When the Wii U came out, our hacker instincts kicked in and we started looking into ways of breaking into the hardware. A few days before launch we...reached most of the milestones required to be able to say that we hacked the device; without going into details, there is basically no security left to break into, other than a mostly unimportant step of the boot process. What would remain is the tedious work of developing the open frameworks required to bootstrap a homebrew community, documenting everything, reverse engineering all of the new hardware, developing a persistent exploit (think tethered vs. untethered iPhone jailbreak, except without any extra hardware or cables), and packaging it all up.
Over the next few months, interest faded. I took a break to work on other projects. There wasnt much of a reaction from the Wii homebrew community. Is it really worth going through all that effort when we already have open devices that are affordable and widely available? About 31 trustworthy people, most of them well-known people in the homebrew community, have access to what we developed, yet nobody stepped up to start working on a homebrew platform for the Wii U.
At the same time, there is an eternal clash between the homebrew community and those interested in pirating games. Writing homebrew software and frameworks is rather difficult - it requires new code to be written to support the hardware, which must be reverse engineered first. Convincing a game console to load copied games is comparatively simpler, as only the bare minimum amount of code patches required to convince the game/OS to load the game from alternate storage media are required. For example, on the PS3, the kernel payload of the first game loaders was a tiny system call patch, and I wrote an (unreleased) Wii USB loader using existing homebrew frameworks in a couple hundred lines of code, as a proof of concept. Every console after the PS2 was initially broken to run open homebrew code, and only later did piracy show up (excluding disc-drive-based hacks, which I consider a different category).
I think we may have reached the point where homebrew on closed game consoles is no longer appealing. The effort required to develop and maintain an environment for a big, complex modern game console is huge. The cat and mouse game with the manufacturer requires ongoing effort. There is a very real threat of litigation. Game pirates would become not just big users of the result of those efforts, but by far the overwhelming majority (not because there are more pirates, but because there are fewer homebrewers). The fact that the Wii U isnt selling nearly as well as the Wii did doesnt help drive enthusiasm either.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe its just that I have a full-time job now and less of a chance to spend all-nighters staring at assembly code. Maybe there are tons of prospective Wii U homebrew developers quietly waiting in the sidelines for a release. Maybe weve just gotten lazy.
We could just release everything as-is, of course. However, we tried that with the PS3, and the results were not only disappointing, but we actually ended up in an undeserved legal mess. Homebrew for the PS3 is basically nonexistent, and all anyone cares about is piracy. This is not a situation which we want to see happen again.
