Nintendo Blames Piracy For Huge European Sales Drop

[GamingAwesome1]

Of course....pirates....

Maybe it could be the fact that your games are slowly declining in quality. Quit blowing off your hardcore fans (like meh!) then perhaps sales will rise again.

 

[Phyroxis]

To all the xboxoids hating on nintendo, cry more, your tears are delicious

To nintendo, stop blaming piracy to try to placate your stockholders, innovate like with the wii and ignore the pirates, you will be rewarded.

/thread


Plus: just because someone downloaded one of your [crap] games doesn't mean they would have purchased had they not had the opportunity to download.

 

[DancePuppets]

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.

According to the report though, actual sales are down 50% which is quite a lot. Whether this is due to piracy or poor games is up for debate, although at least some of that will be due to pirates the question is how much.

 

[DancePuppets]

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.

Of course there is Steam which is trying to give you cool extra stuff when you buy from them and are willing to put up with the DRM.

 

[HDID]

maybe the arbitrary 4 months added onto release dates and ridiculous cost of games could have something to do with it? well, if you think that you're wrong.

 

[JonnWood]

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.

Who said they're just talking about the DS and Wii? Why couldn't they be including the SNES, N64, GBA, etc?

maybe the arbitrary 4 months added onto release dates and ridiculous cost of games could have something to do with it? well, if you think that you're wrong.

Yeah, how dare Nintendo make people wait!

To all the xboxoids hating on nintendo, cry more, your tears are delicious

To nintendo, stop blaming piracy to try to placate your stockholders, innovate like with the wii and ignore the pirates, you will be rewarded.

/thread


Plus: just because someone downloaded one of your [crap] games doesn't mean they would have purchased had they not had the opportunity to download.

You do know Nintendo has released 25 new IPs in the past six years, right? Can you name any of them without "Wii" in the title? I thought not.

Nintendo innovates, no one buys the games, then everyone complains that they're just rehashing old games.

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.

So you think people should get Nintendo games for free just because Nintendo did bad stuff before a good portion of their current Wii and DS users were even born?

That's almost as fascinating as saying you should be able to play a game on your DS because you bought it on your NES.

 

[randomrob]

Well if nintendo's games weren't so easy to pirate, emulate and download then people wouldn't do it as much.

 

[JonnWood]

Software Pirates are the Jews or Gypsies of the 21st century, a punching bag for anyone who's lost money or failed to make as much profit as they wanted. A nice scapegoat for all that ails you, never mind looking into whether or not they are actually to blame.

Except if Jews and Gypsies were actually running around screwing people over, except no one knew precisely how much, so the people getting robbed just blamed everything on them.

Ubisoft being the forefront in anti-piracy measures, I'd equate them to Germany in the Software Axis of Evil, with Nintendo as Italy, Take2/2K as Japan, and EA being both Free France and Vichy France at the same time (as they won't make up their mind on the DRM issue). The Third Reich of DRM, policed by the much-feared SS (Server-side Saves), has become a literal police state where gamers are oppressed simply for being gamers.

GODWIN'S.

YOU LOSE. THIS THREAD IS OVER.

 

[JonnWood]

Well if nintendo's games weren't so easy to pirate, emulate and download then people wouldn't do it as much.

NotSureIfSerious.jpg

Good. The Wii needs to fail.

I hear ya, I sold my wii a year after it came out, because it's just bad.
Also as a kid I was only aware of Nintendo, so i naturally (got my parents to) buy my games from them. Now kids are more aware of the other 2 big compnies, who lets be fair are making much better games.
For this point i'll point out wii music, Nintendo are attemting to milk people with shitty games like this then complain when they loose sales. That coupled with the fact that parents buy games for their kids regardless of the age rating of the game, no one over the age of 10 really takes nintendo seriously any more (hell I just stopped capitalising the company name)
Last point, I do buy games whan I actually want them, and since the wii came out, ive bought 3 maybe four games from nintendo, a couple for 360 and a fair few for ps2.

What you have just done is the equivalent of adults hating Barney, despite the show not being targeted at them.

