6 ms·
Developer claims 'PS4 officially jailbroken'
- imglorp 11y agoPlease ELI5 why consoles need to be locked? Say I'm Sony. I could have a locked platform, sign up some content shops to make a very small number of titles, and sell a few consoles. Or I could make an unlocked platform, reap all the benefits of the locked one, _plus_ encourage a large community of people making all sorts of new things for it, sharing, and spurring many more console sales. So why lock when you could instead have an ecology?
- artmageddon 11y agoI assume it's because they believe that they can make more money by having licensing fees / exclusivity rights for the console than they would be having it be open.
- snarfy 11y agoThey make their money on licensing, not console sales.
- Synaesthesia 11y agoPiracy. They need to enforce DRM, requiring a controlled ecosystem. As for making it open and free, they usually want to keep the average quality of game fairly high.
- elorant 11y agoWell if they didn't price games at $60+ each maybe there would be less incentive for piracy.
- golergka 11y agoWell if I didn't have expensive stuff in my house I wouldn't care about locking it.
- douche 11y agoOr you go the Creative Assembly route, and release less than half the content you already finished for $60, then every two weeks release a $10-15 DLC that unlocks content that shipped on the disk.
- rtpg 11y agoThat sort of price is necessary to run the team needed for a AAA game (mainly for assets I think...) If you don't want AAA games, well all the major consoles have digital games a la Steam that cost less.
- pdkl95 11y agoDRM does not require a closed/controlled ecosystem. The best protection against the development of game-copying modchips on the PS3 was the ability to run Linux on it as an official feature. The serious jailbreaking (which necessarily allowed game-copying) was done only after they pissed off the "other os" crowd by removing it in a later patch. (the fail0verflow's talk[1] at 27C3 on jailbreaking the PS3 is really fun, and they discuss this in detail. (also: as discussed about 35min into [1], using the same nonce for the ECDSA signature of every game? So the keys can be derived from two games, without knowing most of the curve parameters? What was Sony thinking?!) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loZGYqaZ7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loZGYqaZ7I
- mariusmg 11y agoWe already have a open platform, it's called PC.
- venomsnake 11y agoWe are the glorious PC master race :) With the hardware of wintel mostly just working and steam - the best console right now is indeed PC.
- mahouse 11y agoThis isn't leddit.
- venomsnake 11y agoSorry to disappoint you but it just shows that a person watched Zero punctuation in 2007. I also happen to own almost any console manufactured after 1998 on the market. I buy them sometime after they are rooted to play the one or two exclusives. Steam with XBOX controller is mighty fine combo, especially since the gaming industry has been in creative stupor the last decade when it comes to AAA
- zingermc 11y agoUnfortunately and realistically, this requires you to run Windows. It would be really nice if more games ran on Linux.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoSteam runs on Linux and Mac though? Your only issue then is graphics card / graphics card drivers. The games are available, about 1,500 of them last I checked. The best thing that could happen for Linux gaming is that graphics manufacturers start open sourcing their drivers, to the best of their abilities, at least enough to make them usable in games.
- froo 11y ago
- mikelward 11y agoThey reduce the cost of the initial purchase, and make their money from royalties on game sales, similar to Gillette razor and blades. If your competitor costs $400 and you cost $500, you're gonna lose a lot of potential sales. When Xbox was initially $500, they ended up unbundling the camera and dropping the price to $400 because they were losing against the $400 PlayStation.
- castratikron 11y agoInterestingly the hardware becomes more valuable once it's been broken. For example, the jailbroken Apple TV 2 sells for more on eBay than the newer, locked down TV 3.
- ascagnel_ 11y agoBut with the rise of the "open" app store and the ability to build and run your own code on the ATV4, the price of the ATV2 has fallen rapidly.
- Zikes 11y agoI remember when the console prices were announced, at an E3 conference I think it was. The wild cheering when Sony announced the PS4's price would be $100 less than the XBone was surprising.
- mattmanser 11y agoXBone release a load of details which everyone hated. PS4 says, hey everybody we're not doing any of that. And. And. And...... We're $100 cheaper. Why was the cheering a surprise? It's classic showmanship. And they could afford to do it because they weren't bundling the controversial kinect.
