Forum - View topicINTEREST: Japanese Video Game Market Down 8% in 2011
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nhat
Posts: 922 |
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Meh the videogame industry is mainstream and popular enough that it will never kill them in the end.
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TitanXL
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Xillia coming over depends on Graces F I suppose.
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14893 |
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There were also the cumulative effects of earthquake+tsunami, nuclear plant crisis, and (still) electricity issues (only 6 of Japan's 54 nuclear power plants are currently operating)............ It hasn't been a good year of spending money and having fun........
Anyways, just reiterating something to contrast this with:
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Ushio
Posts: 636 |
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What? that everything pirated was also incredibly profitable? Except Crysis 2 on PC as that's just a graphics benchmark. |
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Lightning Leo
Posts: 311 Location: Earth |
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@enurtsol - Holy frijoles, are those number of pirated downloads?? Like, Super Mario Galaxy 2 was illegally downloaded 1,280,000 times??
Sheesh, I was always under the impression that the gaming industry had the whole piracy thing under control, what with the software protections and proprietary hardware and all.  And, I always see gamers with a collector's mentality, who want to have the product available to purchase in a physical format, and fear the effects that moving to a digital-download-only format will have on the used games market. Totally unexpected to find out there's such rampant piracy, even amongst Nintendo software, but really interesting! 
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TitanXL
Posts: 4036 |
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Oh goodness no. Video game piracy is a huge issue. It's the ever struggling battle between developer's terrible DRM solutions and the user. There's been some truly terrible DRM in games that a lot of people prefer to pirate as a "take that" to the developer which only escalate the issue.. It's one of the leading reasons why some developers (Capcom, for instance) refuse to make games or ports of their games for PC, since the PC crowd is far more likely to pirate it than the console crowd. It's also the main reason the PSP is nowhere near as big in the US as it is in Japan. People just mod their PSP in America and download all the games and stuff. The system does so much better in Japan because gamers there actually have some form of decency/morals and look down on pirating as a whole. |
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GVman
 Posts: 731 |
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but DS piracy is far more rampant in Japan than in the US, primarily due to the ease of it. Wasn't it also the main reason why Nintendo has optional region-locking on the 3DS?
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enurtsol
Posts: 14893 |
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Hey, it's not all bad. Here, take a look at this: Crysis 2 Leak Fails To Result in Massive Download Fest Just because people can pirate, doesn’t mean they always do. The fact that it has leaked, however, has caused gaming blogs to go into overdriven condemnation of the anticipated rampant piracy of this much awaited game. While it’s rare to hear people complain about movies or music leaking onto the Internet in file-sharing circles (in fact such situations are largely relished), games are a bit different. This leak of Crysis 2 appears to show that there’s something, even in piracy circles – I’m not sure what – that elevates the connection people have with games and their creators over the connection people have with those behind movies for example. As both EA and Crytek plead with people to wait for the March 22 release date for Crysis 2 they appear to be supported, not just by those who never pirate, but also those who do. Despite the beta being widely available, TorrentFreak stats show (completed) downloads of just 10,000 on public BitTorrent trackers. And that’s not because this title isn’t popular with gamers. Indeed, given the current mood, it’s not unthinkable that these low download numbers may well be a result of it being quite the opposite. While some people are clearly happy to get an advance copy, it’s eye opening to see people on torrent sites encouraging others NOT to download it. Sure, there is the usual crowd throwing a middle finger up to the publishers while delighting in their juicy booty, but so many others are pleading with people to support Crytek by putting their hands in their pockets next month instead. That said, there are others who aren’t heeding the advice but are treating this download as a demo to be deleted in due course, having grown tired of waiting for an official one to be released. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there. High profile game leaks don’t have to result in the doomsday scenario feared by their creators – unless they’re terrible games of course. Rewind back to October 2003 and a beta of Half-Life 2 was also leaking onto the Internet, a full 6 months before its release date, putting this 49 day advance copy of Crysis 2 in the shade. HL2 went on to do staggeringly well, selling 12 million copies to date.
