pory

Yeah, the ease and safety (and incredibly good/available guides) of piracy on 3DS made it so a lot of kids/noobs got in during the freeShop days and just kind of expected piracy to always be that easy. “Actually finding and having a reliable source for the game files” is always the actual hardest part of piracy, but freeShop kids never had to do it.

As soon as the first proof of concepts showed up (a command line PC tool that generated CIA files from a key pair, followed by CIAngel which did it directly on the 3DS but still needed an installation step via another app) it was only a matter of time until someone Frankensteined the open source CIAngel and FBI together and slapped a cute browse UI and json parser on top. Thus freeShop was born.

The 3DS was already thoroughly pwned before freeShop, but pirates still had to actually use a yucky computer to download yucky “files” to do their thing. FreeShop opened up piracy to a new level of tech-illiterate user, and when Nintendo closed the gaping security hole those pirates that didn’t know what a .cia file actually is were left floundering. That was the scene that inherited Switch piracy. Dozens of competing closed-source “shops” that all used their own proprietary databases to pretend to be freeShop. Paid piracy apps. All so that users wouldn’t have to plug in their microSD card (later, the Switch itself via USB) to pirate games. Traditional “download the file from a torrent or trusted HTTP source and then put it on the SD and install it” piracy was always possible in the “shops” era.

This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.

Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.

This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.

After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).

These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.

That’s a really high confidence value to have for a future where Bungie exists. They’re already halfway purged, you don’t come back from something like Marathon by trying really hard with half the resources you wasted on Marathon.

Well yeah. If i wanted to use a browser applet, I don’t see why I’d use MS at all. But for this specific use case (diagramming and flowcharting), Visio (imo) is pretty far ahead of LibreOffice Draw and that’s the only serious offline non-MS option for this.

I was looking for one of these yesterday and honestly they’re all pretty clunky web browser applets. If I’m replacing a Microsoft Office program I want a fully featured desktop app, not a .io website, yknow?

But the work is already illegal. This is probably more about getting court injunctions against services (like, for example, Reddit) that might have the guy’s PII. Obviously voices covers his tracks, but getting a bunch of his anonymized data might reveal a slip-up.

The MIG cannot do any of that “other stuff”. Its only use case is piracy (technically, its only dubiously-legal use case is backing up your owned cartridges). The only code it can cause the Switch to execute is signed, official Nintendo code, exclusively when paired with a valid cartridge key. It can’t be used for music playback or emulation or alternate desktops or as an entry point for custom firmware or for homebrew applications. It can’t even load game updates or DLC. Your memory of DS carts is irrelevant, the MIG is a completely different type of product.

RCM on the Switch enables piracy (of dumped games from carts) and homebrew/emulators and mods and cheats and piracy of non-physical games/DLC. The MIG only enables piracy/backups of physical games and can never do anything else. You can’t even do save-based cheats with a MIG since the saves are stored on the console.

You criticize Nintendo’s security for “letting any random cartridge run software” when actually the Lotus firmware is still one of the most secure parts of the Switch. RCM access is a holy grail exploit and even with it supercharging any Switch reverse engineering for the whole console’s lifespan, the MIG is the only known thing that can pass a pirated game through the Lotus. And the MIG released really late into the Switch’s life cycle, so it required a ton of engineering to make. It’s nothing like the flashcarts from the NES-DS era at all. There is an analogous product to the MIG for the 3DS called the Sky3DS which similarly could only play pirated cartridge dumps and not be used for any custom code (though with the history of 3ds hacking, the Sky could be used for game-based entrypoints to full CFW like ninjhax or oothax).

I don’t know what your thing about playing old carts is supposed to mean. If it’s not clear, I’m pro homebrew and backups and believe that piracy (specifically, the defeat of DRM) is the only way to preserve software in any meaningful way. The MIG isn’t a product I use or own, my Switch is a first-gen with the bootloader vuln. Those Pokémon carts also “held up” fine? The save file is vulnerable to battery death but the cartridge still “works” and there are methods to back up the save file or even perform a battery replacement without damaging the save. But that’s got nothing to do with the MIG or the Switch.

