> Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. We will first describe the Xbox security design goals and why it needs to guard against hardware attacks, followed by descriptions of the hardware and software architecture to keep the Xbox secure. This includes details about the custom SoC we built with AMD and how we addressed the fact that all data read from flash, the hard drive, and even DRAM cannot be trusted. We will also discuss the corresponding software changes we made to keep the system and the games secure.
But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a customer when I was pirating, only an unpaid evangelist of the franchise.
"And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content"
I think this is most of the story.
I mean, it's fun to hack, but a lot of people's ideology about a lot of things go out the window as soon as they have a regular job and can afford to buy regular stuff and see these things as pretty much regular products and services.
Where I would disagree is when I think about Xbox and PS2, they had hardware to be media centers. They had compelling region locked content that just couldn't be used. Hacking any of that meant hacking all of that, and now you could also download games which was faster and more convenient than going to the store. And play Japanese games you couldn't get anyway.
Future generations of consoles made that default behavior, and games are released in multiple continents at the same time with their respective localization. American flagship games are now more appealing and engaging than their Japanese counterparts.
No, not really. Things that annoy me are not going to get my money, even though I have some to spend now. What really happened once I started earning was I started paying for things that I had appreciated back when I was running their free trials, or ones that I had ahem "extended" the trials for (or added one :P).
It's still fun to hack, by the way, I just have less time to do it.
When the currency of your third world country is worth less than 1/5 of the US dollar and a single game amount to a quarter of many people’s incomes, piracy don’t register as something even remotely wrong.
I don't think MS is hugely concerned about piracy that doesn't affect sales.
In fact, if they're smart, they'll be fine with it, because it's a form of 'perfect price discrimination'.
That said, the question is to what extent piracy from other areas bleeds into the higher value markets. Which I believe does happens, ergo 'a crack is a crack is a crack' probably.
It's funny because if the cost of getting a 'hack' of a game literally entails buying a 'CD-ROM' and going through the pain of copying it like in the 'old days', which is a small pain but more than many want to bear, it puts a natural bound on the copying/hacking: it will happen a lot in poor countries, less so in rich countries.
But if a hack is 'discovered once', wherever, and then easily exploited everywhere ... not so good.
Personally I'd call myself a "hybrid consumer." I'll pirate a game as an offline demo if the only way to purchase it doesn't allow refunds. I'll also pirate a game if I already paid for it on a different platform. There are quite a few PC games still in their plastic wrap on my shelf because they required obnoxious add-on software like uPlay and pirating something I already bought was preferable to installing it.
Also multiplayer. One does not simply go online with pirated games! This didn’t matter to pirates when games were mostly singleplayer with local multi as a bonus.
My partner has a ps4 and some subscription thing (PS now?). It ends up being about 6$/month and new games are available each month (including some AAA). If each month you add them to your library you quickly end up with a backlog of more games than you can play.
games seems to loose value rapidly after they are released so some are very affordable.
I just can't get over the idea that a game I'm playing today might be removed from gamepass tomorrow. As a result, I don't want to play anything on gamepass, or subscribe. Although I think I might have somehow accidentally subscribed anyway. I'll stick to gold.
If it get pulled and you enjoy it that much take advantage of the discount (every game on Game Pass has a somewhat discounted price for members) and buy it. There’s been a handful of games here or there I didn’t want to lose when they were retiring, and others that I played but didn’t really miss. I still save a lot of money compared to buying every game I ever want to play - especially given many of them I enjoy but not enough to shell out full price on
Not games but music. One of the things Spotify and Apple Music bring to the table is search and cataloging. It's less of an issue for video games where you might be seriously interested in 20 titles, but for songs, someone else organizing it for you is a huge value-add.
Sadly, due to licensing agreements, nothing can beat the breadth, depth, and curation of the classic not-legit sites that were shut down. I pay for Spotify, but several albums I have on e.g. CD are not available there, and you can't put local music into a Spotify playlist or vice versa.
No service will ever compare to how awesome Oink’s Pink Palace was. It just worked and it had everything. No blackouts, no licensing windows, no format issues. Just all music.
I should have clarified that I mean music that is stored on my phone while I'm not at home. Also, the default Spotify player in Ubuntu is in a SNAP container that can't access my music folder and won't follow symlinks from the SNAP's designated music folder to other folders.
But it is entirely possible. I paid money for a Git client, for example, even though what it can do is a strict subset of what I can do with the command line tools.
Why bother? Those who "pirate" will never convert to paid customers so why not let kids from some landlocked African country or rural India enjoy games?
A) a lot of people who do pirate in console are current customers. They spend quite a bit of money to get access to "every game ever" and stop buying new games.
B) a lot of other ones hack the console in order to play hacked copies of the game in multiplayer, which ruins the experience for paying customers.
Uh, I'm confused. The PS4 has been cracked. Jailbreaks exist. And yes, they enable piracy. But like any console that is still being actively supported/updated by the manufacturer, it requires a certain firmware version (or below).
That's true, but Sony has been successful in making jailbreaking unfeasible for most people. The only path to a jailbroken PS4 today is to find one that's been sitting in a drawer without being updated for over 3 years, and even if you get that far there's no workaround for the version check on newer games so you can't play anything (legitimately or otherwise) that require firmware newer than the last exploitable version from 3 years ago, which rules out quite a few killer app exclusives.
Unlike past generations you can't just brute force it with hardware modifications either, the security is so deeply embedded in the SoC now that there's no way to touch it. Without a software exploit you're shit out of luck.
Yes. The talk was given by an xbox architect, and iirc he mentions he's not sure about the state of the PS4. It's a great talk and if you're interested in security you should give it a watch.
Sony even managed to pre-emptively fix that last exploit a few months before it became known to the public, so users who were actively using their PS4 and allowing it to update unknowingly locked themselves out of jailbreaking before they had the chance. The prospects of jailbreaking the next gen consoles really aren't looking good given the PS4 was this much of a PITA and the Xbox One has been completely bulletproof for its entire life.
> Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. We will first describe the Xbox security design goals and why it needs to guard against hardware attacks, followed by descriptions of the hardware and software architecture to keep the Xbox secure. This includes details about the custom SoC we built with AMD and how we addressed the fact that all data read from flash, the hard drive, and even DRAM cannot be trusted. We will also discuss the corresponding software changes we made to keep the system and the games secure.