A possible setback for DRM in Europe

Posted Feb 13, 2014 11:45 UTC (Thu) by Awebb (guest, #95487)
In reply to: A possible setback for DRM in Europe by khim
Parent article: A possible setback for DRM in Europe

Have you tried keeping a non-official PS3 game up to date? Even getting the patches would be a PITA. PC games on the other hand have entire groups of pirates who package and upload every minor patch. PC piracy is a total no-brainer.

That said, I still don't see a way to use the 360 for homebrew without modding the drive (=Darmokles' Sword of being banned on XBL), adding a modchip (are there even any?) without losing online capabilities. Homebrew is usually the big reason to circumvent DRM on consoles, because there we are with this expensive hardware in our living rooms and we cannot do anything with it.

> Online and need for patches have no stopped anyone.
It stopped me from trying anything over the past few years and it stopped me from even buying a PS Vita, because I can either run homebrew on it OR have full integration into the Sony service and all the connection features with the PS3/4. This is also the reason, why I will never buy an i{Phone,Pad} or other mobile store based Apple products.

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A possible setback for DRM in Europe

Posted Feb 13, 2014 14:25 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

I think you need to study logic more.

You claim: This is the real reason why those consoles took so long to be cracked: The online stuff is too important.. This is simple hyphothesis and it's easy and simple to test it: it means that if one console can be cracked while leaving the ability to use it with online and some other console can not be cracked in such a fashion then first console will be cracked quickly and second one will be creacked slowly. We have three consoles: PS3, Wii, and XBox360. First two can not be cracked without losing online capabilities, last one cam be cracked in such a way. Yet one and only one console was uncracked for years: PS3. Both Wii and XBox360 were cracked early on. This means that implication “people was to play online games thus they will not crack their consoles if they could not keep that capability” is false one.

Your point about the fact that some people have just decided that they don't want to play these games and that not all people crack even Wii (which is very easy and simple to crack) is, valid, I'll give you that. All was just a hyperbola on my path: certanly piracy on Wii is more widespread that on XBox360 or PS3, but that because it's much simpler there. You don't need to even open the cover: buy cheap USB stick, install couple of programs - and play games for free! Almost like PC, really.

A possible setback for DRM in Europe

Posted Feb 13, 2014 19:58 UTC (Thu) by Awebb (guest, #95487) [Link]

I think you need to study talking to people some more (a handy soft skill, even for computer scientists), but I agree on the fact, that the reason I stated is not the only or even the most important one. In fact, I followed the technical side of the PS3 hack a while back, so I know what had to be done in order to provide a software solution to the DRM problem.

Then again, mod chips would have been possible all the years since the console was released, there have even been discussions and concepts in the respective circles, but it was dropped by most with the capabilities to realize it, because the commercial potencial was considered to be not worth the effort, not only because the legislation would allow hunting them down like cheap game, but also because the time for offline-only experiences have been gone for good for a while.

Another fact: Black market blurays and home grown game isos have been around for way longer than the LVo key release (as much as PS3 BD isos have been on the bay for ages), because there have been JTAG based workarounds, just like everybody knows on the Xbox360. It's just that nobody outside the pirate scene really knew much about it, because all this soft modding and clip-on-a-chip mod chips (see WiiKey) really made the masses lazy. It also did not help the homebrew scene, the actual driving force behind console modding, to solve their problems. The homebrew lover is usually the legitimate customer type, who simply wants to do more with those expensive devices.