Nintendo President: Piracy not behind poor sales (opens in new tab)

That's an excellent point. The homebrew scene is often the one that does all the hard work and the pirates reap the rewards of the broken security systems (Notice how the security system of the PS3 wasn't broken until well after the Other OS feature was removed and the community wanted it back).

With Nintendo however, they've had a history of absolute control over their console and I think that it's been working against them in the long-run. In fact I remember a specific instance with the Wii where the homebrew scene had discovered a security flaw that was not necessary for homebrew but could be exploited by pirates and the folks who discovered it even attempted to contact Nintendo to let them know and to also extend an "olive branch" to them to let them know that the homebrew scene isn't trying to break the consoles for piracy's sake. Of course Nintendo gave them the cold shoulder and it was exploitable in the wild for a while until it was eventually caught by Nintendo's engineers and patched in a routine update. The only problem is that Nintendo's updates have sometimes been known to cause problems and it was ironically enough the homebrew scene that had the fix.

I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release. So as long as they can make the DRM good enough to keep the game from being cracked for a week they've scored a pretty big win.

DRM, practically speaking, isn't about prohibiting piracy as much as postponing the point at which a game is pirated until after it has made the bulk of its sales.

Replying to myself as sort of a reply at various other repliers: if you're arguing that DRM helps "slow down" piracy for the first week or however long a game is expected to sell well, you're now going against the article's major premise that piracy doesn't affect the sales all that much. Furthermore, this is a console we're talking about, the costs of pirating are relatively harder than just going to a torrent site and finding an EXE (that you may or may not trust) or something as simple as an MP3. We have distributors like Walmart showing shiny game cases to many people every day. A single game is 4.37 GB ( http://wiki.nintendo-scene.com/index.php?title=Wii_Disc_Back... ). Lastly, DRM does not imply sales at all. (For those of you who forgot: http://www.wolfire.com/humble )

The best strategy in the first place for game companies is to create something people want, as Nintendo admits. Whether you have DRM after that is irrelevant, because people will buy regardless, and people will pirate regardless, which makes Nintendo's whole DRM stance very peculiar, and now I wonder if it's just trying to make third party manager-types feel better.

> possibly even inconveniencing game devs

Game devs are probably /happy/ to see security APIs. It means more money for them before their titles are pirated.

Secondarily, nobody in the gaming biz really cares how much game devs suffer. [You think I'm joking. I'm really not.]

A little bit of DRM security keeps people honest.

More than a content distributor, Nintendo is a major developer (via its numerous first-party studios) and publisher. While not an impartial observer, their businesses would peg them on the side of "any piracy is a problem" more than "piracy is not a problem".