Two Wii modchips announced

General purpose discussion about gaming and emulation.
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Two Wii modchips announced

Post by az_bont »

MaxConsole wrote:Team Ninja has reportedly the first ever Wii modchip up their sleeves. The 5 wire modification will play Wii and GC backups of the SAME region, and is expected to retail for around 35 euro's.
Source: MaxConsole
MaxConsole wrote:It seems that Wiinja is already outdated even before its release. Fedex dropped a nice little gift for us today to review. Say hello to CycloWiz!

Here is what we know so far about this chip:

- Quicksolder (no wires required)
- Plays Wii Backups
- Plays GC Backups
- Play GC Homebrew
- Play GC Imports (swap needed)
- Built-in Audiofix (GC games using streaming are working flawlessly, no patch needed)
- DVD-R / DVD+R support
- Optional chip disable wire
- Stealth even when chip is enabled
- Multi-purpose LED

The chip is supposed to be shipped by the end of the week, so in fact this may be the first "real" Modchip to reach the market!
Source: MaxConsole

Unfortunately, both lack the ability to play Wii games from another region.
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Post by Smiley »

Since I don't have broadband to dl vc games, I kinda want a chip that lets me use roms I already have.
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Post by arrowhead »

have "they" already figured out how to rip wii games? Its not dvd format that you can just stick in your dvd drive is it?

How can they announce a chip that will play backups that havent been made yet?
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Post by az_bont »

arrowhead wrote:have "they" already figured out how to rip wii games? Its not dvd format that you can just stick in your dvd drive is it?
There are tools to read the discs in normal DVD-ROM drives. It uses some strange read method that only works with certain LG drives, and takes around 50 hours. Unless a better one has turned up that I don't know about.

EDIT: A newer program is available which is about five times faster (500MB/hour) and which works with more drives. It also dumps Gamecube discs.
Last edited by az_bont on Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Caboose »

arrowhead wrote:have "they" already figured out how to rip wii games? Its not dvd format that you can just stick in your dvd drive is it?

How can they announce a chip that will play backups that havent been made yet?
Plenty of Wii games have been dumped, starting with Red Steel late last year. Last week loads of them came out, and they are still pouring out.

Wii games are in DVD format, just layed out a little differently, and the hackers have been able to dump them and make burnable .iso images, so yeah you can play the games once the modchips are available for sale.
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Post by APE »

Smiley wrote:Since I don't have broadband to dl vc games, I kinda want a chip that lets me use roms I have dumped from my own carts.
Thats about the only thing I would like a chip for. Now that I have money buying games isn't a real issue to me.
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Post by BlackAura »

The Wii discs are essentially the same as the Gamecube discs. It doesn't look like Nintendo changed anything, which may have been a mistake. As with the Dreamcast, it's quite possible that third-party developers will just drop the console if piracy becomes too widespread.

Then again, it doesn't seem to have hurt the PSP (easily softmoddable, just need a memory stick), the GBA (all you need is a flash cart and an internet connection), the DS (same as the GBA), the PS1 (cheap, easily available modchips), PS2 (cheap, easily available modchips), Xbox (cheap, easily available modchips, and easily softmoddable)...

About the only thing I'd want to use one of these for is playing imports, which they can't do anyway. I don't even really want to do homebrew on a Wii anymore, since I can just use the controller on a PC. Pirating games is just pointless.
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Post by Skynet »

Pirating games is just pointless.
I've found that I do it less and less now that I have a steady, permanent income. Sadly around the time of the DC my legit bought games to pirated were about 3 pirated to 1 legit :(

Funny thing is that within the last 2 years I've been trying to buy all the games I've pirated. Same deal with my DVDs, I'd say between me and my gf we'd own somewhere in the region of 150-200 DVDs
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Post by Ex-Cyber »

Wii chips will almost certainly get much cheaper than this initial batch. All indications I've seen suggest that technologically this is almost identical to a GC "drivechip", so there's no ongoing reason for it to be any more expensive than the current crop of those.
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Post by Nyarlathotep »

BlackAura wrote:The Wii discs are essentially the same as the Gamecube discs. It doesn't look like Nintendo changed anything, which may have been a mistake. As with the Dreamcast, it's quite possible that third-party developers will just drop the console if piracy becomes too widespread.
Nintendo consoles are a lot more resistant to losing third party support (see: N64, GC) because people who buy Nintendo consoles buy them primarily for first and second party releases anyway - and historically some easily piratable consoles have done quite well (the Playstations particularly).

I'm not disputing that piracy hurts the industry however, and a modchip that ONLY plays 'backups' is pretty fucking clearly aimed solely at appeasing software piracy.
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Post by az_bont »

Why would piracy affect sales of their game in particular, when just about every single game released is available on the internet, very often before the release date?
Euro Gamer wrote:SI opted for digital distribution instead of a boxed release, but the expected sales didn't pick up.
Ah, that would be the reason then. They used a distribution method that only a fraction of the population would care to take advantage of, and which in particular alienates mainstream gamers, which form a higher-than-average proportion of the audience for sports games.
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Post by Nyarlathotep »

az_bont wrote:
Why would piracy affect sales of their game in particular, when just about every single game released is available on the internet, very often before the release date?
Euro Gamer wrote:SI opted for digital distribution instead of a boxed release, but the expected sales didn't pick up.
Ah, that would be the reason then. They used a distribution method that only a fraction of the population would care to take advantage of, and which in particular alienates mainstream gamers, which form a higher-than-average proportion of the audience for sports games.
Read the commenst to that article, a few of the programmers explain it in detail, but in summary:

1) PC games generally have 6:1 ratios of warezers:purchasers - this particular title was seeing rations of 10:1

