IRONFALL Invasion.jpg

A short while ago the thoroughly decent free-to-play 3DS shooter IRONFALL Invasion was removed from the eShop, a fairly drastic move in consideration of the marketing backing Nintendo had given the game and its position as a rare example of the genre available on the portable.

Though never explicitly confirmed by developer VD-Dev or Nintendo, this was evidently a move to counteract a planned homebrew and region-free workaround - which utilised the game - that was being developed by smealum, the prominent figure in that area. In fact IRONFALL Invasion was removed from the eShop a matter of days after smealum had demonstrated the hack as being near finished. When the game was taken down the hacker expressed regret at what had happened.

Although it's taken around two months the title is now back on the eShop, and has been updated to no doubt shut out the exploit and attempt to close off equivalents in future. For those that already have the game there's an update to install that's required to play online, too.

This doesn't completely shut off those that already have the game and are using the exploit, however, as evidently they can just retain their old copy that's not updated.

Ultimately this has been a situation that hasn't been particularly beneficial for anyone, most certainly not VD-Dev which saw its title - through no real fault of its own - unavailable to new gamers for around two months. Now that it's back it'll no doubt hope to regain some momentum.