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Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardwar

by saguro 9y ago

Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? Does Nintendo actually stand to lose anything if a homebrew community evolved? Shouldn't we put time limits on DRM like we do on copyright so that eventually owners of these devices are allowed to use them however they like? My sony PSP and nintendo DS are collecting dust because I already played all the licensed games I was going to on them. Now these devices are worthless to me and get tiny prices on the 2nd hand market. If their owners released firmware signing keys, these devices could have a new lease on useful life as homebrew machines, but instead their owners tell us no, they'd rather the devices became prematurely useless and that we can't get any use out of them unless they can cash in on it... It's weird now that I think about it.

rocky1138 9y ago
Hasbro was kind enough to do exactly that for the Atari Jaguar.
Nursie 9y ago
IIRC the PSP has been busted so wide open that Sony may as well have released the keys. It started with quite complex hacks like 'Desperto del cemetario' (I think) but became as simple as sticking something on a memory card and running it. But yes, it is very counterintuitive - spending so much time and effort to make sure your machine is as limited as you can possibly make it.
- Nursie 9y ago
  "Despertar del cemetario", that's the one...
resonanttoe 9y ago
It's a perceptual argument I think. If publishers like EA and Ubisoft lose faith in the system's ability to protect against piracy, they're less likely to go out of their way to develop for it. This is especially true for Nintendo that requires (for varying reasons) special porting/development. For the sake of argument its easy to assume that PC, Xbox and PS4 roughly being equivilent to develop for. (this is totally cutting the gordian knot but...) They're essentially all X86_64 architecture with similar third party modules present (nVidia, AMD). So development on these systems is a lot easier. For Nintendo, you have to develop within the limitations of typically not as powerful hardware. (Take a look at WWE2K18 between PS4 and Switch.. they struggle with that). Which means that you have to not necessarily spend more, but spend extra to get it working on Switch properly (I.E, its not quick and cheap). Therefore if the piracy rates are high or perceived to be high because of a flourishing and popular homebrew community (false equivalency but I'm confident that it happens.) then the desire the expend that extra effort will go down. Espeically if the return is expected to be low. Also emulators are easy these days and that just totally erodes the Virtual Console Market. Around the Wii they discovered the HUGE proportional market for virtual console (Near 0 development cost/effort, huge returns, relatively) One of the first things that will come from this is a port of RetroArch. Which is cool but not what big N wants to see.
- saguro 9y ago
  I don't buy the added development cost argument. Firstly because AAA dev kits already have out of the box support for the Switch, secondly because sony and xbone put just as much effort into preventing unsigned code execution as nintendo does. Then is it just about protecting the emulation market? For nintendo I'd agree. For sony I'd say maybe. For microsoft? They don't really have an emulation market to speak of, but they still dump a lot of resources into DRM. So is it all about the perceived threat of piracy, or is there more? But to my earlier point, piracy stops being a factor a decade or two after the release of a console. Why don't we put time limits on DRM like we do with copyright and patents so that the manufacturers are forced to allow full use of the devices eventually.
  - resonanttoe 9y ago
    Re: Development cost. I think we probably just have different perceptions on what that cost will be. I'm happy to disagree with you here, but I think we'll talk around the lack of any facts here. (Read: I have nothing I can present to concretely prove my point or disprove yours so I'm abandoning that line and will take your point as given as much as I feel mine (should be?) is :D) I would however still argue that its the perception of piracy and those costs rather than any reality of it. In regards to the idea of time-limited DRM. The argument here is what does that ultimately give Nintendo? The device is EOL and from their point of view the goodwill of the small community of us who like poking around the devices isn't worth even the relatively small amounts of effort to implement that model of DRM. Especially when Homebrew development happens within a console lifetime to begin with. Essentially, the work hours for homebrew is bought and paid for by these folk here. Nintendo has to do nothing and they get that Homebrew warm-fuzzies from a small group of folks. However the perceptual loss of faith from someone like EA would cause a huge and immediate impact to the life-cycle of in the In-life console. (Think of the Polygon,IGN and other articles that would come out if EA so much as sniffed at the idea of the Switch being to much of a piracy-risk) So no, I don't think there is more to it than a perception. Which sadly I think is overweighted in the argument. But already in this post, there are some weird equivalencies between user features and OS security being made which has a lot of value for people (not saying they're wrong in their valuations, just maybe the placement) so perception counts an awful lot for a lot of folks.
smacktoward 9y ago
