Virtual Console Rip-off
 

So I sent Nintendo an email asking about what happens to my virtual console games if my Wii was to break down, and I had to send it in for a replacement. Nintendo sent me a reply stating that any games bought for the virtual console are locked to the console's serial number, and are not transferable or refundable, and that I would have to purchase them again. They told me that I'm not buying the games, instead I am paying for the privilege to play them, and that if i have to exchange my system for a new one, that privilege is revoked. And here I thought Nintendo was an honest company.

Yeah, pretty much.

From what I've read, if your console breaks and you send it in to Nintendo, they'll transfer your games to the replacement system.

Well, technically, they WERE pretty honest about it.

Personally I think the VC is a rip-off in pretty much every way. Ridiculously expensive compared to buying compilation packs, and more limited and restricting than other download services like Steam (and even that has problems).

I'll wait until they can design a system that has fair pricing and the freedom to do whatever you want with the games you purchase instead of being constrained to only being able to play them on a single console and basically being screwed in any number of situations.

You mean they aren't honest by telling you straight out that you won't have your Virtual Console romsgames on a repaired machine?

Actually this doesn't make all that much sense. If Virtual Console games are exclusive to each Wii, how does that make for Wii trade value? That would mean "Wii + x Virtual Console games" auctions would be appearing on ebay.

The honesty part falls on the fact that they've worded the parts about linking your My Nintendo account to your Wii shop account to seem like the games you buy are tied to your account, and not the machine you "purchase" them on.

From what I understand, you're technically not supposed to transfer a Wii over to someone with the games purchased. The games are licensed to the person and not to the console, which means that they expect you to wipe your data when you trade it in/sell it to someone.

As such, Nintendo would probably force eBay to shut down any auctions that include pre-purchased Virtual Console games.

If you log into your my.nintendo.com you'll notice it's your account you added on your Wii Shop.

Your Wii friend code has nothing to do with your VC games. In fact, logging into your account on Nintendo's site will show what games you've purchased/registered. I wouldn't worry.

Well, if you take into account the durability of the nintendo system over the years, as long as you don't stick some sort of explosive inside of the system, you should be good to go as far as lifetime value.

Grail has a point. I don't see Nintendo having any problems with longevity. I still have a launch GameCube that works fine.

I still have a launch N64 that works fine. I know people with working SNESes and NESes.

People talking about "fair" pricing really bugs me. The prices are totally reasonable, IMO. $12 for Super Mario 64? That's pretty sweet, since I can play that game for hours and hours. I think people expecting VC to be a good way to "sample" old games are going to be disappointed. The VC really is a place to re-live and re-play the classics from eras past. Assuming you play the games for a decent ammount of time, and not just 5 minutes, it's a great value.

The other thing is people talking about is the licensing restrictions. Sorry, but this is not Nintendo being "dishonest". This is something that's pervasive throught the software industry. You don't own software. You pay for the right to license it. Look it up, it's clearly spelled out in all the EULAs. Do you know what EULA stands for? End User License Agreement. Yup. You're purchasing a license to use.

Nintendo not wanting VC downloads to be transferrable is perfectly reasonable. This is how things work on XBL as well, and how things work in general. Again, remember, you're purchasing a single user license to play the game. You don't own it.

Also, even at the current prices, I doubt it's terribly profitable for Nintendo. It costs money to maintain servers, buy bandwidth, pay programmers, etc. The problem with distributing things over the 'nte is that as popularity increases, costs can go up quite quickly.

Honestly, I think people have unrealistic expectations, especially after having easy access via ROMs to all these old games. Think about if you couldn't play these games on the computer, and had to drag out an NES to play them, or couldn't even find the cartridge to buy if you didn't get it back in the 80s or 90s when the games were out. If you take ROMs out of the picture, I think the VC pricing really seems quite reasonable.

God, I sound like such a Nintendo appolgist :( But that's the way I see it: I don't think the VC is overpriced.

The main problem I have with VC pricing is that every game from a certain system is priced the same. In "real world" shop situations, you'll see a difference in price between games of different quality. Also, games that have been out longer drop in price.

I think they would be wise to offer "bundle" discounts as well, such as 5 N64 games for only 4000 Wii points instead of 5000 Wii points, for example. Are the prices high enough it's worth complaining about a little? Yes. Are the prices high enough it's worth complaining about a lot about? No.

