Japan makes it illegal to mod consoles and save games

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

10/10 very enforcable

[MajinSano]

I know others have qualms about modding and such, but I will put it out there that I don't.  On that note, I hope these new laws don't find there way over to the U.S.

 

Also, I am not sure how to interpret this law when it comes to Akihabara (In relation to suicidalfranco's post) stores that sell retro video games.  Is this new law one that will hurt the industry or not?

 

As for Nintendo having a hand in this, I bet they are the ones who came up with it... considering Nintendo's huge move against ROM sites recently.

[Adramalech]

Goddammit soulja boy... 

[TacoSenpai]

16 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

How much money do you wanna bet that Nintendo was heavily involved with this?

Honestly after the whole soulja boy fiasco this seems oddly convenient.

[DeScruff]

23 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

As tech savvy as Japan is...... Why are consoles so big over there compared to PC gaming?

 

You'd think that would be the epicenter of PC gaming really.

That would be where you are wrong.
Its really only cities (and even then, most specifically Tokyo) that is truly techy. The rest of the country is surprisingly tech barren. And even then most of that tech is... 'Apple Like' in the sense that whats happening under the hood is completely hidden and closed off to the user/public. It might as well just be a magic box that does what you want.

'Tech Cram schools' in Tokyo report that many students and teachers can't touch type, or navigate their keyboards very well. And many in Programing/IT industries only start to get real computer experience in University...
From what Ive heard PCs are often viewed as business machines much in the way most of us in the west viewed Blackberrys, and other early 'Smartphones'. I think I read somewhere that under 50% of Japanese homes have a computer, and I know a 2015 study by the Japanese Cabinet Office, showed that only 30% of Japanese high schoolers use laptops, and 16% use desktops.

Under these conditions I'm not surprised a law like this came to be...

[Trik'Stari]

On 1/6/2019 at 6:54 PM, Arika S said:

implying that tech savvy people should only be playing on PC is tip toeing into the "PCMR" circle which makes no sense. you can be tech savvy and still only play games on console.

If all i games i played were available on console, i would probably primarily play that so i dont have to worry about specs of my PC and if i need to upgrade to get the best out of the game, worrying if my CPU is the issue, or the GPU. I would be perfectly content with playing on console and just have a tablet/laptop for my computer/browsing needs. But alas, that likely will not happen.

 

Arcades & console parlors very common in Japan, much more so than they are in the west. so they will stick with the hardware they are most familiar with if they want to play at home. Japanese publishers very rarely port their games across to PC because the console market is so big in japan. since most people play on console, there's little to no reason to play on PC if you want to play with friends.

 

There's also a vast majority of games on steam do not have Japanese as an option, if you cant understand a game, you wont play it.

 

Another aspect being that some of the more popular genre's in japan, JRPGs, Dating sims, Visual Novels, fighting games etc are primarily made as console exclusives. they only make their way onto PC when they are brought over to the west since there's very little market and therefore profitability in Japan for PC games.

 

and now with mobile gaming taking off in Japan, there's even less reason for developers to release anything on PC

 

Generally the only games that you will find are primarily played on PC in japan are MMOs but with something like FF14 also being on console they likely will play mostly on that

 

EDIT: there is also a bad stigma attached to people who game on PC, and nobody wants a bad stigma in Japan due to their culture. If you game on the PC you’re not one of the "flock", you’re an outsider, and nobody wants an “outsider” tag attached to them

I wasn't saying "they should", I was saying "you'd think they would". Although I'd be willing to say "they should" because I find consoles and mobile to be detrimental to the video game market overall, at least from a consumer aspect.

 

Still, I can see why they don't with what you and @Sypran have said.

 

Makes me sad lol.

[Thaldor]

35 minutes ago, Sypran said:

That would be where you are wrong.
Its really only cities (and even then, most specifically Tokyo) that is truly techy. The rest of the country is surprisingly tech barren. And even then most of that tech is... 'Apple Like' in the sense that whats happening under the hood is completely hidden and closed off to the user/public. It might as well just be a magic box that does what you want.

'Tech Cram schools' in Tokyo report that many students and teachers can't touch type, or navigate their keyboards very well. And many in Programing/IT industries only start to get real computer experience in University...
From what Ive heard PCs are often viewed as business machines much in the way most of us in the west viewed Blackberrys, and other early 'Smartphones'. I think I read somewhere that under 50% of Japanese homes have a computer, and I know a 2015 study by the Japanese Cabinet Office, showed that only 30% of Japanese high schoolers use laptops, and 16% use desktops.

