Nintendo beefs up anti-piracy measures. Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata announces this Friday that its planned handheld game device with 3-D technology will have strict security in a move to guard against software theft. Though he was lip tied about the machine, but confirmed that it will be shown at the upcoming E3 trade show in Los Angeles.
The problem of piracy is getting serious day by day, especially in Asia and Europe, and added to the recent drop in game software sales in Europe, Iwata said at a Tokyo hotel. But he declined to go into particulars on the designed measures, saying such comments will merely give hints to the culprits. Iwata was also worried people were becoming more liberal of piracy. “We fear a kind of thinking is become widespread that paying for software is meaningless,” he said. “We have a strong sense of crisis about this problem.”
Coming to the machine, Nintendo’s new DS-type handheld with 3-D capabilities doesn’t require special glasses to urge new growth in the gaming industry. But analysts are withholding judgment because no one has yet seen the machine. Iwata agreed people were already worried about the possible health effects of 3-D gaming, such as on children’s eyesight. To this he said that the machine will have the feature to turn off/on the 3-D to play games. According to the Kyoto-based maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games, it’s set to go on sale sometime in the fiscal year through March 2011.
Even though Nintendo’s consoles are dedicated gaming machines, they’ve been light on features compared to what PSP, PS3, 360, Zune, and iDevices offer. It’s quite possible that Iwata is very serious as he has stated interest into a free mobile network similar to that of Amazon’s Kindle with 3G. It’ll knock up the cost of the hardware. So be ready for it.
Tags: beefs, d technology, e3 trade, pokemon games, software theft, zune