Crossroads

I hope that most of the Nintendo board room is in a quandary right now over the homebrew situation on the Wii. Their brazen disinterest in network services and gaming in the last generation has cost them dear in this one, with the Wii being the most insecure and exposed system in gaming history. Yet, where Nintendo are failing to tackle the real threat to their business - widespread game piracy - they are doing more than a good job of disabling what I would call reasonable use of the system as a homebrew platform. What they have to say, and indeed decide to do, in response to the fan translation release of Fatal Frame IV (Project Zero in Europe) will speak volumes about their intentions towards the current game market, and the attitude towards their own platform.

It took the worldwide might of a single game - Final Fantasy VII - to open the eyes of Western publishers and see that it wasn't genre or culture that would turn a prospective audience cold. In this new awakening, it was story and gameplay of any type of game that would create the right buzz and the right mood with a player. Whilst Western RPG publishers had struggled for years to carve out enough change to keep them afloat, their options and profits were about to explode exponentially. Those early years of the PlayStation became a golden age for publishers of niche Japanese games and RPGs, and would've almost certainly left Square, Enix and Atlus silently fuming that they hadn't been able to exploit their products from the SNES era in quite the same way, especially given how popular fan translations of their Japanese only products were becoming.

There is always going to be a limit with what a fan translation group can do. Games like Tokimeki Memorial, which has been the focus of many a hacking group for the decade, are impeded by space restrictions for our unwieldy alphabet in cartridge form, and by the inherently more complex nature of translating CD based games, from redubbing FMV to simple understanding of the deeper architecture of the machine, which is why the patch for Fatal Frame IV - which runs off an SD card and the original disc - is so exquisite in how swiftly it was developed and the method it takes to at least try and avoid piracy of the game in the first place.

Although I share the understanding that if you let another individual or group alter your IP you put your own copyrights in danger if you don't pursue those responsible, there is also an equally important argument that you risk losing your target audience altogether. Recent comments from publishers have shown a refocusing of "pure" game titles back to 360 and PS3. Other titles either arrive very late or stripped down and designed to appeal to the average Wii user. This is why, more than ever, Nintendo need whatever traditional, back to basics games they can muster in this time of change, and if fan translators are willing to do this for them, as they have with Fatal Frame IV, then they certainly shouldn't make moves to punish a community that wants to play them.

Nintendo are trapped by a monster of their own making. They chose to embrace one world, and ignore the other, and now I fear with the advent of coming motion technologies from the other manufacturers with vastly deeper pockets to market an develop them, Nintendo don't have a lot of room to attract the kind of titles or market they need to sustain a long term business model. There's still time, of course, but attacking those who have made great strides in development and modification just by opening up Nintendo's security holes can only do more harm than good.