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[Ozriel]

that's not really the case anymore.
these days people mostly care about homebrews and mods when consoles are jailbroken.

if you want to pirate games, the PC is right there, and all games are basically already on there anyways.
it takes maybe 2min to find a free download of say Cyberpunk on PC. and you don't have to do anything to install it.

like, a modded Switch is great for modifying games and running homebrew, while pirating games on Switch is almost best done on PC with an emulator anyway.

Let's not delude ourselves. The majority of people using this would be pirates.

I suspect you overestimate the number of people with powerful gaming PCs, and the PS5 is significantly cheaper than an equivalent gaming PC.

Of course I'm not equating jail breaking with piracy.

 

[kevboard]

Let's not delude ourselves. The majority of people using this would be pirates.

I suspect you overestimate the number of people with powerful gaming PCs, and the PS5 is significantly cheaper than an equivalent gaming PC.

Of course I'm not equating jail breaking with piracy.

well, there are more PCs out there with the power or more power than the PS5 than there are PS5s

and let's not forget that modding your console usually means you're locked out of going online on it, meaning that console will be absolutely useless for anything that needs any online connection.
even if the custom firmware is up-to-date enough to go online, you run the risk of getting banned if you do.

so, no online gaming, no access to your digital library that you might have built for 10 years, possible issues with newer games due to outdated custom firmware etc.

so modding a modern console is way more an enthusiast hobby and less something normal gamers do.
I bet the overlap between enthusiasts who mod consoles and people who have decent PCs is pretty big.

I think the Switch was an exception to this however, for 2 reasons. 1: it was insanely easy to softmod even for casuals, and 2: going online is way less of a concern on that system since even if you wanted to play Fortnite or Apex Legends on it, you'd be stuck playing a near unplayable mess of a port... so being locked to offline play only wouldn't be a big deal there, especially since people also hadn't built up digital game libraries over the years either, due to the Switch having zero backwards compatibility.

 

[Bojji]

Here we go with the fake virtue signaling. We all know you just want to steal games. Own it and stop hiding behind "modding". 99% of people who jailbreak do so to steal games and to cheat in games. That's it. Just own it, nobody cares. We're not here to arrest you.

You are the same breed as all those people that think emulation=piracy and post about it in every emulator thread, very annoying and retarded group.

 

[slrbomber]

The console itself has a security processor that's got a private key burned into it's read only memory (ROM). This allows the console to verify (and thus, play) games that are inserted into the console from discs or to verify the authenticity of digital games while offline. This has to be possible unless Sony is ready to require an internet connection and disallow any offline play.

As it's engineered now, you can purchase a PS5 console and a game on a disc, never connect it to the internet, and still play that game. The console itself is the state of authority to determine what is genuine, such as the game on that disc. If they used a central online public key, the console could potentially be hacked using a man-in-the-middle attack that would tell the console that arbitrary code was actually valid.


They can absolutely patch this with a firmware update by generating a new security key and flashing it to this chip, but the problem of being able to run existing disc-based games offline (as I outlined above) goes into a catch-22 state. If you change this key, all existing disc-based games will now be considered unauthorized code. Every game (both disc and digital) would also have to be patched online to work with the new security key. Trying to run a disc based game offline (without the latest title update that has the new keys) on a patched console would throw an error.

They'll have to weigh doing this against the potential fallout of piracy vs the number of customer support issues they would face. Either way, this means people who are offline or on a firmware version that hasn't patched the new security key should be able to run whatever code they want. Having root-level access even means potentially installing modified (cracked) versions of the consoles later firmware revisions, as it is possible to do with the Switch and was popular on the PS3.

Reminds me of the PS3 days!!

 

[xenosys]

In the grand scheme of things there are only a very small amount of people who care about this. And an even smaller amount that will actually take advantage of it.

Indeed. Look at the various "homebrew" forums around the internet. GBATemps, Reddit etc. There's 10-20 people on those sub-forums at any one time. It's a tiny minority of people.

 

[PSFore]

I can tell you tons of people read any articles or social media posts about emulators. This would be no different, but most sites aren't going to report on it at this stage.

Most people want to read about piracy, but aren't so keen on joining public forums to talk about it, and having their IPs tracked etc.

 

[Neo_game]

I doubt this will go anywhere but if true I personally think it is good. I hate DRM. I do not think anyone wants to login to internet or their account whether it is Steam, PSN, Xbox etc. Especially those who are into SP. But sadly that is the future.

 

[archangelmorph]

Programmer but not security expert by all means. I remember Sony could revoke keys from blurays, so they might be able to do the same here, as in new games would not be able to play in banned consoles. What I don't fully understand is why PS5 needs a private key, shouldn't they have only a public key to check against the private key held by Sony in HQ?

Asymmetric encryption is stronger than symmetric. Hence the local private keys