> why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? Because they want to prevent a repeat of the circumstances that led to the great video game crash of 1983 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983). The first generation of home consoles didn’t have any restrictions on what they could run. The result was a flood of shoddy, low-quality games, which ruined the reputation of those consoles and nearly killed the entire market for home gaming.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  Can this even happen again? Look at PCs. The cost to produce a very low quality game has never been cheaper, and the infrastructure to spread it has never been better. But there isn't really a problem. We now have marketplaces that have some level of curation in them that prevents this from being a major problem. It isn't a perfect system, but there is no threat of it crashing the video game industry. Social expectations of games, knowledge about games, information sharing about games, and platforms that allow this knowledge to propagate have made it so I can't see this as being any threat at all. Add in that we are talking homebrew, so its not like the content will have Nintendo's stamp of approval on it nor accessible to the average user, and the line of reasoning seems completely invalid. Though it wouldn't be the first time a company did something for reasons that were no longer valid.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I think this might be a valid concern for any app store, or market as a whole. I'm thinking of Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" paper here, about the difficulty of assessing quality in advance. Games have a sunk cost of time installing and getting started, often including a tutorial and introduction. This applies even if the game has no monetary cost. If a player finds too much of their time is wasted by bad games, they'll become more conservative and not try new games unless strongly recommended by friends. The big games continue to do OK, but the "long tail" gets a steeper inflection point - the middle tier of games is hollowed out and the rest of the tail becomes trash and knockoffs.
  - 9y ago
pjc50 9y ago
> rather the devices became prematurely useless Then you have to buy a next-gen device and re-buy your games. Good for the manufacturer. I'd love to see this happening but can't see it happening without political action directed against premature obsolescence for environmental reasons.
- saguro 9y ago
  But they don't always release a next gen device. And a lot of people who own a <brand> device will automatically buy next gen <brand> when it comes out. And then only a comparatively small fraction of games is typically re-sold without modification. You think the return on the tiny percentage intersection of those conditions justifices the cost to society in terms of wasted materials and labour to do that? Does it even justify the manufacturer's development costs to create that lockout in the first place..?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > justifices the cost to society in terms of wasted materials and labour to do that? Probably not, but .. > Does it even justify the manufacturer's development costs to create that lockout in the first place.. I feel it must do, or they wouldn't keep doing it.
voltagex_ 9y ago
PSP depending on model is completely owned. The DS never really had enough power, there's some flash carts that have an extra CPU.
- sli 9y ago
  Yeah, I have a flash cart for my 3DS with all my old DS games on it. I can't leave it in the 3DS or it will drain my battery, because it's basically just another entire mini-console running in the 3DS.
exDM69 9y ago
The business model of consoles is selling hardware at discounted price which is not profitable, then selling games at a premium price. All the game sales give a cut to the console company. This only works if there isn't a lot of piracy or 3rd party content. If consoles were an open platform, they would have to raise the price of the console itself. Very few would pay $1000 for a console.
- delecti 9y ago
  Nintendo goes to more trouble than most to lock down their consoles (and they always have), and they also never sell their hardware at a loss (though this may have briefly been untrue after they lowered the price of the 3DS shortly after launch).
  - jonny_eh 9y ago
    Just because they don't sell their hardware at a loss, it doesn't mean they want to give up software licensing fees.
    - delecti 9y ago
      True, and I'm sure that's a factor, but Nintendo's history leads me to believe that it's more of a cultural/ethical thing than a financial thing.
- cleeus 9y ago
  The Nintendo Switch is basically a nVidia Jetson TX1 (4xA57@1GHz) with some additional parts and a nice plastic packaging. That's comparable to a RasPi 3 except for the GPU. The costs are probably a bit more then 30$ of a raspi but it's not 1000$.
jtruk 9y ago
> Why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? Piracy is the most enduring reason. Second, regular players should expect a level field when playing online multiplayer - so no risk of battling against someone with modded software. Beyond that, supporting software and hardware failures is easier if you can assume everyone is running on a stock platform.
- sli 9y ago
  That second point can be mitigated by not allowing unsigned code to run in parallel with a game, and generally sequestering games and unsigned code so they cannot mix. I'd consider that a fair tradeoff. I mean, it may open up another vector for attack running unsigned code without any protections by the console, but... well, those already exist right now. The Switch, for <=3.0, is already broken (rohan[0], which is not yet publicly available). [0]: https://reswitched.tech/rohan https://reswitched.tech/rohan
