Japanese WiiWare titles pirated on U.S. Wiis

Freakin' awsome cat. More lolcats please.

I think this kind of crosses a line for Nintendo. This is probably when they finally step in and update the hell out of this stuff. :P

Say bye bye to homebrew.

"Bloody pirates!"

Nice.
Hackers,gota love em.
How abot some pirate HD for teh wii plz?

How is this any different or more damaging than the fact people already pirate full retail Wii and DS games in droves? Both systems are selling cheaply produced games and overpriced hardware by the truck load. I'm pretty sure they'll survive Wii Ware titles being pirated.

this kind of stuff is what gives homebrew a bad name.

That's what Nintendo gets for making a "last-gen" system: it's easy for people to figure out how to crack it. Sony overcomes a lot of piracy by using Blu-ray disks (the price of them plus a player discourages the money saved from piracy), and Microsoft fights it through an aggressive online system (give players lot of incentives to have their consoles online, hooked into MS's centralized service, and they can scan your shit). Nintendo went with cheap tech, a cheap approach to online, and it made them a lot of money from the get-go, but now they are going to have to spend a little bit of their outrageous profits fighting a little bit of piracy. They can't honestly be that concerned with piracy, given the initial technical hurdle and the huge number of systems they have sold (making it feasible for only a small percentage of Wii owners).

I think it might be more of an issue for the WiiWare titles, only because I don't see as many casual gamers going online to buy games (if they even now it exists) versus buying more physical party games at the store. Given how surprisingly low recent numbers for Xbox Live/Playstation Online were (with their much better online incentives), I'm interested to know how many Wii's are actually connected in the first place (I'd guess a low percentage, if we are talking about actual online participation). In that case, Nintendo might be losing a good deal of profit with WiiWare piracy, since it would most likely be the more 'hardcore' gamers who would be buying these titles, yet they would also most likely have the highest overlap with the group of people who could and would pirate games.

Ultimately, Nintendo is going to lose much money over this, because they are making so much on their profit-leading hardware. With their loss-leading consoles, Microsoft and Sony have a much bigger incentive to keep their software sales up and running.

NOTE: It does seem that Nintendo's other anti-piracy strategy is to keep selling you new hardware (see Wii Fit, Wii Wheel, Wii Boogie mic, Wii cross-bow thingy, etc.), which can't just be downloaded.

Well, that's the end of the Twilight Princess hack, I reckon.

The only way I can think of to block this is if Nintendo completely blocked the loading of Twilight Princess if the Twilight Hack saved game was detected in Wii memory, or to prevent that file from being transferred to the Wii. Depending on how they did this detection, it might be easily bypassed (if they do a hash) since the icon can be changed to match the original Twilight Princess one. However it would not be hard to detect the actual hack... it's documented how the hack works and it uses an invalid value in the save game file and so would be easy to detect.

However Nintendo can not actually patch the game to fix the flaw at its source. Nintendo can only update the Wii firmware, which is rewritable, while Wii discs are read-only. Nintendo would have to code up a storm to allow for game patches to be stored in the Wii memory and dynamically applied at runtime of an affected game. With the problem of limited available space on the Wii's drive, the firmware could easily check to see if a game requires an update and refuse to run it until the user clears enough space on the wii for the update to be downloaded so it could be used. This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, though.

Well, maybe this will finally get them to realize "Oh shit. Maybe we should port these."

So when is Nintendo going to do a press release mentioning the official line-up for the U.S. WiiWare launch, anyway?

There's only a week left. Not everything needs to be done the day of release, for crying out loud.

This would not hurt Nintendo profits given that the hack is rather convoluted and if there's one thing I don't want to do, it's to futz about with disks and software to get one game up and running.

Im not surprise this was gonna happen, but I don't think Nintendo will care. Due to that how many of the millions of Wii user who the majority of them are casual gamers are going to do suck a hack to a pirate game in a language they don't even comprehend?

In the Wii community the pirates are a only a small percentage of all the Wii users in the world.

Actually, not many people will try this and go for the legal way, cuz many of this hacks could brick your wii, and even though it's a pretty cheap console, I (in my case) wouldn't dare to try this, cuz money is a big issue in the future with the next games to be released.

I tried this with the Ping Pong game.

Needless to say, it became an instant buy for me when it comes here.

I be in ur cabin! Stealin ur dubloonz!

Just putting it out there: The homebrew community does not support the use of these releases. It says that at the bottom of EVERY WiiWare and Virtual Console nfo.

Not just WiiWare, ALL VIRTUAL CONSOLE games have been hacked/pirated.
A lot of PAL VC games are available, (not so many NTSC), but there's a region free maker for PAL VC.
It's soo damn easy to use these it's hilarious.

How do you download the WiiWare games? I have used the Twilight Hack so I kinda know how it works, but how do you get the program that installs them?

How pointless. If you have the twilight hack working, just use an emulator and wow look you can play all those same games.

There is also speculation that when the big N does patch this, those that already DL'd the pirated stuff will still get to keep it since the software is tied the wii like any other VC purchase.

It's not Nintendo I feel sorry for, it's the upstart developers who are hoping to make a name for themselves through WiiWare who get my sympathy.

Anyone see the Wii becoming the next Dreamcast as far as hackability?

Anyone who does this can expect to never go online on the Wii ever again. Just saying.

Is anyone else having a problem playing Dr.Mario and Final Fantasy?
Both Ping Pong and Pokemon Farm work fine, but FF and Dr.Mario just kinda have a screen wash and bring me back to the menu when ever I try to launch them.