Nintendo-Scene

GBATemp.net has been sold to CNET.

Dear members, GBAtemp is now over five years old and is continuously growing in both size and popularity in ways we would never have expected in the past. As you can imagine, keeping such a popular website running smoothly and without hiccups is both an expensive and tedious task.

Up until now the sites hosting has been funded by the staff and more recently our affiliates whom we thank very much. Unfortunately we have reached a point in our GBAtemp’s life where it’s impossible to keep the site running by ourselves; we don’t have the time or funds to keep this community online 24/7 — a huge task for such a small group of staff members who have day jobs to attend to.

You may have heard rumours in the past few weeks or months that GBAtemp was considering an offer from an interested party. These rumours are true. Today we become an official CNET Networks channel partner and the site becomes full property of GameSpot.

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IGN is reporting that Nintendo has asked the U.S.A. to take more initiative in dealing with piracy issues worldwide. While not stating the U.S.A. is directly a problem, Nintendo wants the U.S.A. to pressure other world governments to take a stronger stance against video game piracy, and piracy enabling devices.

Nintendo of America Inc. has asked the U.S. Trade Representative to encourage specific governments around the world to take a more aggressive stance to combat piracy of Nintendo video games and systems. Nintendo filed its comments under a “Special 301″ process, in which the U.S. Trade Representative solicits input from the public to underscore specific areas of concern.

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TehSkeen is reporting that a law in Hong Kong has just gone into effect that makes Modchips as well as the Installation of Modchips Illegal.

From the Explanation:

Examples of the sorts of activities that would attract
civil liability:
…
• a person offering a service to modify game consoles or
selling mod chips for insertion into digital game machines so
as to enable others to play pirated computer games
…
To combat the rampant sale of modified game consoles and other
tools which help the public to pirate copyright works, we propose
to criminalize the making, importation or export for sale,
or dealing in any circumvention tools. We will also criminalize
the commercial provision of circumvention services.

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Some other Wii news sites (we wont name names) are erroniously reporting that Nintendo has opened up the Wii Opera SDK. This is not the case. The Hullbreach SDK is an independently developed set of homebrew tools for making Wii Browser apps.

Not only is this not an official Nintendo release, it’s not even new. Our readers may recall that reported on on the Wii Opera SDK not once but twice, earlier in August and no major changes have occured since.
While we don’t normally post corrections for news on other sites, it would seem that this particular story has snowballed quite a bit and with the number of reports we’ve received about it, we felt it necessary to post a statement.

Regardless, the Hullbreach Wii Opera SDK is still a fantastic homebrew product, arguably the best Wii Opera SDK available. We encourage those interested in developing Wii homebrew for the Opera Browser to try it.

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London based Financial Times is reporting that Nintendo is targeting DS game pirate websites in South Korea. As the Wii is still not released there, this mainly pertains to DS titles as of now.

Nintendo on Monday in a rare move demanded South Korean prosecutors investigate domestic websites that have uploaded illegal copies of the company’s games.

The move marks the first time the Japanese video gamesmaker has called upon prosecutors in Asia to help combat piracy, a problem that has dogged the games industry increasingly in recent years.

Until now the company had issued warnings to pirates but had not requested action from the relevant prosecutor. The company has been more active in the US and Europe, with some perpetrators fined millions of dollars.

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Several major gaming sites are reporting on the latest development in Nintendo’s war on piracy. As many of you remember Nintendo played a major role in the ICE raids earlier this year, as well as many other raids of modchip installers and distributors throughout the world including similar events in Europe, China, and¬† Mexico.

The latest of which went after the Supreme Factory in Hong Kong with the aide of the Hong Kong government.¬† For those of you who don’t know Supreme Factory is the manufacturer for Divineo which manufactures Cyclowiz modchips for the Wii as well as the CycloDS carts for the DS among other things. Divineo also has strong ties to several teams and news organizations.

For the most relavant breakdown of what this latest development means for the Nintendo modding community, as well as the larger modding community, you should read the Divineo Raids article by Brakken on tehskeen.

