Nintendo To Employ New Methods In Fight Against 3DS Piracy

Tweet

Piracy has long been a problem for pretty much every digital product maker out there. And unfortunately, due to the ease of pirating methods, whether you like to admit it or not, the good majority of us are guilty of the act be it back in the days of Napster or more recently with Torrents. Whatever the case may be, movie studios and game/software developers have been pulling out all the strings to combat piracy even taking to the White House with the Obama administration recently announcing a major crackdown on piracy.

However, it seems like no matter what any of these officials do, and no matter how many piracy related sites they shut down, virtual pirates trek on, launch new sites and continue to undo security measures put in place to lock them out. Will the fight against piracy ever be won? No body knows, but in the mean time some companies are taking it upon themselves to put forth extra security measures to further prevent piracy.

Video game piracy in particular has been a major problem with some hardware manufacturers releasing rewritable game carts for mobile consoles such as the Nintendo DS that let users play pirated games without the slightest of problems. Unfortunately for these hardware manufacturers, if Nintendo is successful, it’s going to be increasingly hard for them to find a market due to the projected drought of pirated Nintendo 3DS software.

In fact, Nintendo is so serious about combating piracy with their latest console that THQ’s Executive VP of Global Publishing, Ian Curran, went on record as saying the following:

“What excites me even more [than 3DS games] is that there’s technology built in that device to really combat piracy. The problem with the DS market in the last few years, particularly with the DS Lite, is that it’s just been attacked by piracy. It’s made it almost impossible to shift any significant volume. The DSi combated it a little bit, but the 3DS has taken that a step further. I actually asked Nintendo to explain the technology and they said it’s very difficult to do so because it’s so sophisticated. They combated the piracy on Dsi, which they don’t believe is cracked yet – but they know they’ve been hurt across the world and they believe the 3DS has got technology that can stop that. Therefore the opportunity for people to invest more in product development [on the system] and bring more 3DS products to market comes out of that. It’s going to probably cost us more to do it all in 3D – so we want to make sure we get a return on our investment when we do it.”

I’m all for content creators protecting their products and combating piracy but if the past is anything to go by, Nintendo’s plans will soon be foiled as virtual pirates flock to the console in attempts to crack the code.