Does Wii U check for a product key or anything?

Kyzer · December 20, 2017

I bought a Wii U a while ago and it came jailbroken (didn't mean to buy it this way). I want to know if updating (since its gotten to the point I can't play some games online without updating) would cause any issues, such as a game being suddenly invalid (I don't know what games are actually legit or not).

TL;DR: Does Wii U check for product keys or anything, or are installations universal and they don't care?

Renton577 · December 20, 2017

Based off of what I know from the Wii U emulator on PC the system does check for a key, not a product key but a title key. Now I don't know know if updating these titles will effect you being able to play these games or not, if they are legitimate Eshop titles then it shouldn't but if they are images put onto the system usually you cannot update games in that state or they will become unusable. Again I'm taking what I know from the emulator and other jailbroken consoles, I haven dealt specifically with a Wii U.

demonix00 · December 21, 2017

I might be wrong, but wouldn't that jailbreak only work in Wii mode since as far as I know the main Wii U OS hasn't been broken as of yet (I'm going to make sure I'm correct).

Edit: It appears that this jailbreak is just a homebrew launcher and unless you install specific apps (also from what I've read the launcher requires accessing an external website to activate the exploit required to allow the launcher to run) to allow illegally downloaded games to run then there's nothing the system can do, but if it is still there then there's a likelihood that there is an app in place that blocks the console from getting any updates (since it appears that system software updates are downloaded automatically and the exploits used to run the homebrew launcher currently have been patched so all you'll need to do is find out if there's any apps that are blocking system software updates from being accessed and remove them which will allow the system to be updated to the latest version and pretty much putting the system back to standard settings.