A high-ranking executive from THQ, a leading game developer, said in an interview that Nintendo 3DS, a forthcoming game console, would feature a technology that would help game publishers to stop video game piracy. None of the details are available at the moment, but it is hardly a purely hardware solution given the fact that the 3DS should maintain backwards compatibility with previous-gen titles.

“What excites me even more [than 3DS games] is that there's technology built in that device to really combat piracy. The problem with the DS market in the last few years, particularly with the DS Lite, is that it's just been attacked by piracy. It's made it almost impossible to shift any significant volume. The DSi combated it a little bit, but the 3DS has taken that a step further,” said Ian Curran, executive vice president of global publishing at THQ, in an interview with CVG.

Nintendo itself apparently did not explain the technology even to its partner because it was “so sophisticated”. Potentially, the new 3DS console should be able to determine whether the loaded game is genuine or whether the end-user utilizes a special adapter to run pirated titles.

Even though the interest from game developers towards creating games for the world’s first and only portable game console with autostereoscopic 3D screen, there could be even more designers involved if the piracy has not been an issue.

“Therefore the opportunity for people to invest more in product development [on the system] and bring more 3DS products to market comes out of that. It's going to probably cost us more to do it all in 3D - so we want to make sure we get a return on our investment when we do it,” added Mr. Curran.

Tags: THQ, Nintendo, 3DS