Piracy softmod comes to the Wii

If you were one of the misguided games publishers who thought that games piracy was only a problem for the PC market then you might want to take a look at this and see the first example of a homebrew program that lets the Nintendo Wii play pirated games without a hardware modification.

The Wii Homebrew channel allows players to run a variety of community created software.

And considering the sheer number of Nintendo Wiis that have been sold and how easy the homebrew is to enable - the details of which we aren't going to go into here, but our understanding is that it's based around the same Twilight Princess exploit as most other Wii homebrew programs - this could be quite a problem for Nintendo.

Ostensibly called the Wii Back-up Loader, the program allows users to run pirated Wii games in .ISO format without any trouble whatsoever. Though the program claims it is made for people who want to back-up the games they already own, the primary market is obvious.

What's most interesting about all this is that the exploit that the program is based around isn't new at all, and members of the Wii homebrew community had actually already discovered this and tried to contact Nintendo about patching the problem before it became widely known. Nintendo however repeatedly ignored emails from the community and did not respond to attempts to enter into a dialogue with the community.

So, you can't help but feel that Nintendo has shot themselves in the foot here.