The world is nothing but a business. Once you get to be old and almost done with five years of college like me you'll come to realize that.
Nintendo is a money-making business that caters to families, much like Walt Disney or Hasbro. Instead of making movies/amusement parks or toys, they make video games. They want to make sure their product and customer service is tops for the same reason Honda always tries to beat Toyota--so that people will buy their products and keep coming back to them. They also want to go towards specific demographics that others do not. In Nintendo's case, this is easy--the Wii and DS have been selling even to non-traditional video game players thanks to the fitness/sports games and brain games, respectively. Wiis are popping up at nursing homes, are recommended by doctors, and have helped Nintendo sell more systems than they had during the past few generations. Likewise, the DS can be found in the hands of an eight year old just as frequently as it can be spotted in the possession of a 45 year old using it for sudoko (or even MarioKart--both of my parents and my uncle are approaching 60 and all of them play MarioKart and occasionally will beat their son/nephew).
With that in mind, let's talk about the games and the DRM contained within. About ten years ago people started sharing files online. Music was the biggest problem but other folks started sharing Nintendo ROMs. The problem with both is that they are copyrighted (well, most of them--there are always non-commercial/public domain files out there, but we'll ignore them for now). Apple stepped in to make the legal purchase of digital music possible when iTunes was launched six years ago. Software had been sold online since at least 1995 (one of the pioneers was a tiny company that sold Mac clip art, in fact; I bought a package of clip art from them many years ago). Nintendo realized that they had the same problem as the music industry, except the content in question was old games that hadn't been on store shelves in years. They tried re-releasing them on other systems, but some purists felt they were not true to form (i.e. the added voices in the Super Mario Advance line for GBA seemed to make some upset; I personally like the voices).
This is an area where Nintendo really catered to its customers--it made the old games available for purchase. Suddenly, the folks whose NES no longer worked could play SMB3 again for the low cost of $5 (which is actually half of what SMB3 was going for at The Exchange last week). Old games could now be played on modern hardware that was still under warranty. In fact, a "classic controller" was even released to accommodate some titles (namely SNES games). Nintendo also released Sega games, killing two birds with one stone in the process.
Just as Apple's iTunes had come up with a legal way to buy MP3s, Nintendo suddenly offered a way to get old games legally (and even supplied the emulators right inside the Wii). DRM was installed for one reason--to prevent piracy.
Piracy leads to lost sales. If everyone was pirating Wii VC games, what do you think the odds would be that Nintendo would develop more games for VC? The chances would go down because nobody would be buying anything. DRM was necessary and proper and still is despite what music companies have done (I actually get a feeling we'll be going back to DRM files within three years if the sales start to slip).
Sure, DRM has its problems, which are well-documented online, but every system has its problems. I'm a supporter of DRM because I am an aspiring writer and realize that there may be online textbooks in the future. (I hope to write mathematics textbooks specifically for gifted elementary students). If we can't control piracy, the economy will tank!!!
I've done extensive research on copyright laws due to my aspirations of publishing my works someday so if you have any questions let me know and I can see if I've got an answer.
