gaming industry
Nintendo Wins: DS R4 flash Cart Banned in Australia
Nintendo has won the legal battle against RSJ IT Solutions of Australia, the company that was making available for purchase R4 flash cart, a tool which enabled gamers to run homebrew on the Nintendo DS handheld. Following the court’s ruling RSJ IT now has to pay Nintendo $520,000 damage compensation. Besides that RSJ IT was ordered to stop selling the device using any of its sites (gadgetgear.com.au, for example).
Continue reading »Piracy Not a Big Threat to Game Developers, DRM Not a Solution
TIGA, a company that represents and serves the interests of games developers and associated businesses in UK, has recently published a study according to which an important percent of its members regard piracy rather as a problem than an imminent danger to hovering over their revenue. Gamasutra posted some edificatory figures: “60 percent of developers said piracy is a problem; of these, 90 percent believe the problem is “constant or increasing,” according to TIGA. But of those surveyed, only 10 percent said the threat level was “high,” while 20 percent called it “medium” and 60 percent believe it is “low.” (10 percent had no opinion).” When it came to how illegal file sharing should be dealt with in light of the latest anti-piracy measures taken by the UK government, 50 percent of the developers opposed the “three strikes” policy of disconnecting copyright infringers.
Continue reading »Game Released For Free on Torrent Sites by Its Developer
While complaints against piracy from the music and movie industries are pouring in daily, and book publishers as well as game producers are catching up with lawsuits and anti-piracy strategies too, others have adopted an entirely different approach. RedLynx, developer of Trials HD, a game you can quickly become addicted to, has decided to take matter into its own hands and be one step ahead of pirates – so, the company has voluntarily made its own game available on popular torrent sites. However, there’s catch – the version distributed for free on p2p networks was short of one key feature, namely – Leaderboard support, a feature which RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, called “the soul of the game.” The strategy is that the pirates would love the game so much as it is – without leaderboard – that they would want to buy the full version of Trials HD and enjoy all it has to offer.
Continue reading »