People love their Switches. Some people love them so much they want to break them open and make them do things they’re not supposed to. That means Nintendo has to respond. The back-and-forth between Nintendo and hackers reached fever pitch this week.
First, some background: In April, Switch hackers found a way to jailbreak Switch hardware that they said Nintendo would have no way of patching. The bug being exploited was at the hardware level, meaning it could apparently only be fixed as new consoles were manufactured, not through updates to firmware.
At the end of May, a number of Switch hackers found that their accounts had been banned from Nintendo’s online service. That means no more online play, the eShop, orother Switch features.
Users believed the bannings might have had something to do with them violating the terms of Nintendo’s content distribution network to download Switch updates to PC for reverse-engineering and research purposes.
It recalled a ban wave that hit 3DS hackers last year around the same time for similar activities. This shows that Nintendo, which has yet to publicly comment on Switch hacking, was still paying attention in certain cases.
— Shiny Quagsire (@ShinyQuagsire) May 19, 2018
Nintendo Can Detect Pirated Games
On June 18, one of the recent banned hackers, a prominent one named SciresM, detailed in a Reddit post how Nintendo was using a new, sophisticated system to detect pirated games. According to his research, Nintendo uses unique certifications for every individual Switch cartridge and copy of a digital game, then checks to see whether those match up with the account that first played them.
As a result, pirated games will get flagged because of the mismatch, leading Nintendo to easily detect and ban the offending consoles from accessing its online service.
“tl;dr: Don’t pirate games,” SciresM wrote. “These are extremely strong anti-piracy measures — Nintendo did a great job, here. … In the digital game case, Nintendo actually perfectly prevents online piracy.”
Hackers Can Change Their Switch Avatars (To Porn)
Later in the week, there were reports that Switch hackers named Scionae and Pragma had found a way to run the system’s developer software, called DevMenu, on standard, non-developer Switch units. Images of DevMenu, used by developers to create and optimise games for the Switch, have been widely circulated for a while, but this is the first time there have been widespread reports of the software running on normal commercial units.
The upshot of this is that people would, among other things, be able to directly load games onto SD cards or create custom avatars for their user profiles.
Console hacker Reisyukaku was able to change their avatar to a character from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, something a fellow hacker was able to replicate, sharing it on Twitter with a photograph of their own.
Switch owners can only choose from a preset library of different avatars for their profile, and being able to upload any old image would be a truly groundbreaking thing for a platform as feature-limited and tightly controlled as the Nintendo Switch.
In response to the thread, one user tweeted “Next step: adding NSFW images and watch out for the big N hammer” — that is, for the inevitable smackdown from Nintendo’s tech team.
On June 22, someone wrote a now-deleted post on on the Switch subreddit talking about their child finding pornographic content in Super Mario Odyssey‘s Balloon World mode thanks to the avatar hack.
In Balloon World, players can go online to hunt for balloons hidden across levels by other people. The balloons have the avatar of the player who placed it on them, meaning that if someone could hack their avatar to make it a picture of [insert human body part here] it could theoretically appear in other people’s games.
JoJos avatar > Nintendo default avatars ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) pic.twitter.com/XhkaVmNw6M
— Rei (@Reisyukaku) June 21, 2018
A second post, widely reported on by different gaming news sites, alleged something similar, including links to two blurry images as proof. However, when I tried to reach out to the user behind the second post through Reddit, I was immediately contacted by several other members of a homebrew Discord group saying the context of the post was fake.
While the images themselves might be legitimate, they said, they weren’t discovered by someone’s child or being shared by an angry parent. According to them, and screenshots of the discussion in the Discord, the Reddit user in question was just trolling.
A number of Switch users have in fact managed to switch their avatars to something explicit, one of the Discord users told Kotaku, and some of them had popped up in Mario Odyssey — but how widespread it is, and Nintendo’s means for dealing with it, remains far from clear. Nintendo did not return a request by Kotaku to for comment on the matter.
It’s clear from this week’s goings-on that Switch hacking is going to be an endless game of Mario Tennis between hackers and Nintendo, with each side aggressively attempting to shatter the other’s racket on every volley.
The big question is, will hackers force Nintendo’s hand and get it to officially support the sorts of features that players want to add?
Something like custom avatars, a feature the Xbox One has, might not seem like that big a deal. But they, like voice chat, speak to how robust the Switch’s overall user experience is or could be — and how various hackers’ insistence to make it happen, whether Nintendo wants it or not, could affect how the company decides to improve, refine, and grow its online community in the future.
Comments
9 responses to “The Fight Between Switch Hackers And Nintendo Is Ramping Up”
Wait, so the avatars are actually fully shared between consoles? I would have thought just the ID tag associated with it would be shared, and the switch on the other end would pull the correct image from it’s own library.
I believe you can set your Mii has an avatar and I guess its easier to use an image then to send the Mii data to each console.
Oh yeah, that is true. That would be easy, however I think Mii’s can be pretty compressed, didn’t they save in a few kb’s in wii remotes or something way back? Way easier to use a picture that to try and resurrect that though.
The porn thing was fake, it was created as a joke by some people on a certain discord. It never actually happened.
Great article.
Though I do disagree with the wording of one line:
Nintendo has zero control, legal or moral, over what one can do with hardware they have purchased. If I own a piece of computing hardware, it is my right to run whatever code I want on it.
Now, that said, when it comes to then touching Nintendo’s online network, of course yes they are within their full rights to enforce their will on anyone violating the TOS. There are lots of reasons of hack hardware which have nothing to do with piracy or messing with online services. People using exploits to put pornographic material into an otherwise controlled environment is just moronic and immature though, and it shits me to no end that people like this give a bad name to whole communities of hardware hackers.
Im confused
Wouldnt that mean that you couldnt play pre-owned games or lend them to friends too?
It’d mean that Nintendo could track the reuse of second-hand games. I doubt they’d do anything if they saw “user A was using game X, and now user B is using game X”. But if they saw “user A was using game X, and now 1,000 other users are using game X”, then they’d act.
With online connectivity, they might also be checking if the same copy of a game is being played simultaneously on multiple consoles.
Ah thanks for the explanation!
I like to buy pre-owned games and games off people and its good to know I’d be able to use them!
No mention of SXOS? Really?