The Wii might have sold by the bucket-load and made Nintendo a nice little tidy profit but it was also cracked open and exposed to the whims of pirates quite early. There were many other reasons for hacking your old Wii, it added plenty of homebrew functionality for example. But it was widely exploited by those who don’t like paying for games.
Now, one of the groups who enabled a method of hacking the original Wii claims to have broken into the Wii U. Their chip doesn’t enable homebrew, hacked games or circumventing region locks – it only allows 1:1 copies of games to be run from an external USB drive. So, there might be some claims for disc preservation and ease of access to a catalogue but this hardware chip seems ideally suited to pirating disc images.
The group posted the following statement on their website, the veracity of their claims have not been widely tested by independent parties, as far as we know, but we’d expect this story to pick up pace now they’re making breakthroughs.
Yes, its real – we have now completely reversed the WiiU drive authentification, disk encryption, file system, and everything else needed for this next generation K3y. Stay tuned for updates!
It’s difficult to imagine how negative an impact this might have – not just on Nintendo who, it could be argued, struggled to tempt widespread third party support to its piracy-riddled Wii but on Sony and Microsoft who could well use this news to inform their own policies on digital rights management in their next generation consoles.
The Von Braun
Sadly, been expecting news like this for some time.I’m not a Wii U owner but this is probably the last thing Nintendo needs at the moment on the system.
Sure some hacking group is probably feeling pretty smug right now and will be eagerly awaiting new platforms from Sony and MS so they can be the 1st to crack those as well, but i’m looking at the lasting damage it’s going to have on the industry as a whole, if it just drives the powers that be towards ‘Always On’ type measures at an even faster rate, then sad times indeed.
hazelam
not good for Nintendo if true.
could be worse, like the Dreamcast where by the end pirate discs would work on a standard non modified console, but still, for the security to be breached this early is bad news for them.
CrawFail
Dun dun duuuuuuuuun.
Scythegpd
They try making excuses but at the end of the day it all boils down to getting shit for free.
My only hope is that one day these wasters make something themselves which they try to market and it gets the shit pirated out of it. See how “white knight” they feel then.
But what am I saying, they’re far more interested stealing other people’s work to create their own …