It's also generally easier to download a software-crack than to hardware-mod a console. (I've done both, so I know what's more pain in the ass.  ) Plus, besides meeting the minimum requirements, computers don't need to be updated to play new games. In contrast, occasionally consoles need to be updated to play the newer games, thus requiring a modded console to be re-modded again and again, before it can play those newer games (so it becomes an arms race: the console-makers keep updating, the mod-makers have to keep making new mods to circumvent the new updates).
That too, but it's also that N. Americans prefer to play their games in their large-screen 1080p HDTVs with all the powerful graphics of consoles. (If they want to play simpler games in smaller screens, they have their smartphones/tablets for that.) Plus, the new wave is online gaming nowadays, instead of playing by yourself. It's generally easier to play online games on consoles and PCs than on handhelds. Game-makers prefer that too because it's harder for cracked PC games and modded consoles to play online with other players, like the big game right now Star Wars: The Old Republic. |
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ArsenicSteel
 Posts: 2370 |
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Sounds like a lot of exaggerated work and some fudging of facts. I haven't modded the current gen consoles but can see the big names in console mods have devices that can either be turned off with a switch. It gets easier if we are when talking about software that's used to jailbreak some consoles. Computer software like DirectX and C++ will be updated during installation, it's pretty transparent. Then there's video/sound drivers that the user has to maintain themselves. |
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evil_kenshin
Posts: 40 Location: Australia |
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the regional lock was more to promote regional pricing/price gouging than anything else |
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sainta
 Posts: 989 |
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Even after all that criticism towards FFXIII-2, the game sold pretty well even though it was released in December.
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enurtsol
Posts: 14893 |
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No fudge. For example, the current gen 360s we've modded: The first type of mods were a lot more manual, meaning you have to do a lot of steps yourself, and there are different methods for different types of 360 drives. Particularly in initially setting the drive into "Mode B" to make it receptive for firmware changes, it can be more of an art than science. One such method requires using a Linux live CD at boot, hope it detects the drive (it doesn't always) while it's still connected to both computer and 360, then do the "halfway-open tray" trick and hope it goes into Mode B (it doesn't always because the trick sometimes works not with open halfway but 30%/40%/60%/70% open). So ya keep trying until (if) it works, but each attempt, ya have to turn everything off then on and start from Step 1 again. Once Mode B is done, ya restart to Windows or to a Bootable USB with the programs to flash the drive. Any misstep means ya start from Step 1 all over again, or worse, ya brick the drive. And then Jungleflasher came out, which automated and standardized many of the steps for us, especially Mode B. It was a godsend, such that at times, it took more time to take the 360 apart than to flash it. But with any of these mods, when Microsoft comes out with new dashboard updates and/or new "wave" of games, ya likely have to keep re-modding your 360 just to keep up. Ya can optionally get one of those "switch devices" (cost around $50) so ya don't have to keep opening up your 360 to flash it. The re-mod usually involves not 1 but 2 flashes: flash the drive back to stock firmware first, before flashing into new mod. In the old days, ya had to keep copies of the original stock firmwares of the drives ya flashed, but Jungleflasher now automated that too. But then, Microsoft came out with these new Lite-On drives, so now it's required to buy a probe kit (we had to import ours from England for around $100 when it was hard to find). Had to cut circuits and very very carefully solder on the 360 board with the correct resistor and probe kit, just to extract the firmware. Now there are better probe kits that can help out with that, particularly for those who have trouble with minute soldering: 
So hopefully no more of this: 
There's a reason people want to pay you $50 or more just to mod or re-mod (update) their systems, and they have to keep updating their systems every time Microsoft comes up with something new.
(They keep offering, but I prefer those people do it themselves since I just like to do it for friends because I know they would buy the games they like playing.) |
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senpai27
Posts: 11 |
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^ Oh wow that is hard work. Here in my Asian country all of the Playstation and Xbox games sold at the shop are all pirated. Heck, I have never seen an original game before when I was a kid (I even thought that original games are like that, cheap and easily replaced). The only games that the pirates can't successfully replicates is the PS3 games so PS3 gamers have to buy original. But even that I heard that you can already hardware-mod PS3 to download games free, so Sony only manages to stop the rampant pirating of the hard copy of the games in my country (which actually impressive). This also explains why PS3 isn't selling well in my country compared to other consoles. Ah, the cheapskate, piracy loving people of my country...
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