The MIG isn’t “any random cart”, it needs to be running its own firmware on its CPU to “defeat” the Lotus (cart slot) firmware’s security measures. And “defeat” is in quotes because what it’s actually doing is supplying the authenticator with the actual key it wants. It doesn’t “bypass” or “unlock” the console, it sends a real key to a real door in a way that “looks” identical to what a real cart would do. That key isn’t part of the ROM either, it’s a per-copy unique key that decrypts the ROM portion of that cartridge. You can’t take a key from one game and use it to unlock another, so MIG compatible (MIG generated) dumps need to also have the ‘key’ dumped. You also can’t use a MIG to run custom/modified code in any way, since no custom code has a valid auth signature. It’s only usable for spoofing a retail game cartridge.

Nintendo even tracks the usage of each unique copy of a cart on their backend, and uses some form of check to permaban “pirates’” entire consoles from online features. We don’t know exactly how this works, if it’s “this key is in use in two places at once” or “this key has been used by 1000 consoles” but there is evidence that shared MIG dumps do cause console bans. This theoretically also means bans for legitimate used copies could be issued: if I go to the GameStop and buy Mario Odyssey and dump it with a MIG, then share that dump online and it becomes “the common MIG dump”, then sell the game back to GameStop, the dude who buys that used copy will get “caught” as a pirate if Nintendo uses “played that specific copy of Mario Odyssey” as a ban criterion.

The firmware and CPU architecture on the MIG are proprietary and complex, which is why it’s currently just MIG and not “any random cart”.

You can refund early access games too

It’s wordplay, see the capital letters? The company that pressed discs like Action Replay is called Thin Ice.

F4mi is an excellent video essayist about homebrew, piracy, and tech oddities from the 2000s. Strongly recommend her channel. The vid that put her on the map was tracking down and interviewing the person who created the music for the Wii’s Homebrew Channel.

“Real games” (AAA, top tier indie, low tier indie) can easily be as low as 1-2% of “steam releases”. 12k games were published on Steam over half of this year. That would mean, if you want to care about this meaningless statistic of “x% of games drive y% of revenue”, that there’s room for over 240 “worthwhile” games to have released in 2026 without disrupting the scary 1% metric at all. Two hundred forty games this year. AAA releases are what, ten or twenty a year? Less? That’s not 1%, it’s 0.08%. The other 99.92% of the 1% are free to be indie games or GAAS or whatever else.

Slay the Spire and lower quality but still “real” indie games. That entire gamut. The best games ever made and “uhh it’s balatro but with throwing darts”. That’s all more numerous than AAA stuff and also dwarfed in volume by porn jigsaw puzzles, asset flips, and other actual zero effort slop “games”. AAA and “real indie games” are a tiny minority of the games on steam.

Twelve thousand “games” have been released on Steam this year as of July. That would mean the meaningless statistic in the article implies that 240 games from this year drive 85% of this year’s spending. 240 games in 2026 “worth spending money on” is not a dire portrait of AAA slurping up the market space. That “1% of games” is presented to look like “the top 1% fat cat games” when 1% absolutely includes not just the AAA and the top shelf indie (like Slay the Spire) but also the flashes in the pan and the trend chasers and the friendslop and the Balatro clones and the forever GAAS.

Those “not truly slop but” uninspired indie games like stardew clone #780 comfortably fit into the “top” 240 Steam games this year. Darkest Dungeon 2 is absolutely a “top percent” game when the overall pool includes so much actual nothing in it.

Well that’s what I mean tho. If DBFZ reaches a million players in year 1, Bamco gets sixty million dollars (pre taxes and fees and licensing yadda yadda). If 2XKO reaches a million players, Riot gets zero dollars unless you also got some of that million to buy hats. A guy who buys DBFZ and plays for a week before dropping it got you sixty bucks. Same dude in 2XKO that doesn’t buy a $20 hat gets you zilch.

