- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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Web journalism is here to stay - Roy Greenslade, Guardian Online
Nintendo begins Wii war on used games
NINTENDO seems to have fired the opening shots in the war against the resale of its Wii games.
Games publishers love the idea of the resale of their games like Ian Paisley loves Pope Benedict and lately they have been coming up with wizard wheezes to shut down the industry.
Nintendo’s cunning plan is to block the sales of its Wii Speak peripheral on the secondary market.
When game magazine MTV Multiplayer received its press copy of Animal Crossing City Folk, along with Wii Speak, hacks were told to enter a 16-character code needed to download the Wii Speak channel from Nintendo.
If you lose the code you are stuffed because there is no way to download the channel and Wii Speak becomes a useless cheap microphone.
So anyone buying hardware second hand will be out of luck when it comes to getting the channel allowing the hardware to work.
It seems that Nintendo may be one of the first companies to fight the second hand software battle on the hardware front. µ
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They're trying to stop us buying second hand games now? I hope Nintendo and every other evil multinational corporation dies a terrible terrible financial death! If I want to sell my old games I will! If I want to buy some second hand games for cheap, because the new ones have ridiculously expensive extortionate pricing, I will! Here's my message to Nintendo... F*** YOU!!!!
If they worked on Replay Value of their games, and gave more content so they took time to play, not the 20 hours of game play that passes as a long game these days. 

Want ever happened to true arcade style games, 20sec to learn to play, 20 years to master. 

If they don't want people to resale their games they should make them worth keeping, add construction kits so player can make there own levels to share with friends etc. Give the game a life beyond the afternoon of linar hand held game play and then people won't want to sell the games.

oops, but then how can you sell people 27 carbon copy sequels of the orginal game, they might still be playing it.
because most Wii games out there have terrible replay value and game stores are stuffed with used Wii games. I still don't know anyone who plays anything besides Wii Sports regularly
selling something second hand? what a revolting thought!
do comsumers think they own the products they have paid for? oh no, no, no - its a lease!
they have no right to resell their own property it should be a criminal offence to attempt to do so!
nintendo rulez - your property!
...the more slips through your fingers.

Put too much pressure on the consumer, and he starts getting angry. Pirating, hacking, even resale are symptoms, not the disease. Blocking resale of hardware with pointless keycodes? (If only I could talk on the channel without the mic...) Sounds like money-grubbing to me. What ever happened to actually OWNING what you buy? It's the same business of trying to stem resale market of games with more layers of keycodes that have to be purchased to unlock final boss fights. You heard me correctly: you will need to buy a keycode to finish a game if you bought it second-hand. Michael Capps from Epic has "brilliant" idea of squeezing the gamers even more over here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/michael-capps-part-two.

This is what it comes to: economics and willpower. If the hardware/software/media is too bloody expensive, (or it has too much DRM-ware)... DON'T BUY IT! If people could muster the willpower to NOT buy the game/CD/widget if it is a bad (albeit SHINY) product, then we all wouldn't have so much crap in the shops. Vote with your hard-earned coin. I haven't bought a DRM-infected game, I don't buy iTunes tracks, and I use Mozilla and OpenOffice rather than M$ products. (I only own an App₤e product because I won it in a contest...) And guess what? I doubt I'm missing out.
Nintendo will end up in court so fast their feet won't touch the ground over this.

And if they keep up that practice they will go the way of atari. They cant seriously have the cheapest hardware and then expect people to buy it twice because it is cheap. It doesnt make sence to me.
So much for promoting the 3 R's (reduce, reuse, recycle).
Microsoft is doing something similar with Gears of War 2, though not as extreme. When the game is purchased, 5 multiplayer maps need to be unlocked via code on xbox live. Code is only redeemable once, thus resold games will not be able to play multiplayer on these maps.
They may be surprised and disappointed to find that consumers have a legal right to wiisell what they've paid for, however hard they wish it was otherwise.
There are computer Shops in the US which no longer stock PC games - Since they make the bulk of their income from second hand titles, and the PC doesnt have a second hand market (partley due to companies Like EA/Activision which have has these systems in place for years now) it's not worth their shelf space to support the system.
Don't you guys research anymore? This is only for the WiiSpeak channel that allows VOIP from the main menu. You can still use it in any game you want.
But...
Stop buying used games just to save $5! Maybe if you weren't so willing to sell your soul to Gamestop to save 10% on a copy of a game that someone peed on, Ninty wouldn't have to resort to measures like this.

Well, the smart thing to do in this case is to have a moratorium on purchasing the title so that there appears to be no demand and prices get slashed.
Then we all win. :)