Nintendo talks up Wii U and 3DS security against hackers and piracy

If you go online these days in a Wii or DS game, the likelihood of playing against someone who has hacked their game is pretty high. People cheat in Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart DS and many other online enabled Nintendo games.

This isn’t the case with the Nintendo 3DS and it won’t be with the Wii U says Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. During the latest investor meeting Iwata was asked about the online security for the Wii U and 3DS and has told shareholders that he doesn’t think that the same level of hacking and piracy will occur on the Wii U, just like it hasn’t on the 3DS.

[quote]In developing the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS, we recognized that security is an extremely important factor for the sake of our business and in making sure that our consumers feel that playing our products is safe. While some acts of piracy are still possible in its DS-compatibility mode, as we had to ensure that the Nintendo DS software could still be played on the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo 3DS itself still maintains a robust security system, even after this much time has passed since its launch. Various attempts have so far been made to compromise the security of the system, but of course, security is like a multilayered fire door. Even if the outermost layer is wrenched half open, as long as there are other layers behind it, I do not believe the system will be hacked in an overly short cycle. Of course, security that is designed by humans is never perfect, but at the same time, should our security fail, we have to come up with a way to update the system. These days, hardware features can be “updated” through a network by downloading a new system itself and replacing the old system with the new one. This does indeed enhance the overall security of the system, but in fact, all of our devices before the Nintendo 3DS had one major problem. They were structured in such a way so that unless the user proactively performed a system update him/herself, the update could never be done.

Although consumers knew that it was better to perform system updates, many did not perform them, as it was often the case that they were simply never made aware that they were available. As with smartphones, tablets, computers and operating systems, many devices today have an auto-update feature, where updates are automatically downloaded when there is an Internet connection, and put on standby, and a message that says “Updates are available for your system. Would you like to proceed?” appears later before the user finally installs the updates. At the moment the Nintendo 3DS’s security remains robust, but we have prepared ourselves to minimize the damage should our security fail. Please note that, in a sense, we learned a very bitter lesson from the Nintendo DS and the Wii, and we have put it to good use in designing the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U.[/quote]

Piracy was so bad on the Nintendo DS that it eventually made third parties lose confidence in their ability to sell games on the system. The Wii too isn’t much better with both piracy and hacking in games. It’s great to see Nintendo strengthen both of these features.