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Someone at E3 is trying to dump the Zelda Wii U demo on an SD Card
- Thread starter DeathSparks
- Start date
eyeball_kid
Member
Great article.
E3 and other tradeshows should really have a blacklist of known hackers like this. Also, I thought E3 was 18 and over?
Kenzodielocke
Banned
Funny, Joh Hardin told Ben Moore from Easy Allies that this is the exact reason they didn't bring a playable demo.
You think publishers not releasing every demo they work on to the public is some kind of elitism? lol
Once you start letting people outside E3 play it? Like at Nintendo World? Then, yes.
Wow. If they succeeded Nintendo's lawyers wouldn't rest until someone went to jail.
it's shocking how people were rewriting their hack tools publicly and tweeting about their theft techniques.
Who cares?
Not every demo, no.
Some big 40 minute demo though? They could polish it up and release it, yes.
I think more people should do whatever SE did with the Duscae thing, but again, without trying to sell it only with d1 editions like they did.
The obsession with control this industry has eludes me though.
Exterminieren
Banned
I imagine that Nintendo wouldn't particularly want to have all of the information on the next Zelda all over the Internet nine months before launch for no real tangible benefit.
If it's true, then I'm glad they failed and I dislike saying this but I hope Nintendo will do something to protect themself better.
Seriously, I hate datamining on unreleased prducts. That just spoil the fun and the hard work of the devs.
Not all demos get data mined to hell and back, so you could definitely polish that stuff.
But even then, I don't understand the obsession this industry and its fans have with spoilers about every little bullshit.
You watch an e3 interview about the spiderman game, and you get shit like "we aren't talking about that" to basic questions.
I'm not asking them to release the script for the whole game, but a game doesn't stop being fun, because you find out the names of a couple of areas or how many swords are there.
Spoilers obsession and trying to keep everything under wraps like it matters really puzzles me.
To me it's not different from people asking R* whether they're working on red or agent and them going "we can't say anything".
What's the big deal? Just say you're working on it.
Slime Scholar
Member
And risk having that datamined, which people would have unlimited time to do? Plus allegedly the demo is a huge file size. Original tweet put it at 16GB despite being stripped down. They would have to work at stripping it down more. I'm sure they're limited in how much they can actually do that.
Creating a demo is a lot of effort. Article even says that it wasn't running on a retail Wii U, so who knows what other problems they'd have when releasing this to the public?
Calm Mind
Member
Same here. A rare attempt at actual journalism.
SinCityAssassin
Member
The saddest part is probably them spending too much time trying to steal it that they never got a chance to play it.
I think it'd be worth the extra effort to release it.
But I also don't expect a demo to be stable, myself.
HawthorneKitty
Sgt. 2nd Class in the Creep Battalion, Waifu Wars
They didn't reaaaaaly want to play it. :/
NinjaCoachZ
Member
They did some stories on Destiny which were pretty informative, and I think they broke things like Fallout 4, in 2013. They're not my favourite gaming site since it straddles a weird line between a casual blog, a news site, and a buzzfeed-esque setup, but they at least have some legit journalists among them.
ShockingAlberto
Member
You want to play it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's worth the effort.
Kotaku piece didn't mention the Super Mario 3D Land E3 2012 demo. It wasn't until last year that someone successfully dumped a development cartridge with the demo on it. How the cartridge made it off the show floor is a mystery. I'm assuming it was meant to be destroyed but somehow exchanged hands until it ended up on the internet.
The way the story unfolded with the Zelda Wii U demo attempt mirrored early attempts at dumping the 3D Land demo. No one initially accounted for the cartridge dumper not working properly on a debug 3DS. The dumper was modified and the game successfully dumped and is playable on retail hardware albeit with same restrictions you'd find playing a store demo on a retail system (i.e. home button doesn't work).
I guess if they pulled it off, it would be the same case with the Wii U. Nintendo prototypes are a rarity and I don't think a Wii U proto has ever been dumped/distributed.
Prototypes are living history ... it's really neat to see the process and direction a game takes before it's released.
Prototypes of newer games or unreleased games are iffy. I think Sonic Advance 3 leaked earlier than it did in retail at the time and some people didn't want anything to do with it.
Nintendo would have responded legally on the Wii U Zelda demo simply because when people did start inevitably digging through the game's files, they'd find references to the NX that Nintendo isn't ready to make public yet.
I'd argue that in the case of most prototypes even Metroid Prime 3 and Mario 3D Land, the damage is very limited/non-existent to the sales or integrity of the IP and isn't worth it for a company to go out or maybe readily try to claim it.
The way the story unfolded with the Zelda Wii U demo attempt mirrored early attempts at dumping the 3D Land demo. No one initially accounted for the cartridge dumper not working properly on a debug 3DS. The dumper was modified and the game successfully dumped and is playable on retail hardware albeit with same restrictions you'd find playing a store demo on a retail system (i.e. home button doesn't work).
I guess if they pulled it off, it would be the same case with the Wii U. Nintendo prototypes are a rarity and I don't think a Wii U proto has ever been dumped/distributed.
Prototypes are living history ... it's really neat to see the process and direction a game takes before it's released.
Prototypes of newer games or unreleased games are iffy. I think Sonic Advance 3 leaked earlier than it did in retail at the time and some people didn't want anything to do with it.
