pory

Yeah, the ease and safety (and incredibly good/available guides) of piracy on 3DS made it so a lot of kids/noobs got in during the freeShop days and just kind of expected piracy to always be that easy. “Actually finding and having a reliable source for the game files” is always the actual hardest part of piracy, but freeShop kids never had to do it.

As soon as the first proof of concepts showed up (a command line PC tool that generated CIA files from a key pair, followed by CIAngel which did it directly on the 3DS but still needed an installation step via another app) it was only a matter of time until someone Frankensteined the open source CIAngel and FBI together and slapped a cute browse UI and json parser on top. Thus freeShop was born.

The 3DS was already thoroughly pwned before freeShop, but pirates still had to actually use a yucky computer to download yucky “files” to do their thing. FreeShop opened up piracy to a new level of tech-illiterate user, and when Nintendo closed the gaping security hole those pirates that didn’t know what a .cia file actually is were left floundering. That was the scene that inherited Switch piracy. Dozens of competing closed-source “shops” that all used their own proprietary databases to pretend to be freeShop. Paid piracy apps. All so that users wouldn’t have to plug in their microSD card (later, the Switch itself via USB) to pirate games. Traditional “download the file from a torrent or trusted HTTP source and then put it on the SD and install it” piracy was always possible in the “shops” era.

This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.

Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.

This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.

After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).

These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.

That’s a really high confidence value to have for a future where Bungie exists. They’re already halfway purged, you don’t come back from something like Marathon by trying really hard with half the resources you wasted on Marathon.