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Nintendo Penalizing Homebrew Users?
An anonymous reader writes "Bricked your Wii? Not only will Nintendo charge you for the repair, they will now add an additional fee if they detect any homebrew software. 'Should Nintendo have to pay to repair hacked Wiis under warranty? Maybe not, but they have no (moral) right to gouge customers out of spite for having the HBC installed. This actually poses a technical dilemma for us with BootMii. As currently designed, BootMii looks for an SD card when you boot your Wii, and if it finds the card and the right file, it will execute that file. Otherwise, there's no way to tell it's installed.'"
I do understand German, and this receipt says that the internal software (i.e. firmware) was modified.
Realistically, if someone voids their warranty by modifying the firmware on a device, regardless of whether it was done directly by the user or by the homebrew software, then they should expect to pay to have that repaired.
Why? because it takes time. Usually companies have very specific procedures for quickly re-flashing using their existing boot firmware. However, if that boot firmware is modified (i.e. the device is 'bricked') then that procedure needs to be changed. In this case, the engineer would need to 'hack' their own device to get it up to usable standards again (i.e. 'unbricked').
In the non-wii-world (i.e. reality), people that fix things also need to be paid adequately.
This customer should be happy that their bricked wii was even serviceable and that they weren't forced to cough up an extra 40€ to buy a brand-new Wii for 250€.