I will get Mario 64 for sure, and have no problem paying $10 for it. I'll probably also get Bonk's Adventure.

It's not perfect, though. My Wii broke after a system update and now won't ready any discs at all, no matter what I do. Nintendo has yet to respond to the mail I sent them Wednesday, either. :(

I do agree for the most part though about Nintendo's quality. I have a Gamecube I bought on launch day that works PERFECTLY, and my N64 which I got in '97 still works... to a point. I have to blow on it for like a half-hour before it works, but still.

That's true, but pricing them all the same helps the consumer on some games. For instance, an SNES copy of Mario RPG costs roughly $25 used. On the VC it'll be $8 like all other SNES games, and much more affordable. I prefer playing games on consoles rather than emulation, so some of these games are price drops for me. I've been attempting to find a Super Metroid cartridge in good condition for awhile, and the cheapest I've found was $16.

My NES and SNES both still work as does my N64 and Cube:)

What's going on here? You rang Nintendo and they just said outloud what it clearly says in the Terms of Service? Well done mate, you exposed them there!

Really? I would think taking all the packaging and production costs out would leave them with pure profit for every game sold. I assume they're already planning on fixing the other aspects by means of other revenue. I mean, imagine if one of the FTP owners here got $5 for every album downloaded...

I'll end up using it sparingly and mostly for games I don't have. I won't be phasing out my trusty SNES or NES anytime soon, but I skipped the N64 and it'll be cool to play catch-up. I'm seriously hoping we'll see some titles that never came over on the original systems...I imagine Nintendo would make a pretty penny off games like the old Fire Emblems and all of those Square RPG's that never left Japan. Bangai-O for 64 wouldn't be too shabby either.

But the non-transferring thing does sound kind of lame...I was assuming it would be more like the games would be linked to an account and if you needed to, you could grab them again. That would make more sense...Maybe link the account with a serial number and have the two be transferable if need be.

The games you are buying are simply compressed ROMs with a DRM protection on it, as such these files can't be transfered since the DRM check would fail nor modified since it would break the hash check. But they can be re-created (aka re-transfered), thus generating a new DRMed ROM, Nintendo won't do it 'cause they want to rip you all they can just like every other company in this industry.

Everytime I hear/read this I crack up to the non-sense it is. I'm paying for this sandwich, but I don't own it, I simply paid for the previlege of eating it :D

LMAO like there's such thing as an honest company in this industry. Next thing you'll tell me that Google does no evil!

VC will ultimately fail simply because you can play these games for free on the PC, free always beats paid for. And if that's not enough, you can play them on PC with much more options, without any restriction and with better quality, plus it's free! Free I say.

"Fair" pricing is determined by other offering in the "market", since the other offering are free and even have better quality, free is the only fair price for VC games. As simple as that.

People have been cursing Microsoft and others in the software industry for years regarding the EULAs and strange licenses that say that you pay for products but it's not yours, then suddenly Nintendo does the same thing in a noticable way and it's alright. :D
I say noticable way because the same license applyes to games, but people tend to associate the price they pay for a game to own the phisical game disk, disk that can be lended (althrough the license doesn't allow it, so much for the good will sharing teached in pre-schools), sold or offered. Take that away and people won't see any reason to pay for stuff and then having no right to do whatever they want it that file, and infact there isn't, it's just plain digital new world rip off.

The only people with unrealistic expectation here is Nintendo who expects people to pay for stuff they can get for free, better and non restricted.

I thought the process of buying games was pretty simple. You buy a game in th store, you legally own the case, manual, and cd. What you do with it is up to you, but you can't legally copy the information on the disc as stated in the EULA.

However when it comes to Virtual Console games, you're paying to download and use the game, not to sell it as it isn't a physical item (much like how you can't sell an xbox with x amount of games saved to a hard drive) and not claim it as your own material.

Doesn't the same shit apply to 360's marketplace?

The only way it's gonna fail is if Nintendo don't update it and let it rot, but I don't see that happening with their weekly VC game additions, as small as they may be. Xbox Live Arcade has been extremely popular and it's been around a lot longer! PlayStation 3's going to feature Neo Geo games on its own service in the near future, I don't think any of them are going to go under. People can download music for free too, yet iTunes music store is thriving.