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As you may recall the homebrew and scene news site, TehSkeen, closed it’s doors a number of weeks ago, and has recently re-opened as a personal blog for Brakken’s rants over scene politics. Now it would seem that Brakken is planning on bringing back TehSkeen to it’s former self. He has already resurrected the ISO-420 review site and is planning on bringing all of the major FAQs, guides and even the forums back online.

Siting personal financial trouble (TehSkeen was paid for out of pocket by Brakken) as the reason TehSkeen had originally closed down he is now asking for donations to help cover the hosting and licensing costs to bring the whole site back online.

If you are interested in knowing more information about Brakken’s plans to resurrect TehSkeen or how to help support him to that end you can read the open letter to sceeners about it on TehSkeen.

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It would seem that Divineo is not happy with the recent ramblings by Brakken at TehSkeen and have issued him a Ceist and Desist letter ordering him to remove all mention of Maxconsole and Divineo from his site and threatening legal action if he does not comply.

It is fairly clear what Brakken’s chosen course of action is considering that not only has he not removed anything from his site but he has since written another article about his experiences with Divineo and even encourages them to take the legal action that they have threatened stating:

I also would like to see Max come to the USA to try to sue me. For one, he would have to explain his business to the Judge and Jury, explain his multi-million dollar lawsuit and why he hasn’t paid it. More then likely he wouldn’t even be allowed back out of the country. If this indeed does go to court I will make sure I get my hands on the transcripts of the hearings and publish them. So bring it on Max!¬†

Brakken also goes on to encourage others to share their Divineo experiences with TehSkeen.

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Brakken and TehSkeen have returned after the site has lay dormant for a number of weeks. The site is no longer what it used to be, rather than the homebrew haven it was before it now serves as Brakken’s personal blog where he rants about the evils in the various areas of “the scene”.

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VGChartz is claiming that as of their latest sales data the Wii has surpassed the Xbox 360 in worldwide home consoles sales for this generation. While the Xbox 360 still holds a solid lead in the North American and European markets it would seem that the Wii’s strong Japanese sales over the Xbox 360’s almost non-existent sales in that region has allowed the Wii to eek by the 360 as the overall world wide leader.

The Press Release:

Vgchartz.com, the most comprehensive Videogame charts in the world has announced that lifetime sales of Nintendo’s Wii have passed Microsoft’s Xbox 360 on a worldwide basis as of August 23rd. (*)

Two years ago, very few analysts would have predicted the Nintendo Wii would be market leader this generation against the established Playstation and Xbox brands. But analysts can be in error: Vgchartz.com data, which is based on sample data from retailers all over the world indicates that the week ending August 23^rd Nintendo’s Wii (which was released one year after the Xbox 360 in November 2006), currently standing at 10.57 million consoles sold, passed Xbox 360 lifetime sales of 10.51 million units, making Nintendo the new market leader in both the home and handheld videogame console businesses.

As weekly data from vgchartz.com shows(**), the console outsold Microsoft‚Äôs Xbox 360 by a margin of 2.3 : 1 worldwide on average each week since its release, selling at an even faster rate than the most successful console ever created, Sony’s Playstation 2, despite still being sold out in most major markets.

This is the first time that a company has been market leader in the home console and the handheld market since 1994 when Nintendo’s Super NES and Gameboy dominated worldwide.

Vgchartz.com is proud to be first to announce this major sales cross over as an independent tracker of sales and expect this to be a milestone for the current generation. In just two years, home console sales for the three major manufacturers have effectively reversed. This will have a large impact on third party publishers and will undoubtedly influence the decisions they make in the future.

One factor that has no doubt helped Nintendo’s Wii to gain so quickly is the console’s broad appeal across all age groups, demographics and countries. Current sales are pretty evenly split between the three major markets ‚Äì 3.46 million have been sold in Japan, the American market (including Canada and South America) accounts for 4.24million and Other markets (including Europe and Australia and a few niche markets) for 2.87 million units sold, respectively.

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