Yet another case of consumers getting screwed.
This week, Nintendo released a new version of the Nintendo Wii. It’s just like the old Nintendo Wii, except it’s black. Apparently, that’s enough to get lots of Wii owners excited enough to buy a new one.
The Nintendo Wii includes a Virtual Console. Games for the Virtual Console are purchased online and downloaded directly on to your Wii, where they are stored. There are approximately 350 games available on the virtual console, each one costing between $5 and $12.
So right about now you might be asking yourself, “How do I get all those games I purchased from my old Wii to my new Wii?” And the answer is, you don’t.
So to those of you who have spent a couple hundreds bucks on Virtual Console games, you’re just out of luck if you want to upgrade. And if I decide to buy one of the new black Wii consoles, do you know how much money I’m going to lose?
Nothing. Nada. Zero Doleros. Because I refuse to support virtual gaming. I have said it time and time again. When these companies make stupid decisions, we have to stop supporting them! And thank God, you people finally listened to me! The Virtual Console has been a complete failure!
Oh wait, no it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia, Nintendo has sold more than 10 million virtual console games. That means you people have spent between $50 million and $120 million dollars on games that you don’t really own. It’s just unbelievable. And it’s unbelievable that people continue to support systems such as this one.
I vote with my wallet. We must vote with our wallets! By supporting systems in which you download (but don’t own) games, you’re allowing game companies to do this to us again, and again, and again.
Wait — not to us. To you.
Nintendo isn’t the only culprit, of course. Electronic Arts announced this week that all of their future games will come with a one-time code for online play. Gamers who buy used copies of EA’s games will have to pay an additional $10 for online play. Sony made headlines earlier this week by removing the Other OS feature from their PlayStaton 3 consoles, a feature that many PS3 owners (such as myself) paid for and had used. Last year we had the story about Amazon deleting books off of people’s Kindles. It’s like they’ve screwed up every single attempt at digital content delivery. The best of the bunch has been iTunes, and the fact that iTunes is the best of anything makes me want to bash my own brains out with an iPod.
I hate to sound like a crotchety old man sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair while waving my fist in the air, but I feel like game companies are personally daring me to never buy another modern console or game again. And with all the old games I have piled up around my house (both real and via emulation), I honestly do have a lifetime supply (at least) of video games to play without putting up with this crap any longer.
Man, I really do sound like a crotchety old man. But at least I’m a crotchety old man who owns my own video games.
So what happens if your Wii console breaks and you need a new one? You lose all of your DLC? That can’t be right, Nintendo must have some failsafe in place I would think. (hope)
I’m sure Nintendo themselves can take care of transferring licenses in the event of a repair, but there’s no way for the end-user to do it.
If your Wii breaks, Nintendo has a couple of options. The first is called a “quick or fast replacement process”. If your Wii is under warranty and you put a credit card on file, I believe they will cross ship you a new Wii. If you do this, you lose all your Virtual Console purchases. Period.
If you deal directly with Nintendo, there (sometimes, depending on who you ask) is hope. Some people online have reported that, if your Wii breaks or if you upgrade, you can send your Wii to Nintendo and have them move your old games over to your new system. From what I have read this process takes 2+ weeks. More recently, people are reporting that Nintendo has a way to reassign your VC games to a new Wii. According to one fellow, when he tried this he was asked for his “old console serial number, the new console serial number, info about my account and a copy of the receipt receipt of the new console.” Unfortunately for this particular fellow, he did not know the policy and had already thrown away his old, broken Wii without retaining the serial number.
It’s hard to know the full truth because I’m only going by random forum posts discovered in Google, but there are a lot more “it didn’t work” posts than there are “it worked great” posts.
Keep in mind that all of this depends on Nintendo providing this service. You, at your home, can do none of this. You can download VC games and you can back them up to an SD card, but you cannot transfer them to another Wii without Nintendo’s assistance. When Nintendo stops offering this service, it’s all over*.
(I mean, legally, of course. Pirates figured out how to copy VC games a long time ago.)
Wow, good timing.
Nintendo’s No-Transfer Policy Could Burn Wii’s Biggest Fans
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/black-wii-upgrade
Isn’t your Wii modded?
I don’t understand what that has to do with the topic.
That’s why digital content scares the crap out of me. Here’s to owning the real thing even though they might take up a lot space.
I’m right there with you, Rob. With physical media, they can print what they want on the piece of paper, but as the cliche goes, possession is 9/10 of the law. And courts have been a lot better about protecting First Sale rights than they have been Fair Use rights.
When all you purchase is the right to use a file, I don’t want to say you deserve what you get, but let’s look at the track records of the people trying to sell us these files. They’re the same people who’ve been trying to sell us the same content over and over for the last 40 years, with varying degrees of success. They’re trying to get back to the days when vinyl records wore out, which allowed things like Dark Side of the Moon staying on the charts for 15 YEARS. They sold 45 million copies, but I guarantee it wasn’t to 45 million different people.
Unfortunately, Congress and the courts really don’t understand the issues here. They see all these numbers that content producers pull out of the air, but since by and large they don’t consume media themselves, they don’t see the other side of it. So they pass laws that treat ripping a DVD to your laptop or portable video device as equivalent to driving drunk and killing someone. They protect First Sale, because most of them probably remember buying textbooks and reselling them at the end of the semester. They can relate to that.
If the only way to retain some rights of ownership is to not buy digital media at all, well, I’m in. Rob, is there room on your porch for another crotchety old man in a rocking chair?
I tried typing this up a few times yesterday, both here and in the forums, but each time I just seemed to end up going all over the place before deciding to scrap it.
But basically, I agree with you 100%. I was somewhat on the fence about it before, but after thinking about it a lot lately I’ve come to something of a personal decision – from here on out, I refuse to support any digital distribution service that locks my data into proprietary systems of any kind. That goes for hardware systems (consoles) as well as software ones (Steam). I was somewhat open to Steam previously, but I realize now that it’s basically just the same problem in a different suit.
I’m not going to go out and start protesting or anything, but to me it’s just a personal choice. I have absolutely no faith in this idea that these companies are just making “mistakes” here and there, but basically are just trying to “get it right” and, I don’t know, be our best buds or whatever – the sheer mountain of evidence in the form of headlines such as this EA thing has convinced me that these guys are pretty much willfully and intentionally trying to use these systems as leveraging mechanisms to strongarm people into doing whatever the hell they want, regardless of whether it may happen to be invasive, or just plain wrong.
I don’t think they’re evil, and I’m sure they’re just doing what’s in their own best interests in terms of profitability. But just because something might be in their best interests doesn’t negate the possibility of it being completely against ours. I think that’s the case here, and that’s why I just refuse to go along with it any longer.
I have similar feelings about “the cloud” which I think will become a much more prominent issue down the line, but for now I think I’ll end it here. Suffice it to say that I’ve reached the point where sacrificing my freedom and privacy in exchange for a little convenience is no longer a deal I’m willing to make. Those things are just too damn valuable to me now.
Its not what you know its who you know.
Eye Eye caption Flack, Roms on the horizon and Mod Chips Ahoy!
I’ll never eat at KFC again though.
must check for typos before pressing that button. Captain.
Why can’t you transfer your purchased content onto the SD card and then reinstall from that card into your new Wii?