Nintendo would have responded legally on the Wii U Zelda demo simply because when people did start inevitably digging through the game's files, they'd find references to the NX that Nintendo isn't ready to make public yet.
I'd argue that in the case of most prototypes even Metroid Prime 3 and Mario 3D Land, the damage is very limited/non-existent to the sales or integrity of the IP and isn't worth it for a company to go out or maybe readily try to claim it.
Lol fair enough.
But i think in the digital age, it would make more sense to start establishing a more direct "line" with the customers, instead of having stuff like E3.
I'm not the only one questioning its utility, either (as much fun as it can be, for the spectacle).
Nintendo itself started doing Nintendo Directs.
I think a future where E3 "demos" will actually become just demos, is not far off.
Thats what I thought/expected ta happen at the start of last gen. Didn't really pan out in the like 10 years since then...
ShockingAlberto
Member
Microsoft tried this once.
They stopped doing it because it was an intense amount of effort for their own studios and third parties who have enough trouble getting E3 demos ready, much less having to clean one up for consumer units who will get significantly more angry if their consoles crash or brick, all the while trying to develop the game they're trying to make.
Yes, because the music and film industry are not like this. AT ALL.
Also the Zelda demo is not comparable to what happened to the circumstances around Episode Duscae and it seems the game world is structured in such a way that it would be hella easy to datamine the shit out of the map something they seem very averse rn (I mean, they stripped the demo from NPC to avoid story spoilers) and unless they stripped everything except the demo area... yeah, not worth the effort.
Skittzo0413
Member
In addition to points that have been made above:
A) Releasing a demo has been proven to never in any way affect sales of a title. Why go through the effort to build and release it?
B) Data mining the game might lower your sales if people see the entirety of the game's story, or potentially see a lot of the game's mechanics which don't make sense out of context, making the game seem less appealing.
C) A lot of the time developers don't give answers to those questions is because they don't actually have answers. If they confirm something before it's actually ready, then fans can later accuse them of backtracking or otherwise being misleading, which can lead to negative perceptions. A good business will not reveal information about their products until they are assured that releasing said information can't come back to hurt them,
I didn't say that.
Though a movie has little more beyond "story", and that at least has some reason to be kept under wraps.
Castings and staff choices though are usually announced pretty early, and i don't see why they shouldn't.
Also talking about the fans, gamers (and geeks in general) are the people i've seen most obsessed with pointless "spoilers warning" bullshit around, i think that's a problem.
Not all demos make sense, but some demos can really hit it out of the park (as we've seen with PT) so it would probably depend on a game to game basis (no, i don't think every little E3 demo would be worth distributing).
But a lot of this seems to comes down to: Gaming fans would be idiots that can't understand why a feature may be changed, or a WiP can sometimes crash and brick.
I don't think they should have to confirm anything, i just don't see what's so taboo about transparency: "So far we're still deciding around, regarding feature X, could be this, could be that".
At least during the Zelda stream, someone asked about Rupees i think, and the answer was more like "the game is still in development, and things are still being decided, regarding that".
I'd appreciate an even more transparent answer, but still better than a completely lapidary "we're not talking about that".
Skittzo0413
Member
How much money did PT make? Was its success in any part due to the demo? I honestly don't know, I've just seen a lot of reports saying that releasing demos to the public very rarely benefits the company.
As to the bolded, I totally agree with you. Again, this isn't only relegated to the gaming industry but yeah, I don't think anyone would think negatively of a company for giving an answer like that. Who knows why they do it that way!
Pwnedkiller
Neo Member
Would you have to hack your Wii U in order to run this? I'm assuming you would and has it leaked? I would be up for trying to get this running on my Wii U.
Laurel_McFang
Member
Not neccessarily dev units probably have a set of inputs to bring up debug menus so devs can catch errors or monitor performance or restart in case they totally crash the Wii U etc.
While I don't support stealing generally I do have to wonder why Nintendo has not seriously considered releasing the demo as a Wii U download via the e-shop. There clearly is a high demand for it!
I mean, why not? We've been waiting for this game for so long already and the latest delay seems purely political due to the NX version needing to be ready. On top of that, plenty of non-journalist people (i.e. the lucky ones) have played it already, so it's not like it's a secret to everyone.
We all need something to play on Wii U for the second half of this year so if they're not releasing (m)any new games, a self-contained demo like this would certainly hit the spot.
Exterminieren
Banned
Because the demo is not the finished product, and it doesn't benefit Nintendo in the slightest to have an incomplete build of the game out for public consumption the best part of a year before anyone can actually buy it, not to mention the fact that it will be datamined within seconds of it hitting the eShop.
The better question is why they would do it, not why not.
OrbitalBeard
Member
There are many reasons but the main one is that you already want to play it, making the idea of a public demo for this game completely meaningless.
Demos made a lot more sense in the past, before streaming and YouTube became a thing.
KratosEnergyDrink
Member
Sincerely?
They show this demo in a controlled environment with hosts to explain some things, this is somewhat different from a game demo for a broader public. Releasing this Zelda demo for the mainstream audience would only give the game a bad perception. Besides some other negatives like data mining.
It is an enormous effort to make a "real" demo, especially for an open world game. The developers (and producers) should spend time and money on the game not demos.
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