| IxisNaugus said: I take it you both (Rainbird and Mise) must know a lot about the justice system and suitable punishments to make such bold claims. I'd love to know how you both came to the conclusion that this punishment is far too severe and he doesn't deserve it. This man chose to break the law, he was caught and ordered to pay compensation for the damage he caused the company. The loss of potential sales and revenue was a direct result of this individuals actions; the long term damage goes beyond Nintendo themselves and it was revealed that future release dates for Australia may be hurt because of this. Or are you going to tell me he has not in fact caused much damage? If so, please elaborate on that. Justice has been served and the law has spoken. We can go on all day about how harsh it is to "end this mans life" but i shall direct you to some words that seemed to have gone ignored previously: If you cannot do the time then do not do the crime. |
If I'm not mistaken AU Wii games use to ship at about 100 AUD, right?
They're asking 30 AUD for each download.
Now, first of all, that doesn't mean "they're assuming 30 og every 100 pirates would buy the game and didn't because of this" as someone has said. You'd have to take away all the extra costs and work only with Nintendo's actual profit per game. So take away things like manufacturing (incld packaging), shippiment (and overall distribution), all operational costs and the actual retailer's cut. That's how much each game sold is actually worth to Nntendo. I've seen estimates where Nintendo gets about 65% of gross margin on it's sales to retailers, wich have their own margin before getting to the 100 AUD price point. Now, I've seen studies on this a few years ago, and for th US, so it may not apply perfectly, but retailers used to buy games at about 60%-70% of MSRP. So let's go with 65% again and that lands us at a little 42.25 AUD per game. So charging 30 for each download means that over 70% of the people who downloaded this would buy the game otherwise but won't anymore, wich is a ridiculous claim.
There's several other factors.
First, the download was avaiable prior to launch, wich means even people who would buy the game, even people with preorders, just downloaded it so that they could play earlier, and bought the game anyway. Comparing the number of downloads before and after launch could give you a higher downloaded-and-won't-buy/downloaded ratio, but even that doesn't translate directly to lost sales, as not everyone who downloads and doesn't buy would have bought otherwise.
Another point is the free marketing push. We can say to wich extent this may actually help sales (as they can't say to wich the downloads actually hinder them), but having thousands of people playing the game and obvioulsy showing others must help generating hype.
The fact that the game won't sell to anywhere near 100% of Wii's install base is further proof that applying such high download to lost sale ratio is outlandish. Also, people who can have a Wii that can play downloaded game will, on avarage, buy less original games anyway. Besides, after launch (when the downloaded-and-won't-buy/downloaded ratio is larger as I said earlier) there where many other sources for getting this, so many people would just get it elsewhere, meaning, again, a much lesser lost sale/download ratio on his account.
And that's just for starters, but anyway, I doubt he's acutally paying this :P
