Nintendo Doesn’t Care if You Hack and Cheat

You might have noticed that I was frustrated to find how much hacking and cheating is going on in Nintendo Wii games, particularly, Mario Kart Wii. Well, I decided to send an email to Nintendo to see what kind of response I would get.

I’ll admit that I wrote a somewhat angry email to Nintendo. But, Nintendo responded to my complaint in a timely manner. I suspect that their response was somewhat canned, but that only makes it worse. If this is a canned answer, this is how Nintendo really feels about people hacking their games and ruining other people’s online experience.

Here’s the response I got from Nintendo:

Hello,

Sadly, cheating in games (even board or card games) is an unfortunate fact of life. We do respect the fact that you, and many others, do their best to enjoy gaming without cheating. At Nintendo, we do our best to make sure that our fans are able to have a fun gaming experience.

One way we have been able to accomplish this is through the Friend Code feature. We introduced the Friend Code feature as a way of allowing gamers to build their own personal online gaming community by choosing to play only with those they know and trust. This way, players are able to create an arena where they can enjoy a fair gaming experience.

Rest assured that your comments about this very important issue have been shared with the appropriate departments within Nintendo for review.

Sincerely,

Alex Loren
Nintendo of America Inc.

First of all, I wasn’t asking for a life lesson. I’m completely aware that there are cheaters out there… it’s pretty obvious just from playing one Nintendo game online. The point I was trying to make in my email was that other companies take visibly deliberate measures to keep all cheating – especially cheating that is the direct result of altering a game – to an absolute minimum. Take Xbox owners for example. If you’re caught with a Xbox that has been altered, that Xbox will never play online again. Players that are caught with an altered version of a game can expect to have their Live subscription revoked.

The second paragraph in Nintendo’s response is what frustrated me the most. It seems that Nintendo would rather leave the task of eliminating cheating and hacking to its customers. We’re not supposed to play other gamers with the same interests. We’re not supposed to depend on a gigantic, multi-cultural, international company that has been in business for decades to protect its customers. We’re supposed to use an awkward and inconvenient “friend” system to only play with people we already know.

Am I way off base here? Surely I’m not the only guy who thinks it’s not my responsibility to put a leash on the hacking of Nintendo’s hardware and games. I’d love to read any comments you might have.

Oh, and by the way, this is all certainly something to consider when you’re picking out your GameFly list: