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Having held out for the best part of two years, Nintendo’s 3DS seems to have sadly succumbed to pirates.
With both the Wii and DS suffering intense levels of piracy, Nintendo put a lot of effort into securing its latest hardware. And it had been very successful, until now.
Gamasutra reports that hackers have in recent weeks made several breakthroughs in breaching the handheld’s copy protection”, with one individual now claiming to have full control of the system.
As well as the obvious potential consequences for Nintendo, the news has also unsettled developers who are understandably nervous about the 3DS going the way of the DS and becoming unviable to many third parties despite strong sales success.
"If piracy gets bad on the 3DS, we will have no choice but to stop supporting the platform with new games," co-founder of Renegade Kid Jools Watsham stated.
Some say that piracy leads to more game sales, claiming that it enables players to try before they buy. Bullshit. The percentage of people who will spend money on a game that they already got for free is surely very small – especially with so many ‘free’ games already in the market. The line between what should/should not be free is getting very blurry."
The most impressive performer in the field of console anti-piracy, however, has to be Sony’s PS3. Having been launched 2007 it was only late last year that piracy on the machine became openly accessible to a wider market.