I know I'd happily bend over for the Virtual Console when Nintendo get Pilotwings 64 up on it. It's one of my favorite games ever. :(

Laugh My Ass OUT!!!

Do you have any ideia of how many terabytes of musics are traded each month? And I say terabytes to go with low numbers because the real number may go over the petabytes!! What are a few misarable millions of downloads on iTunes? Nothing, zero, nada, completely nothing, probably not even 0.0001% of the music downloads.

Sure that Nintendo may be able to get money from the scraps left by those who don't download the entire SNES + MD + N64 Romset, but how many are these? Not many and defenitely not me.

So, because everyone doesn't do it, it's suddenly not a lucrative business venture? That's fucking brilliant.

Now imagine if he had millions of people downloading from him. Servers and programmers and bandwidth all cost money. Remember, these games were originally selling for 40 or 50 dollars.

You can delete the game and re-download it at your leisure, which is way more than the iTunes Store allows. In theory, you could buy everything on VC, even though you couldn't store it all on the Wii at once.

True, but the cost of materials (the carts), shipping, marketing and overall developing/testing expenses are taken out of the equation, so you're left with pure profit on games that made back their development costs many years ago. Which...is smart business, if I do say so myself.

I'm sure if Nintendo has a full network in place, they can handle the upload requirements and still make out in the greens every month by plenty. I'm sure they thought this through and compensated for that.

I'd be curious to see the sales figures and about how much they can pocket of the game fees. Even if they only got to collect 1/2 of each VC game's fee, that's some good side money.

And really...NES games aren't that big. I'm sure even I could upload a million copies of Super Mario Brothers if I had to. At $5 apiece...Man, I'd be raking it in.

Sorry, what I meant was transfer to another console (in the event something happens). I meant make it so you can transfer another serial number to your account.

Exactly the same situation here. I keep hoping that will be one of the next games to be released. I just love the birdman stages where you fly around at your leisure.

Yet, Apple makes millions of dollars on this, continues to attract more and more people, and are showing steady, healthy growth. You're completely missing the point here. A lot of people said that if the music was there for free, NOBODY would pay for it online, ever. Yet, clearly millions of people are downloading music, movies, TV shows from iTunes. All of these things were available for free online. So, I'm not sure what your point is other than trolling and typing poorly.

Here's my speculation as to why people like iTunes: Consistent quality. You know that you're going to get 128kbps AAC (which sounds pretty sweet) when you download from iTunes. When you download music from less than legal sources, you often get stuff that's in 128kbps MP3 (ugh) or, even if it's at a decent bitrate for MP3, it might have skips and be poorly encoded. And let's not even talk about tagging.

Same reason for TV shows. The quality of the encode you get from iTunes is stellar -- 480p h.264. Delicious. Many TV ripping groups are doing 320p XviD. I haven't bought a feature length movie from iTunes, but they're also in 480p h.264.

Anyway, going back to Nintendo, I think this also applies to the VC: of course, the games are still exactly the same, but... on an emulator, you're using the keyboard (or a joypad if you feel like dealing with drivers and poorly made pads). VC, you get to use a high quality controller made by Nintendo. Plus, you get to play the games on your TV, just like they were supposed to be -- something always felt weird about playing a SNES game on the computer, to me. Didn't feel natural, somehow.

So basically, stop trolling.

Double Post:
It's a very smart business, defintely. You have free content, and your only costs are distribution.

It wouldn't surprise me if the money they make from the VC is helping to alllow them to set up this network in place in the first place. They haven't done anything on this scale before with online gaming. Online gaming on the DS is a bit different, the cost of starting that up can be recouped from licensing fees from games. Setting up a huge network for millions of online gamers on home consoles is going to cost a ton more money in initial capital than setting up one for people who occasionally play online with their DS.

My main point above was that the VC isn't Nintendo's big money maker, nor is it their loss leader -- that would be the console. The general model for console manufacturers is that you sell the console at cost or take a loss and make the money and profit on licensing fees for people who make games (and on 1st party titles, the markup that normally gets passed on for the licensing fee turns into straight profit).

If something happens to it and you send it to Nintendo, I've heard (and it's been mentioned in this thread) that they will take care of that and set you up with a transfer.