Nintendo of America has told Kotaku that they are aware that a group has claimed to have hacked the Wii U, though they have had no reports of illegal Wii U games nor unauthorized applications playable on the system while in Wii U mode. The news came earlier today when WiiKey claimed that they had managed to completely reverse the Wii U drive authentication, disk encryption and file system. Here’s what Nintendo had to say.

“Nintendo is aware that a hacking group claims to have compromised Wii U security. However, we have no reports of illegal Wii U games nor unauthorized applications playable on the system while in Wii U mode. Nintendo continuously monitors all threats to its products’ security and will use technology and will take the necessary legal steps to prevent the facilitation of piracy.”

http://mynintendonews.com/2013/04/30/nintendo-responds-to-wii-u-hack-claim/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Pirates are scum. They risk destroying the kind of games many of us love because they're too cheap and entitled to fork over the money. Despicable.

"Hackers, please understand we need the money earned from our games to stay afloat."

This is a little misleading.

The actual Wii-U hasn't been hacked at all. They have simply developed and ODE, like the same thing that's available for the Xbox 360. A device that daisy chains between the motherboard and the optical drive that intercepts commands and requests for data directing them to a connected USB device, so ISOs can be loaded.

This technically isn't hacking in the classic sense, it opens up no opportunity for homebrew for example and is pure piracy because executable code can only be run still that is signed with private keys on Nintendo's side, same as with the drive hack that C4E did for the Xbox 360 - as opposed to the reset glitch/JTAG hack that allows unsigned code to be run and thus emulators and so forth.

Anyway, just to clarify, the Wii-U isn't hacked as such but piracy will now soon follow.

Mixing "hacking" and "piracy" is not a very good thing to do because it causes ignorant people to label all hackers as a blanket as "scumbags". When in fact, most hackers actually don't approve of piracy and some even go out of their way to allow hacks to work but only with genuine software like for example on the Wii, where a hacker has made it possible to boot ISOs for the Gamecube but will only allow them to boot after the original disk has been validated as genuine and will ask for this original disk every now and again.

It's become very popular and cool the last few years to label all hackers as scumbags based basically on ignorance and people too retarded to think for themselves. These are the same people that don't like the idea of game developers not getting money from second hand games sales, but are completely against ideas like the next xbox not playing games unless online - thereby stopping sharing or selling of games. People are so hypocritical it's funny to read.

People don't want their rights violated, but they don't care if others feel their rights are violated, they don't want their favourite publishers/developers losing money but they're quite happy to see a business model that's been popular for years burning to the ground.

We've all got a view.

Nintendo's response: Please buy the Wii U now.

Hey, I have feelings too, ya know :(

Well, probably the Wii U start to sell after this notice.

Video games are luxury items, not necessities to life, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to get it for free (unless the developer provides it as such). Piracy is nothing but a false sense of entitlement among spoiled brats and misguided individuals.

Like fillet said above though, one needs to distinguish between pirates and "hackers". I think the better word would be homebrewers. There are enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in simply opening new possibilities on closed hardware, running Linux, adding new features, and creating their own programs. Unfortunately this also opens the Pandora's Box to be abused and run pirated software as well. Homebrewers are also far outnumbered by pirates. The average pirate doesn't care about these things, and usually has minimal technical knowledge. The only feature they care about is "duz it run free gamez".

Very true.

IF you take the PS3 which was opened up somewhat for "free gamez!!!" + homebrew about 2-3 years ago. This breach was plugged after 6 months by Sony so that only consoles on 3.55 or below could be hacked and access to PSN wasn't possible, games needed about 3.55 couldn't be played as it wasn't hacked entirely.

Eventually a device called TrueBlue was released which allowed pretty much all games to be played even ones above 3.60, but it was a highly monetized device, the actual code used was sold to a chinese company which exploited it for mass commercial piracy, it was different to this hack in that the hack was on the software level and the device was simply a con to make money - This is obviously immoral.

Eventually, other more moral hackers released the keys for the later firmware and the whole base LV0/LV1 of the PS3 in a direct attack at the makers of TrueBlue, effectively ending this commerical piracy. It's well known that these hackers had a small inner circle and had these LV0/LV1 keys for 2 years or so. This happened about 9-10 months ago, so now it is possible providing you have a hacked PS3 to play any game and connect to PSN.

This was a genuine move by hackers to swap one bad thing for something else that isn't as bad. Taking it from commerical piracy (same as what this Wii-U device will be about) to per user piracy with no monetry gain.

These hackers are more against piracy than anyone would believe here on VGChartz and even I think they take a line that is a bit draconian in terms of controlling what people do, they on occasions make the odd post to the effect of fuck all pirates and talk in a rather megalonaniac type way. Even so, they do firmly believe in just wanting to open stuff up for fun.

It does really annoy me though with people labeling "hackers" as the bad guys, sure they aren't exactly a shining example of ethical perfection but they aren't in it for the piracy. The end users are the ones responsible for that. People also need to understand that there's a massive difference between commercial piracy which this device will allow, as in people are making money from a device than the piracy end users indulge in on the PS3 currently.

Reported for insulting all pirates. Not all pirates are created equal.