I feel bad for Wii owners that really want to buy heaps of these games. It’s clearly the biggest profit center on the system for Nintendo with no physical disc and packaging to produce, and now the hardcore fans who want to buy everything from past consoles they’ve owned to play at will on the Wii just can’t.

If arcade games show up, they’re even worse off.

As one of my favorite security researchers always says, trying to copy protect digital files is like trying to make water not be wet. That said, there are hurdles Nintendo could put up that would make copying downloaded games from external storage to a friend’s system extremely onerous.