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    Or they could just lock down the system and prevent all of these problems with less effort... which is what they did.
MikeKusold 9y ago
Because Nintendo completely failed at DRM on the Wii U. Pirates can actually download games directly from Nintendo's official store and load them onto a hard drive to play.
- jamie_ca 9y ago
  It's even worse on the 3DS, pirates get an on-device store browser and install things directly. To my knowledge on the WiiU you still need to download and move it over via SD card.
  - sli 9y ago
    And with FBI and the title DB, you don't even need freeShop. Things can be installed on a 3DS with custom firmware using the front camera and QR codes.
- Ralfp 9y ago
  > Pirates can actually download games directly from Nintendo's official store and load them onto a hard drive to play. I hear its the same with PS3 those days. Pirate app you install on your cracked console that allows you to browse, download and run games from Sony's servers without paying for anything.
trashcan 9y ago
A big part of is ensuring that unsigned code isn't run to cheat in multiplayer games. A lot of times there will be games that come out on Xbox and PC, and the PC one will have rampant cheating, and the Xbox version will not.
bane 9y ago
It's important to understand the history and context of the industry that Nintendo operates in. The 1983 video game crash was very real and devastating (at least in North America). In 2 years, revenue in the industry dropped by 97 percent. A number of problems were identified as causes -- like most things there is no single cause. But among them was poor quality control of games produced by third parties all producing an unlimited number of games. If 90% of everything is crap, in 1983, 99% of what was produced was crap because there was, at least up to 1983, no incentive to produce quality. In 1986 Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo at the time said, "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." Nintendo, in 1983, had just released the Famicom and also was struggling with unlicensed games produced by third parties with poor quality control. When Nintendo decided to, against all apparent sanity, sell into the North American market in 1985, they made several key platform changes: 1) The Famicom changed from a "video game system" to a home entertainment and computing toy and was shown at trade shows with accessories from keyboards to robots and no joystick in sight. To exhausted and bruised retailers this enabled them to position it differently than Atari's previous products. 2) They fenced in 3rd parties with strong licensing agreements, limited publishing rights (only 5 games per publisher per year), centralized control of product manufacturing (Nintendo made the cartridges and the publishers had to eat whatever cost Nintendo sold them at and a host of other restrictions. Any publisher who couldn't agree to this either went separate ways (Namco was a famous case) or was sued out of existence by a very litigious Nintendo of America. 3) They enforced the agreement with a lockout chip (10NES). 4) They rigorously playtested all published games for strict QC. It doesn't mean unfun games were released, but games released for the U.S. NES tended to be generally free of major bugs. 5) Games were reviewed from content. Pornographic, overly violent, religious themed games or items in games had to be modified. With this strategy, Nintendo hit the market in '85 and basically single handedly revived the entire North American market. There were a handful of unlicensed 3rd parties (Tengen, Color Dreams, etc.) but none of them became major players at the time. While some of these 5 points have eroded a bit over time, they formed the basic business framework for competitors to either adopt or attempt to exploit. For example, the basic licensing model, QC and content provisions became Sega's framework for the Megadrive/Genesis while they relaxed the content provisions a bit to drive marketing during certain game fads (Mortal Kombat). Sony famously used a similar model, but then one-upped Nintendo on licensing deals and manufacturing costs to lure major third parties away during the N64/Playstation 1 era leaving Nintendo with a set of very 3rd rate 3rd parties and expensive to produce cartridges. The Playstation on the other hand had over 2500 games. In Japan, NEC adopted a very open publishing platform with the PC-FX, which basically turned into a platform for pornographic anime FMV games and died a quick death. Back in the West, the CD-i and 3DO platforms attempted completely different strategies and also died quickly and Atari gasped for life a few times before their own poor QC killed them off. All of these cases provided more data points that Nintendo's basic framework was prudent and any modern strategy should be variations off of that work. The large number of games for the PS1 caused its own set of problems as Sony also was starting to deal with QC problems by the PS2 era (which had almost 4,000 games released for it). However, Sony's response has been less focused than Nintendo, part of that is because the modern industry has more viable competition and consumers can "jump ship" so to speak between a handful of equivalent consoles. By the PS3 the game count was down again to PS1 levels (the PS4 is at about the same). Microsoft has their own variation which is more of a response to Sony than Nintendo. By the Gamecube era, Nintendo was seen as an also-ran, stuck with a hard-lined approach to the industry that had benefited but no longer