A new system would track fraud and link Club coins to product returns.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/30193
Nintendo is considering an alternative registration system for Club Nintendo, which would do away with registration cards, as revealed by a patent application published today.
The registration codes would instead be printed right on the box. The hope is that more people would register their products instead of missing or losing the inserts.
While printing the code on the exterior could lead to fraud, Nintendo envisions a system where all registrations are tracked with purchase information. If an account has several duplicate registrations, the customer's account is flagged and potentially revoked. An example is if a rogue store employee copied and registered serial numbers after selling an item to a customer, but before the customer had a chance to register it.
The system would also tie in with retailers in an attempt to reduce fraud. Upon purchase, the code is scanned into a computer at the retailer. This tells Nintendo that the product was purchased legitimately, which is of special concern in regard to Nintendo point cards. If customers register a product on Club Nintendo but later return it, the Club Nintendo coins for that product are removed from the account. If a customer has already spent those points, he/she will be disallowed from returning the product. The system would require a computer at each retailer to handle scanning and reporting of the serial numbers.
The system patent was applied for on Nov. 15, 2010, and while it includes Wii products as examples, the ideas must have been around for much longer as the application text references the SNES, Game Boy, and Nintendo 64. Nintendo of America was represented in the latest round of patent filings, with Peter J. Junger and Brian Cheney listed as the system's designers.
If a customer has already spent those points, he/she will be disallowed from returning the product.
I also don't see this happening. Or if it did it wouldn't last long.
Once a code has been registered, it's useless and can't be used anymore.
And when buying a used game I sure don't expect to be able to use the code. Another reason to do it automagically and not give out coins for used games that have had the coins redeemed. Tragic, I know.
Indeed, I could see things going very badly if this were implemented, assuming retailers would even be up for the extra hassle of running the Nintendo system.
There seems to be a standard solution for things like this, eShop cards use some sort of register verification that only activates the code in them after they're bought. This is reused from several cellphone-related cards (and things like iTunes or Facebook cards).Yeah, the patent application basically covers this too. I guess for it to be feasible, they'd have to make it compatible with the gift card verification services, but I wonder about all the smaller shops and resellers... and the increased customer support headache if anything went wrong.
i remember back in the day when they had free zelda collection for gamecube. I didn't have enough coins so I went to blockbuster and stole the inserts. Since i didn't steal the game or anything they didn't care but were confused.
