The Nintendo DS might have experience some mind boggling software sales, but perhaps those numbers could have been better if the system wasn’t probably the system most rife with piracy in history. With the DS’s firmware being easy to crack, and flshcarts such as R4 (now outlawed in Japan) being widely available, sales of several games were lower than what they should have been, causing the third party support for the system to steadily dwindle in the last couple of years.
The 3DS, though? It could be like the PS3 of handhelds, a system that’s almost impossible to crack. So says THQ’s executive VP of global publishing Ian Curran anyway.
“What excites me even more [than 3DS games] is that there’s technology built in that device to really combat piracy,” he said.
“The problem with the DS market in the last few years, particularly with the DS Lite, is that it’s just been attacked by piracy. It’s made it almost impossible to shift any significant volume. The DSi combated it a little bit, but the 3DS has taken that a step further.”
“I actually asked Nintendo to explain the technology and they said it’s very difficult to do so because it’s so sophisticated,” he adds. “They combated the piracy on DSI, which they don’t believe is cracked yet – but they know they’ve been hurt across the world and they believe the 3DS has got technology that can stop that.”
Uh, okay. Way to go, challenging and goading the pirates to their face so that they will almost certainly have cracked the system on Day One. Bravo, man, bravo.