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Piracy Fight is an "Uphill Battle"

by Steven Rodriguez - June 3, 2004, 9:20 am EDT
Total comments: 20 Source: Bloomberg.com

Nintendo is stopping game pirates in record numbers, but there are still too many to stop.

China has always been a hotspot for videogame piracy. Even though the largest markets for videogames has always been Japan, North American and Europe, the 1.3 billion or so population of China has gone relatively untapped, almost exclusively in part to the piracy of games, movies and other entertainment media.

In 2003, Nintendo lost around $720 million in sales due to piracy and counterfeit games, even though the number of fakes doubled to 4 million units. This figure is astonishingly well over double of what Nintendo pulled in all of last year, which is $303 million. Piracy not only causes loss, it also prevents new markets from being tapped, most obviously the Chinese market.

For the rest of the story of how Nintendo and Sony are dealing with this problem, read the Bloomberg Article.

Talkback

Ian SaneJune 03, 2004

Piracy in China is not a loss. It's a potential market that Nintendo can't enter because of a corrupt government but it's not a loss. Nintendo doesn't sell games in China anyway so piracy is pretty much the only way to get a game. It's not like Nintendo is manufacturing all of this games for the Chinese market that aren't being sold because of piracy.

North America, Japan, Europe, and Australia are where Nintendo actually sells games and makes money. Therefore those are the only places where piracy is an actual loss because in those areas the games are on the shelves to be purchased.

Now piracy in China is still wrong but Nintendo and Sony are not going to go broke because of counterfeit games being sold in a market they have no presence in in the first place.

When these companies are going broke because of piracy in the major markets they rely on to make a living then I'm going to feel sorry for them.

gwgtrunksJune 03, 2004

Remember that IQue thing Ninty launched in China though? I wonder how that's doing...

And actually, the piracy in China lands roms on the net, and roms on the net cause losses world wide.

How can it not be a loss for Nintendo? Remove piracy and Nintendo would be getting revenue from the legitimate sales of those games. Obviously there's a demand that Nintendo could fill, but can't because piracy isn't letting them get a foothold in the market.

Whether or not people should feel sorry for Nintendo here isn't really the point. Nintendo has a legal right to the sales of its intellectual properties in these territories and they're getting screwed out of that.

silks

Ian SaneJune 03, 2004

"How can it not be a loss for Nintendo?"

Well Nintendo doesn't manufacture any games for China so they don't spend any money on merchandise that doesn't sell. They don't pay to advertise the games being pirated there. They don't take China into account when predicting sales so it's not like they design a game with the idea being that good sales in China is crucial to profitability. So if they say that they lose several hundred million in piracy every year and that includes potential sales in China that's an inflated amount. They don't sell games in China so they don't technically "lose" anything.

They do have every legal and moral right to prevent this piracy. I just don't like them feeding me this crap about how they're losing millions of dollars as if some guy in China is stealing Nintendo's and Sony's money out of a giant safe.

ootlerJune 03, 2004

Fake carts and machines manufactured within china aren't necessarily sold in china.

xproductionzJune 04, 2004

well in my area where i live there are some shops here that sell imported stuff that are not the real deal... so i can see where these companies can take a loss where import shops are selling fake games... half of what the real things cost... so now can you tell me how nintendo or sony is not taking a loss from that?

oohhboyHong Hang Ho, Staff AlumnusJune 04, 2004

The real problem is not only are they copying the games in China, but they are counterifing them. No better than printing money.

Although it is true it is an imanginary loss according to the accountant. I man what does he care if he can't count it. But the loss of sales of not being able to penatrate a market with thier legitimate product and the resulting growth in the market is a loss to the industry as a whole. Although one could argue all day as to the dollar amount that is being lost yearly, it cannot be denied that there is a loss or resources that could have been tapped and used to fuel the industry. Chinese developers not tursted with valueble code for the same reason, therefore you have untapped Devs. More money to push into games and hardware. The simple exchange of ideas on games betwen the cultures isn't possible.

But the problem really has more to do with the Chinese Goverment absolute refusual to do anything about counterifing of any sort whether it is agaisnt Nintendo or the United States goverment or the EU. I hazard a guess tht without counterifing, the Chinese communist goverment wouldn't last another year.

Besides I find Chinese games absolute rubbish anyway. Just maybe there isn't such a big loss after all.

nickmitchJune 04, 2004

Quote

I hazard a guess tht without counterifing, the Chinese communist goverment wouldn't last another year.

So does that mean that without piracy there would be no communism?
It seems the U.S. government might get involved somehow...

