With all the recent PlayStation 3 hacking news releasing lately, everyone seems to have an opinion on the matter, focusing on whether the benefits of homebrew outweigh the negatives of piracy. A former Ubisoft DRM expert, foresees a dire future for Sony, with a potentially gigantic tidal wave of piracy set for the PlayStation 3’s future.
Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, Martin Walfisz from Massive Entertainment (a company which was acquired by Ubisoft) stated that the new hack may be difficult to detect if what the hackers have claimed to do is true:
If that hack works as reported, I don’t believe that Sony can regain any control… They could try to employ a similar system to Xbox Live, so that people running hacked systems won’t have access to PSN. But Sony won’t be able to stop people from running pirated game copies as long as the machines are not hooked up online.
Mr. Walfisz goes on to say that because this hack is not dependent on a hardware modification like other consoles, the system is now completely open and that “hackers can create pirated copies that completely mimic the official Sony digital signature.” Since this can conceivably be done off of the PS3’s built-in hard drive, Mr. Walfisz says piracy could be so easy on the PS3 that it might surpass that of handheld piracy. He also stated his opinion on future iterations of consoles:
I believe that future-generation consoles will require a constant online connection…If they have that in place, they can run a much more powerful DRM scheme, where parts of the game logic will only be executed on secure servers – in effect partially mimicking a client-server scheme such as MMO’s use. Then it doesn’t matter if the console is hacked, since users won’t be able to play the games without being online with a valid and unique registration key.
Wherever the future of hacking takes the gaming industry, let’s just hope it is as free from pirates as possible. Stay connected with PlayStation LifeStyle for more on this issue as the stories unfold.