Under these conditions I'm not surprised a law like this came to be...

Second to that. Then there is also the "cultural" differences like Japanese used emails around the same time from their phones as we texted, but most of the Japanese used payphones and landlines. IIRC where "west of the world" pushes schools to use more and more IT and encourages students to use laptops, in Japan the school builds very much on handwriting and books and they are very heavily rooted because traditions.

You could say it's kind of same kind of oddity as English in Japan, as much as Japan seems to be huge technology center and it could be thought that with it they would have good communication skills, even that they have had English in their school curriculums for eternity tells that, but the truth is most of the Japanese are quite helpless with English especially speaking it and quite a lot that is because in schools they learn very basic English and only to write it and it doesn't really help the case that English media (movies, TV-shows etc.) is just as rare as Japanese media is in the west and while blockbusters are released in Japan they are dubbed.

This language barrier also affects a lot to the tech because still some Japanese softwares are coded in "Japanese" (best example that comes to my mind is the Pokemon games, the first gen games were coded in Japanese and Gamefreak changed to "normal" English coding with the second gen games and this most notably affected that 1st and 2nd gen games were totally uncombatible with each other) and earlier (in 90's and 00's) it greated quite a huge tear between Japan and the west technologically, because while everything seems quite a lot the same there were huge differences (you could say it's like Windows, even when EN-US (American English) and something like FI-FI (Finnish) version of Windows 10 Pro is still the same Windows, there's actually features missing and behaving differently in the Finnish version compared to the American English version which has been translated to Finnish with language package).

[Canada EH]

On 1/6/2019 at 3:56 PM, Thaldor said:

5 million yen

Which is meaningless, those are just words. I know what they are trying to do and it is just to show face that is all.

 

Its like when the Government Safety guy comes around, everyone laughs at him. Maybe enforced if there is extreme negligence, but max this or that, never!

[TacoSenpai]

18 hours ago, Thaldor said:



This language barrier also affects a lot to the tech because still some Japanese softwares are coded in "Japanese" (best example that comes to my mind is the Pokemon games, the first gen games were coded in Japanese and Gamefreak changed to "normal" English coding with the second gen games and this most notably affected that 1st and 2nd gen games were totally uncombatible with each other) and earlier (in 90's and 00's) it greated quite a huge tear between Japan and the west technologically, because while everything seems quite a lot the same there were huge differences (you could say it's like Windows, even when EN-US (American English) and something like FI-FI (Finnish) version of Windows 10 Pro is still the same Windows, there's actually features missing and behaving differently in the Finnish version compared to the American English version which has been translated to Finnish with language package).

I have always wondered how algorithms or even simple markup would work with different languages hell a different writing system altogether. 

[Thaldor]

30 minutes ago, LordOTaco said:

I have always wondered how algorithms or even simple markup would work with different languages hell a different writing system altogether. 

Language really doesn't affect anything, what affects are the characters (I don't know any coding language that would use anything else than the wester left to right up to down writing system, but there might be some compilers that can use different writing systems). I'm not a coder and know that much about it. But what I think some older coding languages and compilers had problems with were basicly coders using generaly unsupported characters (like nordic åäö, Japanese/Chinese or other language limited characters) in variable names and could have even been in comments within the code and if the compiler didn't support them they could affect how the variable behaves or writes into the memory causing the code go haywire (you can think it like "memory coding" (arbitary code execution) in older games where if you do certain things in certain order you basicly write in the memory some different state that let's you do something else, like the famous Super Mario World "speedrun" or the "clitch" how you can obtain Mew in the first generation Pokemon games which both are basicly writing code into the memory by playing the game). But those are quite rare problems because rarely, even in the past, someone was to change the language they use or the compiler they use within the project and use the same code, more often the problem is to try to combine or make support for a program that uses different character sets than the other.

 

But don't take my word for it because I can be very wrong about this. Also this is going very much offtopic...

[corrado33]

Eh, consoles.... PC modding has always been there and if someone tries to take that away they'll have hell to go through, and even if it were to pass, people would just pirate the mods anyway. What are they going to say? You can't download this copyright free software developed by someone who isn't selling it? Yeah... that'll work. What, monitor the game itself by always on internet DRM. Yeah nope, the crackers get through that quickly, and it's extremely easy to block games from connecting to the internet. 

[Delicieuxz]

Prohibiting people from modifying their own property is an unreasonable action at all times. So is any attempt to obstruct people from selling their property or from buying the general items that other people are selling of their own property.

 

I wonder if Japan has any existing law that would let this new legislation be challenged in court.