power is entirely their responsibility and not the only gaming magazine out there. The rest is a bunch of pretty crappy that doesn't really fly in the modern age of video games.