needed the 5 point approach Nintendo had used to resurrect the industry. For the Wii, Nintendo finally learned, opened up and while still requiring licensing agreements, set a tone more like the first generation Playstation and ending up with over 1500 games for it. However, quality among 3rd parties dropped precipitously. Nintendo bungled the Wii U, and despite similar library sizes, the Wii had earned a reputation for really unfun shitty licensed tie in games and consumers moved away. It appears that Nintendo is returning to some other strategy with the Switch. Top-tier 1st party hits, great 3rd party games at the top end. And then filling out the lower tiers, casual games, indie games, multiplatform games and so on. There's already almost 600 games for the platform and it has a reputation for high quality titles -- correcting perceptions around the Wii. So the basic premise is that if console makers are struggling with crap in their libraries now, they can't tolerate the abysmal piles of pornographic garbage that will clog up store shelves if they don't attempt to control their platforms because that lesson was learned in '83 and again in the 90s (with the PC-FX, 3DO and CD-i). Lockout chips partnered with legal protections like the DMCA build protections they feel will keep their industry viable and history has shown that in the console market at least this is critical. The PC market has no such controls of course, but the consumer type is very different even if it looks superficially the same.
dragontamer 9y ago
> Does Nintendo actually stand to lose anything if a homebrew community evolved? Piracy was the #1 reason why people think that the Dreamcast failed. There was no security on the Dreamcast, and no one bought games for it Instead, everyone downloaded .iso files, wrote them to a disc, and ran games for free.
pandaman 9y ago
>Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? It is to prevent piracy. If you could run any code on a retail console then all you need is to get an image of a game, stripped of authenticity checks ("cracked"). This is how piracy on PC and other open platforms works.
EpicEng 9y ago
>Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, Well, yeah; that would be why. If you open it up you're also opening yourself up for this. Why do they need another reason?
kbenson 9y ago
In the past, Nintendo would likely not have had as much to worry about, as Nintendo has a habit of always selling their hardware at a profit. That said, I think the status quo of the industry means that every console manufacturer has to take security very seriously, for the following reasons. - Back catalog sold on newer platforms. Nintendo sells access to old games on new platforms. They want to charge you a few bucks to play the original Zelda, and for each additional game, not just allow you to throw on an emulator and hundreds of games and be done for free. - Available games and game developer targets. Developers choose what markets they want to target. Many already forego the Nintendo markets because they are generally underpowered compared to current gen hardware, and/or the cost benefit doesn't work out because there are less buyers for that type of game for Nintendo consoles. The gamer that wants to buy Dark Souls and has a Switch probably also has either a PS4 or an X-Box. Not preventing piracy of games makes this an even worse cost-benefit ratio, as you may end up subsidizing your game being wildy popular but largely unbought on Nintendo platforms if they don't. Look into the history of the Dreamcast. - For other console manufacturers, there's also the issue of recouping production cost. Licensed games pay a few bucks back the console manufacturer for each game sold, and they rely on this and sell the systems at a loss to help with market penetration. If a PS4 costs $350 to produce and sells for $300, you don't want people finding alternate uses or running unlicensed software (that doesn't kick back money) on them. You really don't want someone to produce some interesting free software that catches on so people start buying them just to run that software. That's money streaming out the door (I'm not sure if the PS4 or Xbox One are sold under cost at this point in the current generation, but I suspect not. Usually there ar later hardware revisions that make them more profitable to sell outright). So, really, it's just market economics and incentives. I do agree that limits on DRM would be in all our interests though. The only way I think the game companies would get on board with this (or more likely support it if forced to) would be to completely separate the "official" system and bios from the "general purpose" hardware access mode. That would still probably give hackers and crackers some clues about how to exploit the firmware, but may allow people to develop customized game console operating systems to run all the homebrew you want. Semi-useful for roo based systems, but actually fairly useful for mobile systems like the PSP, DS and Switch.
jotm 9y ago
> My sony PSP and nintendo DS are collecting dust because I already played all the licensed games I was going to on them. Now these devices are worthless to me and get tiny prices on the 2nd hand market. If their owners released firmware signing keys, these devices could have a new lease on useful life as homebrew machines Where have you been for the past couple of decades? This is literally planned obsolescence, you need to buy the new hardware and discard the old one. According to manufacturers, you shouldn't have any electronic device older than 1-2 years, or any car older than 5. Any ideas of a homebrew around any device are viewed as dangerous...

