Anti-piracy technology on DS games by this holiday
Piracy is distressing. Metaforic CEO Andrew Mclennan said as much in an interview with Gamasutra, referring to the plight of piracy, particularly on the DS via the R4 cards. Echoing this sentiment is Nintendo, who as of last year has filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court for an injunction of the R4 as it causes “severe damage” to them. Since then, Nintendo has been hard at work on a plan, and we just might see it come to fruition by this holidays.
Piracy is distressing. Metaforic CEO Andrew Mclennan said as much in an interview with Gamasutra, referring to the plight of piracy, particularly on the DS via the R4 cards. Echoing this sentiment is Nintendo, who as of last year has filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court for an injunction of the R4 as it causes “severe damage” to them.
That injunction was granted to Nintendo just this March, thereby making it an illegal product. Despite this, however, R4 sales continue to happen, albeit more discreetly than it was before. Nintendo is not giving in, however, and is determined than ever to put a stop on piracy on their products. As such, they have developed a technology that will render pirating technologies incapable.
This is where Metaforic comes in. What their technology does is “at its most basic level detects the form of patching that the R4 cards use to play ROMS, and then process to ‘kill’ the ROM.” Explained Mclennan:
We take any DS game and inject a security scheme into the game itself. It turns each game into its own security system. Everytime we apply it to a different game, it’s a different security system. .. What we’re really trying to do is make hackers take on a long, slow, manual job… We add so much security to it that it will take a very long time to hack.
Sounds like a plan. Nintendo has already started the ball rolling by coming out with the R4-incompatible DSi.
Will it work, finally sealing the doors of homebrew on the DS? We’ll see soon enough. After all, Nintendo has already approved the technique developed by Metaforic and will have the publishers implementing the said solution ASAP.
What this translates to is that by holiday of this year, the games we’ll be finding on store shelves will have this security added to it already.
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Via Gamasutra
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