"New R4 shipment has finally arrived! You know what it does! Absolutely no questions will be answered concerning this product", stated the sign outside one electronics store in Japan. "Guaranteed for one week only! Of course we can't explain what the R4 will do", stated another sign in the store next door.
The R4 Chip mentioned in both signs looks like a simple piece of plastic. It is just a couple of centimetres square, a few millimetres thick and unbelievably easy to use. For Nintendo it is the Nightmare before Christmas.
Made in China and costing about 20 Euros, the R4 allows Nintendo's DS to run pirated games.
The chip is already available for sale over the internet and is selling like hot cake on the streets of Tokyo. Many stores in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo described R4 sales as "very strong" but refused to say what it actually does, for fear of potentially dire legal consequences.
A Japanese retailer explained that R4 falls into a "grey zone": the product itself is not illegal, but nearly everything that a customer would do with it probably is. High street electronics shops refused to stock it because it is legally questionable and -more importantly- it damages sales of legitimate games software.
In the hands of the 35 million DS users around the world the R4 chip has the potential to deal a heavy financial blow to Nintendo and to the dozens of software developers that make games for the machine. Nintendo is Japan’s third most valuable listed company with a stock market value of more than $85 billion (£41 billion) and revenues of $7.8 billion in 2006.
R4 is designed to fit into the DS's game cartridge slot. A flash memory ship containing an image of the pirated game is then inserted into the R4 which fools the handheld into running it as a legitimate game. As usual, most DS games are already available as pirated images on p2p sites.
An industry analyst told the Times Online that R4 "takes games piracy into a new level". Beyond the purchase of the device, the user never has to go to stores to buy pirated software. "The R4 gives ordinary users the ability to sit at home and just browse the internet for any game that takes their fancy. A few clicks of the mouse and it is theirs free. Unlike previous piracy tools, the technology is not intimidating," he said.
"We are keeping a close eye on the products and studying them. But we cannot smash all of them," a Nintendo spokesman said.
