The future of the Nintendo Wii - DRM and resale implications

Millions of people buy a Wii, and it works. I buy one (list price) and our 2nd remote won't stay "synchronized" (connected) to the console.

I try not to think about this sort of thing too much. I'm sure it's not personal.

My balky remote means I've had to spend time with the manual. There's a suspicious volume of discussion on troubleshooting the remotes, and on the complexities of using older Nintendo games (example: Classic, meaning modern, controller vs. GameCube controller). Mixed among this is a very brief discussion of how Nintendo's digital rights management works for the "Virtual Console Games".

Briefly, there are three classes of Nintendo games for the Wii system:

1. Nintendo Wii games shipped on optical (CD/DVD like) discs. Game data is stored either in the console or in optional 2GB SD card.
2. Nintendo GameCube games - also optical disc based. Game data is stored in 1-2 optional GameCube memory card(s).
3. Virtual Console: games for NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx 15, NEOGEO and "more". Game data is stored in the Wii console or in optional 2GB SD card.

The Virtual Console games shipped in various cartridge formats, they now are downloadable and run in emulation environments on the the powerful Wii processor.

It's the Virtual Console games that have the most interesting Digital Rights Management implications. I suspect that a future version of the Will will use this infrastructure for modern games; the current console doesn't have enough storage to allow this.

So let's assume that the Virtual Console infrastructure is the future. What happens to those games when you try to sell a Nintendo Wii?

Page 61 of the Wii operations manual tells us what to do:

1. Format Wii system memory. This removes downloaded content, but it can still be recovered for free from the Wii Shop Channel Account.
2. Remove the Wii Shop Channel Account. This removes "records of your transactions and rights to downloaded software".

In other words, to sell a Nintendo Wii, you must first destroy your Virtual Console games.

Ouch.

Maybe Nintendo will figure out a way to move games to a new machine, but there's nothing about that in the documentation. The excellent Wikipedia article on the Wii says:

The SD card can be used for uploading photos as well as backing up saved game data and downloaded Virtual Console games. To use the SD slot for transferring game saves, an update must be installed. An installation can be initiated from the Wii options menu through an Internet connection, or by inserting a game disc containing the updated firmware. As a presently uncircumvented system of digital rights management, Virtual Console data cannot be restored to any system except the unit of origin.

It's certainly interesting to watch how the evolution of DRM.

Update 3/23/2008: See the comments. There may be a way to access the accounts and restore access to the virtual games after selling a Wii -- but it's not well documented. I assume Nintendo will need to figure this out eventually. They'll probably copy whatever Apple does with the iPhone.

* Good luck figuring out which of three classes of controller will work with the Virtual Console Games and the storage relationships to the Wii SD card and the optional Wii GameCube Memory Card. This Wikipedia article tells us that the "classic controller" works with all of the emulation games, but the GameCube controller is almost as good. On the other hand, there are Game Cube games that don't work with the "classic" controller. I think if you don't mind the long cables and you have the Wii console well secured, the GameCube controllers are preferred.

PS. Even when I log out of my personalized Google search, today a brief post of mine is the 2nd hit on a search of "Nintendo Wii digital rights management". Weird.

Update 3/31/2008

An interesting corollary of the Wii DRM -- you really don't want to return a console.

Please do not return your system to the retail store. All of your Wii Shop data, including games and points will be lost. They are non-refundable and non-transferrable. If you don't have a Wii Shop Account and you elect to return your product to the store, you must first follow the Delete Usage procedure described in your manual to remove any personal pictures, email addresses or other information that may be on your system.

Updaters: From Diff to Whole (and Sparkle)

This TidBITS article brings back memories for old geeks:

TidBITS Problem Solving: Tales from the Sausage Factory: Why Those Big Downloads for Simple Updates?

...And then at the end you have whole-app updaters such as Sparkle, which is what we use (see "Sparkle Improves Application Update Experience," 2007-08-20). The Mac developer community seems to have more or less standardized around Sparkle these days. I'm amazed at how often I open and app and find that it's using Sparkle to keep itself up to date. Aside from the programs where I implemented it myself, I don't recall the last time I saw an application using a more granular updater. Even Apple seems to publish monster updates for their apps. They use more granular packages for updates to the OS itself, but on the other hand there seem to be a lot of problems caused by these which are fixed by re-applying the big combo updaters they put out...