2) Its a particularly niche game aimed at a particular niche audience (in much the same way Sam & Max Episodes are) and distributed electronically, so it cant rely on 'mainstream' sales to support piracy (as many PC titles actually do)

Software piracy on the PC as a gaming platform is a MASSIVE problem for developers, especially the smaller / independent developers and it affects games more than it does something like music or films because there arent multiple revenue streams.
You can argue that as much as you want to justify your own morality regarding downloading games, but at the end of the day thats actually a fact.
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Post by az_bont »

Nyarlathotep wrote:
az_bont wrote:
Why would piracy affect sales of their game in particular, when just about every single game released is available on the internet, very often before the release date?
Euro Gamer wrote:SI opted for digital distribution instead of a boxed release, but the expected sales didn't pick up.
Ah, that would be the reason then. They used a distribution method that only a fraction of the population would care to take advantage of, and which in particular alienates mainstream gamers, which form a higher-than-average proportion of the audience for sports games.
Read the commenst to that article, a few of the programmers explain it in detail, but in summary:

1) PC games generally have 6:1 ratios of warezers:purchasers - this particular title was seeing rations of 10:1

2) Its a particularly niche game aimed at a particular niche audience (in much the same way Sam & Max Episodes are) and distributed electronically, so it cant rely on 'mainstream' sales to support piracy (as many PC titles actually do)
1) Where are they getting these numbers from? BitTorrent is uncentralised, and so there's no central source for figures. There is no way of keeping track of the number of downloads on Usenet, either.

Besides that, if actual game sales were as disappointingly low as they stated, and the game was only expected to sell to a small market of gamers, then surely the much smaller sample size can account for that discrepancy?

A figure of 10:1 for pirated copies to actual sales means nothing. Aside from that, the difference between sales of 10:1 and 6:1 is only 40%, and the various posts by the developers seem to indicate that sales were a lot worse than that - a fraction of what they expected.

2) Using a novel digital distribution method is fine if your particular niche audience is one likely to be receptive to the idea of paying money for digital content. Very few games have gone with this sort of method, and the only two big success stories I know of are the Sam and Max episodes, and Half-Life 2, which are squarely aimed at a segment of the market that are, for lack of a better word, geeky. And in the case of the latter, it only sold 25% of its copies via Steam, the remaining 75% coming from the boxed release.

But an ice hockey management game has much more mainstream appeal, by which I mean it does not especially appeal to that segment of gamers who would be particularly receptive to the idea of digital content distribution. You only have to look at the percentage of iPod users who bother with iTunes to see that whilst people will happily pay for their CDs (sometimes), they are not keen to pay money for a product that doesn't have a physical prescense.

Aside from that even, there are posts in that comments page complaining that the game wasn't any good, and that their previous copy protection methods had rendered games unusable, which seems to be becoming more and more common with PC games, further increasing the attractiveness of pirated copies to gamers.

The game was a German language hockey simulator, with it's potential audience being hockey fans in Germany, of which there aren't many. The game recieved no marketing, had a small potential customer base, yet the developers decided to go with a distribution method which has so far only been used with a handful of other titles which were so immensely popular they were guaranteed a large number of sales even if the majority rejected the notion - which in the case of HL2, they certainly did.

The developers fucked up - immensely - and they're trying to pass the buck.
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Post by Ex-Cyber »

Yeah, I'm always a bit skeptical of purported warez statistics. Aside from the obvious difficulty in getting real data, there's a serious problem with trying to model it one-dimensionally. How do they count e.g. people who both buy the game and download it illegally? I've known people who do this pretty regularly, for a variety of reasons (try-before-you-buy, getting a cracked version that's less of a hassle, early access to a game they've preordered, leaving the legit copy shrinkwrapped et. al.). I'm willing to bet that they don't count people who download an old game/movie/album and then buy the sequel upon release, either...
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Post by |darc| »

Pirated copies != lost sales
It's thinking...
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Post by mankrip »

Pirated copies does equal to lost sales. What they doesn't equal to is lost money. However, development, publishing and marketing does equal to lost money, which must be recovered through sales. So, lost sales + lost money = failure.

Piracy always hurts, but the degree of the damage can be very different from one product to another. Some times it may be negligible, and some times it may get someone (usually the developers) out of business.

On a related note, there is only one game I regret not warezing before buying: Men in Black (PC). I played the demo version, which has only the first stage, and liked it. And then I bought the full version, and got disappointed right at the second stage (the one in the snow). But usually the full version always offers a better experience than the demo, so if you liked the demo you'll certainly like the full version.
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Post by |darc| »

Fragger wrote:Pirated copies does equal to lost sales.
No, it doesn't. If you accept that pirated copies might be try-before-you-buys, then you can't accept that pirated copies equal lost sales. Not everyone buys everything they try.
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Post by Nyarlathotep »

|darc| wrote:
Fragger wrote:Pirated copies does equal to lost sales.
No, it doesn't. If you accept that pirated copies might be try-before-you-buys, then you can't accept that pirated copies equal lost sales. Not everyone buys everything they try.
No, it does but not necessarily at a 1:1 ratio.
Surely you must accept that although not everyone who downloads a copy of a game would have bought it if a copy was not available, some would have?

I'm not entirely sure why there are people trying to justify warez as being completely harmless. It isn't.
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Post by mankrip »

Well, not all lost sales are caused by piracy, and not all piracy causes lost sales, but I think it's safe to assume that piracy aways causes a number of lost sales. That's what I meant.
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Post by |darc| »

Nyarlathotep wrote:I'm not entirely sure why there are people trying to justify warez as being completely harmless. It isn't.
I don't think there was one person in this thread that said piracy is harmless.
Fragger wrote:I think it's safe to assume that piracy aways causes a number of lost sales. That's what I meant.
I never said anything contrary to that.
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