Today we received a press release directly from the Big N. It was a day old, so I guess we’re waaaaay down their list of media outlets for important announcements. Anyway, the point is that we got it, and this here press release contains the moderately exciting news that…

“At Nintendo’s request, the Hong Kong High Court has intervened to help stop a global distribution operation involving game copying devices and modification chips (”mod chips”) that violate its copyrights and trademarks in the Nintendo DSâ„¢ and Wiiâ„¢ systems.”

During a series of daring raids in Hong Kong, police seized more than 10,000 game copying devices and mod chips. The devices in question are used on the Nintendo DS to copy and play game files (most of which are unlawfully distributed via the Internet). The mod chips, meanwhile, allow pirated Wii discs or illegal copies of Nintendo games to downloaded from the Internet and played on the machine. That old chestnut about using such devices to play back-ups of games you legally own is looking increasingly shaky.

Funnily enough, the raid happened on Oct 8th, but Nintendo have only just seen fit to tell us about it. The time-lag is not because of PR slovenliness - not this time anyway- but because the raids took place around the same time that the company had their big-ass press conference. Y’know, the one where their stock value soared after a raft of announcements about new games and products. The news about the piracy crackdown would’ve been an unsightly blemish on an otherwise perfect week, so the company brass wisely chose to sit on it.

The same press release contains some lovely fat statistics to make us hate those evil pirate bastards even more. “Piracy not only affects Nintendo,” it says, “but also more than 100 companies that independently create, license, market and sell Nintendo video game products. Nintendo and these companies lost an estimated $762 million in sales due to counterfeits in 2006.”

We do wonder, however, if Ninty is going about things the right way. The reason why there’s such a roaring trade in mod chips and whatnot is because there’s clearly a demand for that kind of functionality. Gamers want to be able to back up their software and play it off a flash card or hard drive or whatever. Why not embrace that kind of demand instead of trying to stamp it out?

Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 5:41 pm by Bulent Yusuf
DS, Hardware, Misc news.