GoldShadow1June 04, 2004

Hmm. I can't imagine how Nintendo could really suffer all that much from piracy. GameCube is pretty much piracy-proof, as far as I know; there hasn't yet been an emulator developed for it. There are GBA emulators, but they completely destroy the point of the GBA - portability. Who wants to sit in front of a computer to play a GBA game? The only way I can see for piracy to be worthwhile is to get portability somehow - through copies of cartridges somehow, or some alternate portable system with a GBA emulator.

What is "counterifing"? I assume it's just a misspelling of "counterfeiting"..

NinGurl69 *hugglesJune 04, 2004

Why, it's counterific!

post.count++;

oohhboyHong Hang Ho, Staff AlumnusJune 05, 2004

Actually they make copies of GBA games and pass them off as the real thing. There is some information on the nintendo website. To the average consumer, you can barely tell the differnce. Not only is the sale lost, the the materials and workmanship of these counterfeits are invariably sub-par. Upon failures of these products, Nintendo's name gets that much more dirtier to the unsuspecting buyer.

Anyway, I though the US got away from all that "Kill all commies and we actually had some intelligence in the CIA" thing they had in the 1960's to "Kill all terrorists and buys giga tons of cheap stuff from a human rights abuser".

EpitaphJune 05, 2004

Even if they got into china's market, is their really enough money their for people to want to buy a game for 50$ americain. Or a system for 300$. Like really will people really but the systems and games if they released, im just not sure it would be affordable.

Bill AurionJune 05, 2004

The people in China are not quite as poor as you may think...

(And what's with the title? It's been chopped off... :\)

KDR_11kJune 05, 2004

I think we need to make one thing clear: Piracy doesn't equal piracy. There's two forms of piracy. People can download their games from the internet, usually for free. his doesn't cause a lot of damage, most of those downloaders wouldn't buy games, anyway. Any damage claims are completely made up and are in no way close to the real numbers. The others are the counterfeiters. They make copies that look more or less like the original and then sell them at either a budget price (with obviously counterfeit goods, people rarely question legality when you can get the latest games for a fiver) or a full retail price. Some counterfeiters even go as far as delivering their counterfeits to retail stores (Nokia's exploding phones are a result of this). Damage claims are real numbers, since people have proven their will to pay for the game by buying the counterfeit goods. They thought they had payed for the real deal and instead got a fake from china and the money goes to some illegal crime ring instead of the people who made the game.
While the RIAA is claiming exorbitant losses from piracy, software companies have a lot more reason to complain. Microsoft is a prime target of counterfeiters, that's why they have this whole "certificate of authenticity" deal. They had anti-counterfeiting measures in place long before people came up with sophisticated copy protection schemes.

Infernal MonkeyJune 05, 2004

China needs to develop more games like Toto World, yo. Better than Super Mario, I tells ya. You played as a cat with funky shoes and stood on little brown mushroom type things while bashing blocks with your head for coins and eggs that made you shoot fire.

Oh wait.

KDR_11kJune 05, 2004

Infernal: Sounds like a Giana Sisters rip-off to me face-icon-small-wink.gif.

AnyoneEBJune 06, 2004

First, I agree that pirated (downloaded) games have little effect on Nintendo's profit, especially in China. Counterfeit games sold at retail price are a different matter, and they could certainly mean Nintendo is losing money, but if a counterfeit game is way sold below retail, no one thinks it's real, they just aren't willing to pay the actually cost of the game and are probably not a lost sale.

On GBA pirating, you can either run an emulator on a PDA or tablet computer (recent ones are probably powerful enough to do so) or get a GBA flash cart, which is completely legal to own/distribute, just it's not legal to put games you don't own on them.

On GCN pirating, (EDIT2: Removed)
Of course, that works for pirating, but not for counterfeit games. By now it would not be surprising to find that counterfeiters had Gamecube disc stamping set-up to create counterfeit discs.


EDIT: Bill: The title was probably cut off by the quote mark due to some sloppy coding.

EDIT2: I apoligize, I just reread the rules, and my post was breaking them. I thought I would be fine because I didn't post a link to a ROMs site.

Bill AurionJune 06, 2004

Oh crap, you better edit those links out...

MysticGohan24June 06, 2004

Man, Your gonna get butchered by the mods and or the good folks at PGC.

ToS clearly states about linking or even telling how to emulate or explain how you can pirate thing's.

it's a big no no.

You might seriously think about what to do before you do it in the future,

Fixed the weirdo title bug. (The last couple of words had been cut off.)

Also fixed the link near the end.

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