On 7th August Nintendo announced that it was opening legal proceedings against HackYourConsole.com, a subject that unsurprisingly caused plenty of debate and disagreement within the Nintendo Life community. The site had sold R4 cards and offered mods to Nintendo hardware for a good amount of time, but reading between the lines of Nintendo's press release on the subject it seemed that the 3DS Gateway product, which aims to allow illegal ROMS to be playable on the latest handheld, may have prompted Nintendo to formalise its opposition to the website.
The operator of HackYourConsole.com has developed a global business focused on selling unauthorized copies of Nintendo games and game-copying devices (such as the R4 device) used to circumvent the technological protection measures contained in the Nintendo DS family of hand-held systems. The website operator, for a fee, also provides services to hack and modify the Wii console and allow the play of illegal software.
HackYourConsole.com also claims to be an authorized distributor for the yet-to–be-released 3DS Gateway cards. The Gateway device is promoted as operating similar to the R4 game copier for the Nintendo DS, which facilitates the play of illegally downloaded games. Game copying devices, such as the R4, severely undermine the sales of video games created by thousands of developers.
Of course, the arguments are made that some mods have supported homebrew, but whether in that category or direct piracy it's considered illegal by Nintendo; in the case of Gateway, it's a format targeting straight-up ROM copies and piracy. With the legal proceeding presumably ongoing, HackYourConsole.com has now been taken down, with the following message on its front page.
Out of Service: The site is out of service. At this time all Pre-orders have been cancelled.
No new orders will be accepted.
Please stick to the subject at hand in the comments below while observing our Community Rules. Many thanks.
[source nintendoeverything.com]
Comments 36
It's nice to see Nintendo being more aggressive about fighting back against these piracy cards.
Good! I bet that even those that defend their stance on this that they only use if for Homebrew still have a copy or two of some games they shouldn't!
It's about time
Cheerio!
Can't wait for R5
Hurray!
Nice, good job nintendo!.
because of those people (thieves) company's collapse.
Mario: "Bye-bye!"
@LordJumpMad Lol
Shouldn't be taking peoples games from the start.
For the best far too many pirated games for the DS and there really is no possible way to justify it because gaming is a want not a need. If you can't afford a game you don't get to play it.
IMO home brew is fine but this is an example of a the few people using these cards for something that was generally harmless having their fun ruined by the majority of people who used these cards to get free games which is ILLEGAL...
Nintendo has done the right thing by going after these companies and I honestly hope that it doesn't stop here there are plenty more sites that Nintendo should and probably will go after
Between this and Ouya's corruption being found out, this is a good week for gaming. Now just don't look at Wonderful 101's sales...
Good.
Homebrew can stay at PCs, in my Opinion.
In other related news, nintendo's game sales remain the same and change not one bit.
Good.
Good to hear that Nintendo has won another battle against the war on piracy.
Good riddance. Homebrew is definitely not what most of these cards are used for.
As for OUYA. Ya, OUYA was trash since the day they started crowdfunding. I don't have one, but the disappointment and sadness that console has caused to the people that bought one was to be expected.
Whats next? Are they going to sue the people making/selling blank DVDs? since those can be used to pirate wii/gamecube games.
@ShanaUnite uh, way to miss the point.
These flashcarts have software installed to actively play ROMs of DS and 3DS games, they aren't blanks for normal games. And most importantly, these things are generally prohibited from usage.
I'm really relieved that Nintendo finally sends some banhammer bro's out to smack the distributors. Of course, HackYourConsole is by far not the only one, but one of the biggest.
Now to hope for a HomeBrew/region-free hack WITHOUT ROM loaders...
Thats how it should be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE
Good.
@Hyperstar96 Are you forgetting developers? They work to make games for a console just as much as people work for their money to buy a console. So things like the Gateway card would be cheating developers out of their profit.
Nice move, Nintendo
@Hyperstar96 #17
Earn some more money and buy the games. The big developers may not be affected as much, your despicable actions cripple independent developers.
The sooner Nintendo can kill these Gateways for piracy, the better.
See what I did there?
@Hyperstar96
The thing is, if you hombrew the game, you have to own a copy of it anyway so there is almost no point in putting it on a flash drive, it only saves you five seconds of switching time on the DS anyway and a little more on the Wii. Homebrew is even more pointless on the 3DS and Wii U where you can now download the game, and switching between games is even faster than with homebrew. It annoys me how people talk about homebrew like it's mostly used by honest people and not pirates, and as if it is still relevant.
@Hyperstar96 #31
Does that change the fact that homebrew is mostly used by pirates? Homebrew is a cool concept, it's a nice thing to have, but it's really hard to justify it's existence and use when people don't respect its original purpose. If a dog has rabies, would you let it run around and bite your loved ones and infect other animals? Or would you put it down to keep it from harming people and other animals?
The Gateway 3DS doesn't support homebrew, and never would be able to because of the way it's designed. It's unable to run anything that's not properly signed, so unless you have the private key (which is pretty much impossible to get), then there is no way to run homebrew.
Homebrew has always been a weak excuse to me. If you want to create homebrew stuff, use a PC. People have been able to do some pretty incredible stuff by linking Wiimotes and the Wii U Gamepad to PCs and Nintendo has done nothing to stop those efforts because it doesn't infringe their ability to sell games. Why do you need to hack the console itself?
This was inevitable.
@Hyperstar96
By that logic, why not just get rid of animals all together? Then none of them would get rabies.
@galetyler
I completely agree. Thank you for saving me the time it would have taken to type what you typed.
@Kaze_Memaryu How did i completely miss the point? Both flashcards and blank DVD's are used to make backups of your games/movies. In both cases thats often what it is not used for though. If Flashcards are bad than so are blank DVD's for the exact same purpose.
@ShanaUnite No, they're not. DVD's are physical storages that aren't used for backups alone - many use them to store data of all kinds. The fact that blank DVD's are the base of almost all movies is an inevitable move of the industry.
But Flashcarts (as I already said) have tools and programs to extract data from original carts and use the ROM packages to play the games. So the flashcart itself is a hacking tool, one that cannot be used by any devices other than a 3DS - and since only the required (Micro) SD Card inserted is the actual storage, the flashcart has no legal reason to exist. It's no backup device, it's a backup player, which is not allowed by Nintendo, since user-generated stuff isn't supported by the 3DS in the first place, except for videos, music, and photos. There you have it.
When I was younger I bought a dsi off of ebay. With the dsi i received a r4i card, this was about 5 years maybe more ago. At that time I did not know what an r4i card was so it sat in my case for nearly 4 years. Im not proud to say that Im using that card to play games.... today
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