That's not food you are eating - Cooking Mama accused of crypto mining

[williamcll]

 

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 Since this story broke at the weekend, people have been speculating that the reason Cooking Mama: Cookstar has been pulled from the eShop is due to the fact that it mines cryptocurrency using the processing power of the Switch owners who download it to their systems. When the game was first revealed, the developers mentioned blockchain technology – a fact which has inspired these recent accusations. The developers have now responded to these claims (thanks, Nintendo Everything), and stress that the claims regarding blockchain tech being used in the game were "hypothetical":

As the developers we can say with certainty there is no cryptocurrency or data collection or blockchain or anything else shady in the code. The Nintendo Switch is a very safe platform, with none of the data and privacy issues associated with some mobile and PC games. This is a release from Feb 2019, and we presume hypothetical like most releases about blockchain are. Blockchain was never brought up to us developers, and we were entertained to hear about in late 2019. Not happening anytime soon.

 

We're now seeing reports which suggest that code was removed prior to launch and this could be the root cause of the game being removed from sale:

Source: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/04/cooking_mama_cookstar_pulled_from_switch_eshop_amid_accusations_of_mining_cryptocurrency

https://nintendoeverything.com/cooking-mama-cookstar-cryptocurrency-developer-response/

Thoughts: I would imagine blockchains being useful on a MMO where there in-game economy and secure login is required but probably not a mostly single player cooking game. That said, there are still some unsolved questions like the battery issue as well as the takedown.

[SupaKomputa]

Dev: Hey these switches been idle most of the time...

LETS MAKE SOME MONEY!

[PlayStation 2]

I half-thought to myself "why would you mine cryptocurrency on a Switch?", but I remembered that there's legitimate apps on both the App Store and the Google Play Store that have that kind of shit in it that runs while the app is active (i.e. iFunny). Mining cryptocurrency isn't particularly stupid on a mobile device, but it's not a good practice by legitimate apps.

[spartaman64]

when dunkey is a news source now Kappa

[Bombastinator]

That looked like a comedy bit rather than a news bit.  Was it released apr 1?  You may have gotten onioned there.

[DeScruff]

Well the battery life issue is certainly because of shoddy code, and probably why it was taken down.

I have never owned a cooking Mama game, but from what I remember of the Wii and DS games, it always seemed like something that could be made in Flash, and the fun of it came from the Touch and Motion controls the DS and Wii respectively had.

[Kisai]

On 4/6/2020 at 1:29 AM, VegetableStu said:

 

if a game on a nintendo ecosystem needs processorware for extra revenue, despite having the cultural benefit of maintaining the same price for the entire lifetime of said ecosystem, i'm curious to know what's going on behind the scenes, to say the least

 

EDIT: okay fine i'll take their word that it's not specifically for coin mining, so i'll knock down my reaction to "lol i guess we can all learn how to version properly against the clock"

Only a tinfoil hatter would think it's a crypto miner. It's probably just programmed using a crappy middleware. 

 

Speaking of crappy developer tactics:

 

They... ripped their audio from youtube? Is this a damn HTML5 game?

 

Oh worse, Unity.

[Kisai]

On 4/6/2020 at 12:42 PM, DeScruff said:

Well the battery life issue is certainly because of shoddy code, and probably why it was taken down.

I have never owned a cooking Mama game, but from what I remember of the Wii and DS games, it always seemed like something that could be made in Flash, and the fun of it came from the Touch and Motion controls the DS and Wii respectively had.

 

Unity and GameMaker Studio, are both successors to "Adobe Flash" as their workflows are pretty much the same. The only thing that Flash really has over these newer products is the incredibly tiny, processor-and-bandwidth efficient vector format. Like it's amazing you can create a 11 minute cartoon in just a 3MB SFW file, where as to convert anything like that to h264/h265 video it becomes 30MB and loses it's scability.

 

But it's time for flash to die, since it stopped scaling well over 720p. Go dig up any ol newgrounds flash file and try and play it in the stand-alone player at 4K, it won't be happy, and all the motion tweens will stutter across the screen due to the loss in precision.

 

I would like to see some kind of "next generation" vector animation format that keeps it's mittens out of the "game" pool so that browsers can play the animation's the same way you play a video, but I think too many animation programs are hellbent on trying to look like Studio Ghibli, and less like 2000 Cartoon Network.