If you were one of the misguided games publishers who thought that games piracy was only a problem for the PC market then you might want to take a look at this and see the first example of a homebrew program that lets the Nintendo Wii play pirated games without a hardware modification.
And considering the sheer number of Nintendo Wiis that have been sold and how easy the homebrew is to enable - the details of which we aren't going to go into here, but our understanding is that it's based around the same Twilight Princess exploit as most other Wii homebrew programs - this could be quite a problem for Nintendo.
Ostensibly called the Wii Back-up Loader, the program allows users to run pirated Wii games in .ISO format without any trouble whatsoever. Though the program claims it is made for people who want to back-up the games they already own, the primary market is obvious.
What's most interesting about all this is that the exploit that the program is based around isn't new at all, and members of the Wii homebrew community had actually already discovered this and tried to contact Nintendo about patching the problem before it became widely known. Nintendo however repeatedly ignored emails from the community and did not respond to attempts to enter into a dialogue with the community.
So, you can't help but feel that Nintendo has shot themselves in the foot here.
Piracy is obviously something that concerns Nintendo massively, especially with the DS being massively pirated for too thanks to the popularity of the R4DS card system, so it'll be interesting to see if any official response comes out of this.
How do you think piracy is shaping the industry? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Piracy softmod comes to the Wii
Posted by Engeneer Moris at 2:53 PM
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1 comments:
Wow, a lot of misinformed statements here that I feel I must rectify, sorry;
1) The Twilight Princess exploit is used to enable homebrew on the Wii; the ISO loader in question is just another piece of homebrew that is loaded on the homebrew enabled Wii.
The sentence states that ''it's based around the same Twilight Princess exploit as most other Wii homebrew programs''. Nope. the homebrew programs have NOTHING to do with the Twilight exploit themselves, it is just a means of enabling homebrew.
2) ''Ostensibly called the Wii Back-up Loader'' Since it was leaked, it has no official name, just many different titles that people may wish to give it.
3) ''allows users to run pirated Wii games in .ISO format without any trouble whatsoever'' Nope, it cannot run .ISO files, but only the burnt image from an .ISO. And it isn't without ''any trouble whatsoever'', the disc images need to be patched by a program leaked alongside the loader.
4) ''the exploit that the program is based around isn't new at all, and members of the Wii homebrew community had actually already discovered this and tried to contact Nintendo about patching the problem before it became widely known. Nintendo however repeatedly ignored emails from the community and did not respond to attempts to enter into a dialogue with the community.''
Wrong wrong wrong. The exploit that was known was found by 'Bushing' and it has nothing to do with this exploit, it simply allowed discs to be read with a low-encryption level.
Nintendo DID respond to Bushings e-mails, but Bushing didn't want to be held responsible for previous Wii hacking-related programs.
Just thought I'd mention that.
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