90% according to John Hiller of the British ELSPA<\/a>.\u00a0 That is right – he says that “it\u2019s thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s.\u00a0 Takings from Nintendo DS games in the US are lower than any other console.”\u00a0 The R4 he refers to isn’t the astromech that accompanies Obi-Wan to Geonosis, but rather a interface card that is the same size as a DS game card.\u00a0 Inside there is a slot for a micro-SD card, which allows you to install games downloaded illegally from the internet.\u00a0 Of course, it also allows the use of ‘homebrew’ – custom made applications.<\/p>\nOK, so now we get to the core message – piracy is bad, the R4 is primarily used as a piracy-enable, and John Hiller doesn’t want folks in the UK pirating software.\u00a0 That all makes sense – but 90%?\u00a0 Where the heck does THAT number come from?\u00a0 How many people do you know who personally own a Nintendo DS?\u00a0 I know a few dozen or so – the vast majority of whom are kids, and not a single one has a flash-cart of any type.\u00a0 Indeed, it was only a week or so ago that I heard the term R4 in a discussion on the GamerDad forums.<\/p>\n
I have always been an advocate against piracy – I have made enemies on PSP forums by suggesting from the very start that the amount of non-piracy (i.e. legit ‘homebrew’) usage of ‘custom firmware’ (i.e.\u00a0 hacking the firmware) is so small that it could easily be considered rounding error.\u00a0 But despite the incredible ease of hacking the PSP and getting pirated games for the system, I wouldn’t estimate the piracy rate for that system anywhere *near* 90%.<\/p>\n
So what good does citing a number that is absurd on its’ face? Perhaps the question should be more about the HARM it does!\u00a0 Because reading that makes me categorize him as a clueless alarmist with an agenda – and file him alongside the RIAA and others who insinuate that we could pay off the national debt in three months if people just stopped downloading music and movies.<\/p>\n
I don’t want my kids pirating, nor do I want them playing pirated games with their friends – but I want them to do it because pirating commercial software is wrong, not because people like Hiller have used scare tactics to force legislation that push draconian measures to counter the perception they have built that things like this are “risking the future of the games industry”.<\/p>\n
Let me push my own made-up statistic – 100% of people with a clue think John Hiller is full of crap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Piracy is a problems for video game makers, and always had been.\u00a0 I recall having to skim through my PGA Tour Golf for Mac manual to find a certain detail – every time I started the program.\u00a0 That was 17 years ago.\u00a0 Now we have Starforce and rootkits and other elements to supplement manual authentication.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"news2_r4.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/01\/news2_r4.thumbnail.jpg\")
Piracy is a problems for video game makers, and always had been.\u00a0 I recall having to skim through my PGA Tour Golf for Mac manual to find a certain detail – every time I started the program.\u00a0 That was 17 years ago.\u00a0 Now we have Starforce and rootkits and other elements to supplement manual authentication.\u00a0 Yet there are claims that piracy is worse than ever – every platform loses sales due to ‘hacks’ and downloads.\u00a0 There are those whose business it is to estimate the losses incurred by piracy.\u00a0 One of them has chimed in this week with regard to the top-selling Nintendo DS.\u00a0 Can you guess his estimate of what percentage of North American DS users are playing pirated games?\u00a0 Answer to yourself before you click in …<\/p>\n