In the old days updaters were pretty small, typically diffs. Those days are gone -- the cost of bandwidth is less than the cost of the problems that arise with anything less than a whole-app update.

In my real job we still use an old data update solution that's basically a diff-type update. Nowadays whole-data is the only way to go.

Aperture 2.01 bug: retouch broken for grayscale images

This is a verified bug -- but it may be limited to grayscale images.

Apple - Support - Discussions - Retouch/Clone problem ...: "I can't get Retouch (or clone) to do anything at all. They act like they're working but nothing in the image is changed. However the Spot and Patch tool will work on these images/files."

I'm using 10.4, but it sounds like this is a bug everywhere.

Update 3/22: I exported as PNG and reimported and the tool works, so it's not broken for every file format. Then I found the "limit to 1024" PNG export is broken -- it ignores crops. Apple must punish the QA group for finding bugs.

SharePoint 2007 and non-Office documents: didn't Microsoft lose a court case for this sort of thing?

SharePoint 2007 is ubiquitous now. It's eliminated most other document management and "collaboration" solutions in corporate settings.

Office 2007 Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents work pretty well in a managed Sharepoint document repository (library).

Oddly enough, other documents don't work nearly as well. They're very much second class citizens, with an unnecessarily clumsy and error-prone workflow for check-out, check-in, versioning and editing.

Funny how that works.

I thought Microsoft got in a wee bit of trouble for these sorts of games -- once upon a time. Too long ago, perhaps. Certainly nobody in the current US justice department is paying attention now.

Google's GData OS X cocoa library now iPhone compatible: photos to Picasa, etc.

The "one more thing" reference in this Google Mac blog posting seems appropriate ...

Official Google Mac Blog: New frontiers with Google Data APIs and Objective-C

And one more thing...

The source code for the GData Objective-C Client Library is now compatible with the iPhone SDK as well. Perhaps you want your iPhone software to send photos to a Picasa Web Albums account, or keep a journal of phone calls automatically in Blogger. Maybe your iPhone application accesses a database of information from a Google Spreadsheet or from Google Base. With the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library, creating software for these tasks is straightforward.

If you are writing iPhone software, just drag the "GData Sources" group folder from the GData project file into your iPhone project, and use the GData APIs as you would when writing a Mac application. The Objective-C Client Library is an open-source project, so you can find links to the sources and documentation on the project page.

So those 100,000 SDK developer wannabes can now easily leverage Google's entire suite of services with very little extra effort.

Wow.

The iPhone SDK-OS is like the Palm OS -- and that's a good thing

When the SDK came out I was bemused to find similarities to the Palm OS world: No multitasking, data access limited to the application's data.

Since then we've learned that Apple's applications do multitask (if I actually owned an iPhone [2] I'd have noted that obvious fact, but I write these posts very quickly) and some iPhone partners (AOL, ?Adobe) will be allowed access to multitasking. For most developers though, developing for the iPhone OS X is rather like developing for Palm OS [1].

Fubo.org has made a persuasive case over the past few days that these are justified and measured constraints given the current state of iPhone development. The articles are well worth reading, but I particularly liked the fine way he concluded his last post:

furbo.org · More brain surgery…

...If you’re still unconvinced, let me ask you one final question: do you want to get IM notifications while you’re making a 911 call?

[1] One developer I read noted that the original Palm OS SDK had a more sophisticated 'wake me when an event matches my entry on the event registration queue' function than he found in the current iPhone SDK.

[2] Gordon's laws of acquisition mean I don't buy until my demands are met ...

iPhoto can't merge Libraries -- but neither can Aperture

What can I say?

Aperture: Merging Libraries confirms you ... can't merge Libraries.

You need to export project-by-project-by-project then import project-by-project-by ...

It's awe inspiring, really.

And now I own this sucker ...