by saguro 9y ago

rocky1138 9y ago

Hasbro was kind enough to do exactly that for the Atari Jaguar.

Nursie 9y ago

IIRC the PSP has been busted so wide open that Sony may as well have released the keys. It started with quite complex hacks like 'Desperto del cemetario' (I think) but became as simple as sticking something on a memory card and running it. But yes, it is very counterintuitive - spending so much time and effort to make sure your machine is as limited as you can possibly make it.

Nursie 9y ago
"Despertar del cemetario", that's the one...

resonanttoe 9y ago

It's a perceptual argument I think. If publishers like EA and Ubisoft lose faith in the system's ability to protect against piracy, they're less likely to go out of their way to develop for it. This is especially true for Nintendo that requires (for varying reasons) special porting/development. For the sake of argument its easy to assume that PC, Xbox and PS4 roughly being equivilent to develop for. (this is totally cutting the gordian knot but...) They're essentially all X86_64 architecture with similar third party modules present (nVidia, AMD). So development on these systems is a lot easier. For Nintendo, you have to develop within the limitations of typically not as powerful hardware. (Take a look at WWE2K18 between PS4 and Switch.. they struggle with that). Which means that you have to not necessarily spend more, but spend extra to get it working on Switch properly (I.E, its not quick and cheap). Therefore if the piracy rates are high or perceived to be high because of a flourishing and popular homebrew community (false equivalency but I'm confident that it happens.) then the desire the expend that extra effort will go down. Espeically if the return is expected to be low. Also emulators are easy these days and that just totally erodes the Virtual Console Market. Around the Wii they discovered the HUGE proportional market for virtual console (Near 0 development cost/effort, huge returns, relatively) One of the first things that will come from this is a port of RetroArch. Which is cool but not what big N wants to see.

saguro 9y ago
I don't buy the added development cost argument. Firstly because AAA dev kits already have out of the box support for the Switch, secondly because sony and xbone put just as much effort into preventing unsigned code execution as nintendo does. Then is it just about protecting the emulation market? For nintendo I'd agree. For sony I'd say maybe. For microsoft? They don't really have an emulation market to speak of, but they still dump a lot of resources into DRM. So is it all about the perceived threat of piracy, or is there more? But to my earlier point, piracy stops being a factor a decade or two after the release of a console. Why don't we put time limits on DRM like we do with copyright and patents so that the manufacturers are forced to allow full use of the devices eventually.
- resonanttoe 9y ago
  Re: Development cost. I think we probably just have different perceptions on what that cost will be. I'm happy to disagree with you here, but I think we'll talk around the lack of any facts here. (Read: I have nothing I can present to concretely prove my point or disprove yours so I'm abandoning that line and will take your point as given as much as I feel mine (should be?) is :D) I would however still argue that its the perception of piracy and those costs rather than any reality of it. In regards to the idea of time-limited DRM. The argument here is what does that ultimately give Nintendo? The device is EOL and from their point of view the goodwill of the small community of us who like poking around the devices isn't worth even the relatively small amounts of effort to implement that model of DRM. Especially when Homebrew development happens within a console lifetime to begin with. Essentially, the work hours for homebrew is bought and paid for by these folk here. Nintendo has to do nothing and they get that Homebrew warm-fuzzies from a small group of folks. However the perceptual loss of faith from someone like EA would cause a huge and immediate impact to the life-cycle of in the In-life console. (Think of the Polygon,IGN and other articles that would come out if EA so much as sniffed at the idea of the Switch being to much of a piracy-risk) So no, I don't think there is more to it than a perception. Which sadly I think is overweighted in the argument. But already in this post, there are some weird equivalencies between user features and OS security being made which has a lot of value for people (not saying they're wrong in their valuations, just maybe the placement) so perception counts an awful lot for a lot of folks.

