$20k for pirated ps4/ps5 games? Seems ridiculously low.
When I lived in Bolivia I remember buying PS2 games in the market for 10 Bs. ($2). I imagine few people in Bolivia can buy these games. Same for other third world countries.
I imagine the exploit author reported it for the clout and a "good get" right? It's quite the feather in your cap.
It's also not like house owners reward people that tell them about an open front door with the total value of their house's contents. In Dutch we say "10% finder's wages" (10% vindersloon) when someone returns an item they found, say a smartphone. Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get 20%, but nobody expects to get 100% (or even half) of the true value of the item you are dutifully returning.
That there is a huge market in less-wealthy countries for pirated games is a well-known fact. What strikes me as a leap is that there is some mastermind behind it all that has enough savings (or other liquidity) to buy these exploits for whatever you would consider the true value (if $20k is "ridiculously" low), and then needs to earn all that money back by selling game copies (presumably there is some hardware cost to burn discs) to a population that is large but, indeed, poor.
No one is returning something to PlayStation, though. This is independent intellectual property. Property, that if exposed, runs the risk of destroying their entire ecosystem.
And this possibly cuts well beyond simple piracy. PlayStation enjoys exclusive control over who does and does not get to publish on their platform. A mechanism that earns them millions in licensing deals, to the extent that they can happily lose money on the sale of the hardware itself. The destruction of that mechanism seems akin to destruction of their entire platform.
This isn't a "we found your front door unlocked" situation. This is a "we found a bomb attached to your spine, and we know exactly how to dismantle it."
What is the actual risk though? Game piracy is almost a solved problem now that most gaming is online gaming. Very few are interested in getting free games if it means permanently being unable to play online.
Really? It seems like some of the biggest titles for PlayStation are single player games. Multi-player is often tacked on, but I doubt it's the main selling point for most of their titles. Would so many people have played the last of us or red dead redemption if they shipped those games without any single player campaign and had only the strength of their multiplayer experience to go on? Final fantasy, kingdom hearts, Spider-man, God of war, Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream titles in general), Persona, Cyberpunk 2077, these all depended heavily (or entirely) on single player content.
Plenty of folks would have welcomed a change to play those kinds of games if they were just a download away. Even multiplayer games aren't necessarily off the table if unofficial servers are created and can be used, and piracy aside, it's compelling to be able to run your own software on the devices you own.
Yes there are good singleplayer games around, but the vast majority of people will at some point want to play a multi player game as well. The group of people who are willing to permanently give up multi player to save money on single player games is quite small.
In the modern internet connected era, piracy is almost completely solved. A good example is the Nintendo Switch. There have been several major exploits which have allowed full access to the system and priacy, and yet it has hardly touched their profits since multiplayer has become such a big aspect and network updates allow this stuff to be fixed.
Compare this to the Nintendo DS and DSI. You could buy piracy carts at almost every retail store and almost everyone was doing it. There was also no downside to the consumer since it didn't require giving up anything. Piracy was a massive issue for this console.
If they already have the networks in place to sell stuff like pirated movies, I don't see why they would balk at paying for an exploit to sell pirated games. I could also see them using an advance + royalty model to share the risk with the exploit writer.
I'm from a 3rd world country and can confirm, everyone is keeping their ps4 in v9.00, A shop near me is selling dozens of ps4 with +10 pre installed games, each for 280-300$.
The question is how competitive is the market? Would he get more money by auctioning it off? For something like smartphones there are plenty of governments that would buy. But for a game console? It's mostly commercial pirates and I guess those don't have as much money sloshing around.
Maybe one could make it an adversarial kickstarter kind of thing. The public pools against sony, full disclosure vs. time-delayed disclosure.
I've seen some interesting things out this way, like a 1980s IBM computer still running some dBASE II app in an auto parts store for it's inventory on a green phosphor screen, which I'd love to do some videos about
I recently got into game collecting and this is fun indeed. Managed to get myself a copy of Silent Hill 3 for the PS2, which isn't exactly a rare game but it's up there for sure.
It's like 100+ on ebay, it's kind of rare now. Classic tho. Harder and harder to find working playstation 2 consoles as well. Those games genuinely freaked the shit out of us.
When I was a teenager there was this abandoned Catholic girls school in our neighborhood which we used to go exploring in dodging the security guard and etc. It had this huge hole in the gym floor completely filled with desks JUST LIKE IN THE GAME so that was a lot of fun to bring friends who had played silent hill to come and check out.
That sounds terrifying lol. I loved these games as a kid as well but couldn't play it because of how scary they were. It wasn't until I became a young adult that I was able to actually experience them, as well as horror movies.
As for the console I also got extremely lucky and managed to snag one with no mod chip or any other alterations whatsoever. Now that we have software exploits for the PS2 through FreeMcboot it seemed like the best bet from a collection standpoint.
Oh yeah I think these games, running from security guards/police and other crazy as hell experiences in my youth broke my amygdala or something. I regularly get into the most messed up, near-death situations and laugh them off cause at least it's not like I have pyramid head coming after me.
For some reason I've noticed that in Nicaragua families really like watching horror flicks together, it's like part of the culture there for some reason. I was watching the silent hill movie with one and they actually didn't know it was originally a video game.
Pyramid head sounds like a fun halloween costume for next year, a friend of mine went as a nurse from that last time. Can do it with some cardboard boxes I think.
When I lived in Bolivia I remember buying PS2 games in the market for 10 Bs. ($2). I imagine few people in Bolivia can buy these games. Same for other third world countries.
I imagine the exploit author reported it for the clout and a "good get" right? It's quite the feather in your cap.