 

[ohellynot]

Good. The Wii needs to fail.

I hear ya, I sold my wii a year after it came out, because it's just bad.
Also as a kid I was only aware of Nintendo, so i naturally (got my parents to) buy my games from them. Now kids are more aware of the other 2 big compnies, who lets be fair are making much better games.
For this point i'll point out wii music, Nintendo are attemting to milk people with shitty games like this then complain when they loose sales. That coupled with the fact that parents buy games for their kids regardless of the age rating of the game, no one over the age of 10 really takes nintendo seriously any more (hell I just stopped capitalising the company name)
Last point, I do buy games whan I actually want them, and since the wii came out, ive bought 3 maybe four games from nintendo, a couple for 360 and a fair few for ps2.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

Piracy of DS games is very, very widespread here. A recent effect of this is the game Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, not being released in the Netherlands because the distributor doesn't think they could make a profit here due to piracy (something that really sucks of you're an honest Dutch fan of the Phoenix Wright franchise like me).

It's not even Nintendo that's taking the most damage, their games will always keep selling anyway. For smaller DS developpers however it's almost impossible to still make a profit here, unless you make casual games aimed at an audience unlikely to own R4's.

 

[Asehujiko]

Hey Nintedon't, here's a reason why your DS is selling shit: It's called the fucking DSi.

 

[targren]

Nintendo might try putting an end to the "Making games that suck" policy and see if that helps game sales.

Seriously. Everyone else got over shoehorning the touch-screen into places it should never go, years ago. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, otoh...

 

[Unrulyhandbag]

10.7 billion in one month, who are they kidding?

How about the fact that Europe has just been through a fairly severe recession and is nothing like recovered, the DS itself is very rapidly approaching end of life and the games keep increasing in price. these seem pretty likely candidates for me.
Products do get old and lose consumer interest, items in the technology markets particularly so.

Then think off the top of your head how many good DS games have come out this past year in Europe. I can only think of three.

as for the pirates... well if your downloading Bowsers inside story then you may as well grab that crap mini-game package while your at it. I mean it's, what, 5MB tops? takes two seconds.

 

[joschen]

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.

Thou that would be completely awesome!

 

[mike1921]

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.

For one: I don't believe it for one second.
For two: Even if they aren't full of shit and it was pirated 238 million times, I assure you, if the people pirating it didn't have the ability to pirate it, most of them would've rented it or not played the games at all. They weren't getting that $10 billion

 

[WhiteTiger225]

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.

I love how they point fingers at the pirates, rather then their glut of HORRIBLE remakes, horrible reimaginings, and them raping each and every last franchise of theirs TO DEATH (If Pokemon White & Black doesn't give out free blowjobs and pudding, I am seeing hell to pay in nintendo's future)

Heck, the ONLY thing keeping them alive it seems is the cheap cost of their consoles and games, and the rabid fans. As I see it, if the wii were anymore expensive, and if they stopped milking the pokemon franchise, nintendo would be in sega's current place in the industry.

 

[WhiteTiger225]

Well if nintendo's games weren't so easy to pirate, emulate and download then people wouldn't do it as much.

NotSureIfSerious.jpg

Good. The Wii needs to fail.

I hear ya, I sold my wii a year after it came out, because it's just bad.
Also as a kid I was only aware of Nintendo, so i naturally (got my parents to) buy my games from them. Now kids are more aware of the other 2 big compnies, who lets be fair are making much better games.
For this point i'll point out wii music, Nintendo are attemting to milk people with shitty games like this then complain when they loose sales. That coupled with the fact that parents buy games for their kids regardless of the age rating of the game, no one over the age of 10 really takes nintendo seriously any more (hell I just stopped capitalising the company name)
Last point, I do buy games whan I actually want them, and since the wii came out, ive bought 3 maybe four games from nintendo, a couple for 360 and a fair few for ps2.

What you have just done is the equivalent of adults hating Barney, despite the show not being targeted at them.

MadWorld anyone?
Call of duty ports anyone?

 

[SenseOfTumour]

do you think when the somalian pirates board someone's yacht and find there's not much worth stealing they blame software publishers?