smacktoward 9y ago

> why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? Because they want to prevent a repeat of the circumstances that led to the great video game crash of 1983 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983). The first generation of home consoles didn’t have any restrictions on what they could run. The result was a flood of shoddy, low-quality games, which ruined the reputation of those consoles and nearly killed the entire market for home gaming.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago
Can this even happen again? Look at PCs. The cost to produce a very low quality game has never been cheaper, and the infrastructure to spread it has never been better. But there isn't really a problem. We now have marketplaces that have some level of curation in them that prevents this from being a major problem. It isn't a perfect system, but there is no threat of it crashing the video game industry. Social expectations of games, knowledge about games, information sharing about games, and platforms that allow this knowledge to propagate have made it so I can't see this as being any threat at all. Add in that we are talking homebrew, so its not like the content will have Nintendo's stamp of approval on it nor accessible to the average user, and the line of reasoning seems completely invalid. Though it wouldn't be the first time a company did something for reasons that were no longer valid.
- pjc50 9y ago
  I think this might be a valid concern for any app store, or market as a whole. I'm thinking of Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" paper here, about the difficulty of assessing quality in advance. Games have a sunk cost of time installing and getting started, often including a tutorial and introduction. This applies even if the game has no monetary cost. If a player finds too much of their time is wasted by bad games, they'll become more conservative and not try new games unless strongly recommended by friends. The big games continue to do OK, but the "long tail" gets a steeper inflection point - the middle tier of games is hollowed out and the rest of the tail becomes trash and knockoffs.
- 9y ago

pjc50 9y ago

> rather the devices became prematurely useless Then you have to buy a next-gen device and re-buy your games. Good for the manufacturer. I'd love to see this happening but can't see it happening without political action directed against premature obsolescence for environmental reasons.

saguro 9y ago
But they don't always release a next gen device. And a lot of people who own a <brand> device will automatically buy next gen <brand> when it comes out. And then only a comparatively small fraction of games is typically re-sold without modification. You think the return on the tiny percentage intersection of those conditions justifices the cost to society in terms of wasted materials and labour to do that? Does it even justify the manufacturer's development costs to create that lockout in the first place..?
- pjc50 9y ago
  > justifices the cost to society in terms of wasted materials and labour to do that? Probably not, but .. > Does it even justify the manufacturer's development costs to create that lockout in the first place.. I feel it must do, or they wouldn't keep doing it.

voltagex_ 9y ago

PSP depending on model is completely owned. The DS never really had enough power, there's some flash carts that have an extra CPU.

sli 9y ago
Yeah, I have a flash cart for my 3DS with all my old DS games on it. I can't leave it in the 3DS or it will drain my battery, because it's basically just another entire mini-console running in the 3DS.

exDM69 9y ago

The business model of consoles is selling hardware at discounted price which is not profitable, then selling games at a premium price. All the game sales give a cut to the console company. This only works if there isn't a lot of piracy or 3rd party content. If consoles were an open platform, they would have to raise the price of the console itself. Very few would pay $1000 for a console.

delecti 9y ago
Nintendo goes to more trouble than most to lock down their consoles (and they always have), and they also never sell their hardware at a loss (though this may have briefly been untrue after they lowered the price of the 3DS shortly after launch).
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  Just because they don't sell their hardware at a loss, it doesn't mean they want to give up software licensing fees.
  - delecti 9y ago
    True, and I'm sure that's a factor, but Nintendo's history leads me to believe that it's more of a cultural/ethical thing than a financial thing.
cleeus 9y ago
The Nintendo Switch is basically a nVidia Jetson TX1 (4xA57@1GHz) with some additional parts and a nice plastic packaging. That's comparable to a RasPi 3 except for the GPU. The costs are probably a bit more then 30$ of a raspi but it's not 1000$.

jtruk 9y ago

> Why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? Piracy is the most enduring reason. Second, regular players should expect a level field when playing online multiplayer - so no risk of battling against someone with modded software. Beyond that, supporting software and hardware failures is easier if you can assume everyone is running on a stock platform.

sli 9y ago
That second point can be mitigated by not allowing unsigned code to run in parallel with a game, and generally sequestering games and unsigned code so they cannot mix. I'd consider that a fair tradeoff. I mean, it may open up another vector for attack running unsigned code without any protections by the console, but... well, those already exist right now. The Switch, for <=3.0, is already broken (rohan[0], which is not yet publicly available). [0]: https://reswitched.tech/rohan https://reswitched.tech/rohan
- EpicEng 9y ago
  Or they could just lock down the system and prevent all of these problems with less effort... which is what they did.