This one was f2p, so it doesn’t matter how many copies it “sold”. It needed dedicated long term players that would shell out for hats.

The casual fighting games market does exist, but it’s going to be people that buy the fighting game for an IP they like (say, Dragon Ball Z) and play it for a couple months then put it on the shelf. Maybe they boot it back up (and pay $10 again) when the DLC adds Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta or whatever.

2XKO was never a game that could make money from casuals, because there was no reason for anyone except “fgc mechanics heads” to give a single shit about the game. And those fgc heads saw a 2v2 tag fighter with ten characters and responded with a resounding “lmao”. Doesn’t help that it’s a fighting game with kernel anticheat.

Apple’s customers don’t get a choice of stores in the first place.

And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin’s Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality “real, good indie games”. And for every real, good indie game there’s a hundred asset flips and ai slop “games”.

And what percent of the “games that barely make anything” are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, “percent of new games that are trash” is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is “pay Valve $100 once”. This is a total junk statistic.

Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.

Piracy is the most consistent and solid form of preservation, definitely. Well technically piracy is a subset of “DRM-free software” which is the true holy grail (all the advantages of piracy, with total legality and legitimacy!). To preserve software, it must be able to be copied instead of tied interminably to something perishable like a disc or single hard drive. Or, for that matter, a single online account that might suffer anything from a banning to deletion for inactivity to just “lost password and forgot the email and can’t get access anymore” to “the company that operates the servers the account uses no longer exists”. And piracy needs to be happening during the release windows of the software, not “be respectful and wait 5 years” - the only reason retro console libraries are as well-kept as they are is because people were dumping games to play for free back in the day.

Those Wii redownloads are tied to specific console IDs, and those console NANDs are just as vulnerable to damage or deletion or loss as normal physical media is. They’re even worse than account-based DRM’d media since account-based media at least tolerates hardware damage or loss (but not account bans or service EOL). Thankfully, every digital purchase on Nintendo platforms other than Switch 2 is fully preserved and made available. This would be impossible if Nintendo’s anti-piracy measures had ever worked for an entire console generation. Switch 2 games, on the other hand, are currently “loseable”. You might be reasonably sure that Nintendo will never delist DK Bananza until (insert threshold where you think it’d be acceptable here) but game preservationists also care about game versions. And it’s always possible that Nintendo finally managed to nail it and piracy for Switch 2 won’t happen ever (or for a sufficient definition of “ever”).

Game key cards (and discs for update-reliant or online-focused games) are in a weird place. The main reasons people claim to care about physical games are “preservation” and “used games” and those don’t actually overlap.

From the preservation standpoint, GCKs and discs that don’t have the whole game are both pretty shit. There’s an argument that buggy broken v1.0 is better than nothing and that’s objectively true, but neither of these things provide actual software preservation in the face of (for example) storefront closure or account banning. GCKs and all discs are useless for preservation of online games, of course: what are you doing with that Highguard or Concord disc? A further argument is that even a complete game burned to a disc that relies on DRM isn’t truly preserved as it won’t outlive the death of the DRM boxes themselves, when every Nintendo 3DS dies you’re not going to be able to play that pristine physical copy of Pokémon Moon. Used physical games themselves are also a physical product that can decay or be damaged or lost - you can’t say that a game with a million extant discs being traded around between various people is a “preserved game”.

A completely different appeal for physical games is simply the ability to resell. Your gaming budget goes a longer way if instead of spending $60 three times to play three games, you’re spending $45 three times and also selling the games for $30 after you’re done with them. You could play ten first-party single player Nintendo games legally on the Switch for $0 if you always bought used and sold the used copies for the same price you bought them for. Game-Key cards and discs for incomplete/online-only games do facilitate this perfectly, though GCKs lose all value when the CDN of the storefront closes and discs only lose most value in this situation.