
A short time ago, we reported that some Wii U owners were finding their systems had died after being in storage for a while, with NAND corruption being exposed as the issue.
As is so often the case, a member of the modding community stepped up to help. Electronics engineer Voultar created the Wii-U NAND Rebuilder (AKA The 'NAND-AID') which is capable of resurrecting your dead Wii U and swapping out the defective NAND with a Micro-SD card.
Fast-forward to the present and another modder by the name of Mathieulh is claiming that Nintendo was aware it was shipping Wii U consoles with faulty parts from the very beginning.
"It turns out Nintendo knowingly put bad hynix emmc parts into many WiiU consoles and wouldn't extend the warranty as they failed, worse, they did not provide any tools to unbrick those units it was down to hackers to find the way to avoid those WiiU from filling up landfills," he says on social media without providing any evidence for the claim. "That talks volumes about how much Nintendo cares about the environment and their customers."
Voultar was quick to refute this claim:
While I appreciate that this person used my Wii NAND-AID to fix his Wii-U, I strongly disagree with his assertion that Nintendo knowingly used a faulty memory module during the production of the Wii-U. There is no evidence to suggest this and is completely unsubstantiated.
Mathieulh has responded to Voultar's tweet, saying:
Unless the manufacturer lied to them and Nintendo performed no amount of quality checks on those parts whatsoever, they had to know, the bare minimum when testing emmc is benchmarking for wear leveling by performing multiple years worth of use through constant writes. The industry standard is 10 to 20 years depending on the part. There is no way Nintendo ordered millions of these parts and shipped them to factories without prior testings from either themselves or their suppliers, that's just best practices.
As many people have pointed out in the replies, it wouldn't be the first case of a major manufacturer supplying dodgy goods. Early PS1 consoles suffered from skipping CD drives, while the Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" needs no introduction.
However, these are issues which are usually discovered years into the lifespan of a console, and while it's tempting to leap to conclusions, it's unlikely they were premeditated.
We'd be stunned if Nintendo would knowingly risk using defective parts in one of its consoles, but perhaps you think otherwise? Let us know with a comment.
[source x.com]
Comments 12
I would be completely unsurprised if a gigantic company used cheap faulty parts because they thought it would make them more money.
My launch Wii U has been in storage for a while and I was planning to pull it out soon to jailbreak it. I'll be curious if it actually starts up, but I'm glad there's a solution if it doesn't. Gaming gods bless modders!
Yeah that makes zero sense. Nintendo uses old proven tech to keep their hardware from being loss leaders and has a well proven history of reliable hardware. Sucks that this happens but it's definitely an aberration. Every one of my Nintendo consoles including the Wii u, Virtual Boy, and NES still fire up just fine which is more than I can say for my Xbox 360 slim which developed a nice GPU failure. And that is a similar thing I hear all the time from my friends when they dig out their old consoles. Good smackdown on that clout chaser.
I mean we're dealing with the company that gave us the 80 dollar joy con controllers here.
The parts were good enough to keep the systems running for what, 5-10 years? Not saying that it's justified, but I can easily see it being within the range that a company would consider acceptable.
If the NAND goes bad while it’s in storage and not being written to, I’m not sure how wear level testing would allow Nintendo to pick up on flawed memory modules.
Nintendo should have instead put a Wii U away in their cupboard for 10 years and then sent it back in time so their engineers could see the results!
This is a butt-hurt consumer who stored their Wii U away for years and probably would never even have booted it up again had they not read about the failures being reported, and now wants to express their frustration through made up claims against the company they feel wronged them. There's no reason Nintendo should've been expected to know the parts they were using could develop a fault if it wasn't used for a decade. How would you even go about testing for that? Nintendo has a proven track record of delivering quality goods, with a few stumbles along the way as any long-lived company will experience from time to time. Notably, they don't try to pretend the issue doesn't exist or deny people repairs when stuff does go wrong, unlike another few giant companies i could name.
While this post does correctly state Voultar's point, it leaves out that he mentioned "bad faith" on the part of the person who claimed Nintendo's parts were defective. He's trying to sell something Voultar made by making Nintendo sound bad and make a profit from overstating the issue.
@Aerona That's the one thing that keeps it plausible to me, however unlikely. I don't trust them after the stick drift fiasco. I gave up trying to fix them after awhile and just started replacing my controllers.
Three words: Joy Con Drift. 😉
Damian, do you believe nintendo would do this to their faithful fans?
I just fired my Wii I up after about a year of being in storage. Mine bricked too. Looks like I'll have to figure that fix out.
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