MikeKusold 9y ago

Because Nintendo completely failed at DRM on the Wii U. Pirates can actually download games directly from Nintendo's official store and load them onto a hard drive to play.

jamie_ca 9y ago
It's even worse on the 3DS, pirates get an on-device store browser and install things directly. To my knowledge on the WiiU you still need to download and move it over via SD card.
- sli 9y ago
  And with FBI and the title DB, you don't even need freeShop. Things can be installed on a 3DS with custom firmware using the front camera and QR codes.
Ralfp 9y ago
> Pirates can actually download games directly from Nintendo's official store and load them onto a hard drive to play. I hear its the same with PS3 those days. Pirate app you install on your cracked console that allows you to browse, download and run games from Sony's servers without paying for anything.

trashcan 9y ago

A big part of is ensuring that unsigned code isn't run to cheat in multiplayer games. A lot of times there will be games that come out on Xbox and PC, and the PC one will have rampant cheating, and the Xbox version will not.

bane 9y ago

It's important to understand the history and context of the industry that Nintendo operates in. The 1983 video game crash was very real and devastating (at least in North America). In 2 years, revenue in the industry dropped by 97 percent. A number of problems were identified as causes -- like most things there is no single cause. But among them was poor quality control of games produced by third parties all producing an unlimited number of games. If 90% of everything is crap, in 1983, 99% of what was produced was crap because there was, at least up to 1983, no incentive to produce quality. In 1986 Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo at the time said, "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." Nintendo, in 1983, had just released the Famicom and also was struggling with unlicensed games produced by third parties with poor quality control. When Nintendo decided to, against all apparent sanity, sell into the North American market in 1985, they made several key platform changes: 1) The Famicom changed from a "video game system" to a home entertainment and computing toy and was shown at trade shows with accessories from keyboards to robots and no joystick in sight. To exhausted and bruised retailers this enabled them to position it differently than Atari's previous products. 2) They fenced in 3rd parties with strong licensing agreements, limited publishing rights (only 5 games per publisher per year), centralized control of product manufacturing (Nintendo made the cartridges and the publishers had to eat whatever cost Nintendo sold them at and a host of other restrictions. Any publisher who couldn't agree to this either went separate ways (Namco was a famous case) or was sued out of existence by a very litigious Nintendo of America. 3) They enforced the agreement with a lockout chip (10NES). 4) They rigorously playtested all published games for strict QC. It doesn't mean unfun games were released, but games released for the U.S. NES tended to be generally free of major bugs. 5) Games were reviewed from content. Pornographic, overly violent, religious themed games or items in games had to be modified. With this strategy, Nintendo hit the market in '85 and basically single handedly revived the entire North American market. There were a handful of unlicensed 3rd parties (Tengen, Color Dreams, etc.) but none of them became major players at the time. While some of these 5 points have eroded a bit over time, they formed the basic business framework for competitors to either adopt or attempt to exploit. For example, the basic licensing model, QC and content provisions became Sega's framework for the Megadrive/Genesis while they relaxed the content provisions a bit to drive marketing during certain game fads (Mortal Kombat). Sony famously used a similar model, but then one-upped Nintendo on licensing deals and manufacturing costs to lure major third parties away during the N64/Playstation 1 era leaving Nintendo with a set of very 3rd rate 3rd parties and expensive to produce cartridges. The Playstation on the other hand had over 2500 games. In Japan, NEC adopted a very open publishing platform with the PC-FX, which basically turned into a platform for pornographic anime FMV games and died a quick death. Back in the West, the CD-i and 3DO platforms attempted completely different strategies and also died quickly and Atari gasped for life a few times before their own poor QC killed them off. All of these cases provided more data points that Nintendo's basic framework was prudent and any modern strategy should be variations off of that work. The large number of games for the PS1 caused its own set of problems as Sony also was starting to deal with QC problems by the PS2 era (which had almost 4,000 games released for it). However, Sony's response has been less focused than Nintendo, part of that is because the modern industry has more viable competition and consumers can "jump ship" so to speak between a handful of equivalent consoles. By the PS3 the game count was down again to PS1 levels (the PS4 is at about the same). Microsoft has their own variation which is more of a response to Sony than Nintendo. By the Gamecube era, Nintendo was seen as an also-ran, stuck with a hard-lined approach to the industry that had benefited but no longer needed the 5 point approach Nintendo had used to resurrect the industry. For the Wii, Nintendo finally learned, opened up and while still requiring licensing agreements, set a tone more like the first generation Playstation and ending up with over 1500 games for it. However, quality among 3rd parties dropped precipitously. Nintendo bungled the Wii U, and despite similar library sizes, the Wii had earned a reputation for really unfun shitty licensed tie in games and consumers moved away. It appears that Nintendo is returning to some other strategy with the Switch. Top-tier 1st party hits, great 3rd party games at the top end. And then filling out the lower tiers, casual games, indie games, multiplatform games and so on. There's already almost 600 games for the platform and it has a reputation for high quality titles -- correcting perceptions around the Wii. So the basic premise is that if console makers are struggling with crap in their libraries now, they can't tolerate the abysmal piles of pornographic garbage that will clog up store shelves if they don't attempt to control their platforms because that lesson was learned in '83 and again in the 90s (with the PC-FX, 3DO and CD-i). Lockout chips partnered with legal protections like the DMCA build protections they feel will keep their industry viable and history has shown that in the console market at least this is critical. The PC market has no such controls of course, but the consumer type is very different even if it looks superficially the same.

dragontamer 9y ago

> Does Nintendo actually stand to lose anything if a homebrew community evolved? Piracy was the #1 reason why people think that the Dreamcast failed. There was no security on the Dreamcast, and no one bought games for it Instead, everyone downloaded .iso files, wrote them to a disc, and ran games for free.

pandaman 9y ago

>Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, why do console manufacturers put so much effort into preventing unvetted code from running on their hardware? It is to prevent piracy. If you could run any code on a retail console then all you need is to get an image of a game, stripped of authenticity checks ("cracked"). This is how piracy on PC and other open platforms works.

EpicEng 9y ago

>Beyond preventing the distribution of pirated games, Well, yeah; that would be why. If you open it up you're also opening yourself up for this. Why do they need another reason?

kbenson 9y ago

In the past, Nintendo would likely not have had as much to worry about, as Nintendo has a habit of always selling their hardware at a profit. That said, I think the status quo of the industry means that every console manufacturer has to take security very seriously, for the following reasons. - Back catalog sold on newer platforms. Nintendo sells access to old games on new platforms. They want to charge you a few bucks to play the original Zelda, and for each additional game, not just allow you to throw on an emulator and hundreds of games and be done for free. - Available games and game developer targets. Developers choose what markets they want to target. Many already forego the Nintendo markets because they are generally underpowered compared to current gen hardware, and/or the cost benefit doesn't work out because there are less buyers for that type of game for Nintendo consoles. The gamer that wants to buy Dark Souls and has a Switch probably also has either a PS4 or an X-Box. Not preventing piracy of games makes this an even worse cost-benefit ratio, as you may end up subsidizing your game being wildy popular but largely unbought on Nintendo platforms if they don't. Look into the history of the Dreamcast. - For other console manufacturers, there's also the issue of recouping production cost. Licensed games pay a few bucks back the console manufacturer for each game sold, and they rely on this and sell the systems at a loss to help with market penetration. If a PS4 costs $350 to produce and sells for $300, you don't want people finding alternate uses or running unlicensed software (that doesn't kick back money) on them. You really don't want someone to produce some interesting free software that catches on so people start buying them just to run that software. That's money streaming out the door (I'm not sure if the PS4 or Xbox One are sold under cost at this point in the current generation, but I suspect not. Usually there ar later hardware revisions that make them more profitable to sell outright). So, really, it's just market economics and incentives. I do agree that limits on DRM would be in all our interests though. The only way I think the game companies would get on board with this (or more likely support it if forced to) would be to completely separate the "official" system and bios from the "general purpose" hardware access mode. That would still probably give hackers and crackers some clues about how to exploit the firmware, but may allow people to develop customized game console operating systems to run all the homebrew you want. Semi-useful for roo based systems, but actually fairly useful for mobile systems like the PSP, DS and Switch.

jotm 9y ago

> My sony PSP and nintendo DS are collecting dust because I already played all the licensed games I was going to on them. Now these devices are worthless to me and get tiny prices on the 2nd hand market. If their owners released firmware signing keys, these devices could have a new lease on useful life as homebrew machines Where have you been for the past couple of decades? This is literally planned obsolescence, you need to buy the new hardware and discard the old one. According to manufacturers, you shouldn't have any electronic device older than 1-2 years, or any car older than 5. Any ideas of a homebrew around any device are viewed as dangerous...