- Zikes 11y agoIt was surprising because in between announcements a lot of people were still rooting for Microsoft. Call it fanboyism, brand loyalty, media spin, or maybe even Stockholm Syndrome, but a $500 Kinect-laden console actually seemed to sound appealing to the XBox crowd.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoI think the last major unlocked console was the Atari 2600, and by the end it had an incredible amount of low-quality games out there (not to mention shit like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge)
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoAccording to what I've read, the main reason it wasn't locked is that it didn't even occur to Atari that outside developers would be able to make 2600 games. After Custer's Revenge (and, more consequentially, after failing to sue Activision out of existence), they locked down the 7800 pretty hard: much like 6th-generation consoles, it required games to be signed, though presumably with a weaker algorithm.
- criddell 11y agoMultiplayer games are a pretty big part of console gaming. Even PC gamers sometimes will buy a console to participate because there's less cheating.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoThey lock because the product isn't the hardware, it's the walled garden (for which end users, developers, and publishers all pay their respective admission fees). They're not interested in encouraging anything outside of that except as lip service to "indie" developers (limited to less efficient frameworks and smaller package sizes if they're allowed at all; if you want to compete with the big boys, you have to pay for the privilege). It's basically the same model as the iOS App Store, except everything is more severe.
- bpye 11y agoI think ID@XBOX allows for indies to get proper access to the hardware? You can ship as a Windows app, but it doesn't appear you're limited to it. I don't personally have access, but that's what their media seems to say.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoBy my reading, this is basically a "lite" version of the full-blown approval process: Microsoft still has to individually approve each developer and each game, but the process is much cheaper and less stringent.
- shinymark 11y agoYep, you get full dev kit hardware and SDK access for the XB1. My company is in the program.
- bluedino 11y agoAlso quality control. You don't want your $400 top of the line console to have a library of shovelware.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoOne feat Origin has that Steam lacks. Too many games on Steam can be really awful.
- douche 11y agoOrigin just doesn't have very much selection to begin with. If you filter out the different editions of the same games (GOTY, Gold, Premium, Washington-Redskins-Go-Frak-Yourself edition), there's only a couple dozen versions of Battlefield, FIFA, NFS, the other sports games, Sims & SimCityand BioWare games. At least the user review process on Steam seems to penalize the garbage pretty effectively.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoThat's Origin's weakness as well, they don't have much as far as third parties is concerned, hopefully they change that eventually, but they still make (EA) enough games to where you get a great selection. In my particular case I enjoy BioWare so I at least get their collection there, and sometimes for free, whenever they give out a game.
- CocaKoala 11y agoSteam used to be relatively hard to get games on to, and while it meant that a lot of good indie games weren't on steam, it also meant that in general (with obvious exceptions), most games on steam were pretty decent. Now that they've been running the Greenlight program for a while, I've found that the number of games I actually buy on steam has gone way way down. There's just too much crap to shovel through; if a game is worth buying, I'll probably hear about it through some other channel, instead of by finding it on steam, and go to pick it up. Even during the sales events, I don't bother doing anything besides looking at what the 12 to 24 daily specials are, and I'll rarely buy them now.
- douche 11y agoIt's the way it's always been. I'm hoping this is the last generation of dedicated gaming consoles from the big three. I think the time of that idea has passed. At one point, dedicated graphics and sound hardware on consoles gave better performance and quality than you could get on an equivalent PC, but those days are long over. I'm getting a little sick of gimped PC games, that are held back by console limitations. I could get a RaspPi and have enough power to play a surprising number of games. I've got a Steam Link and a length of ethernet cable that almost cost more to tie into the switch at my desktop, so I certainly won't ever be buying a gaming console.
- jahnu 11y agoThey will continue to exist because most people want a gaming appliance that always works and works the same way at their friends house etc. etc.
- pjmlp 11y ago> It's the way it's always been. Only after 1983's crash.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoThe 2600 came out in 1977, six years before the crash. 1983 is 32 years ago, I think that's pretty close to "the way it's always been."
- pjmlp 11y agoFor people of my age, no.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoI'm old enough that my first console was a Colecovision in 1981, and I'm ok describing locked consoles as "pretty much the way it's always been."
- gambiting 11y ago
- bad_user 11y agoBecause we can't have nice things. For example marvel at the self-entitlement of people for getting free stuff while not giving a shit about publishers and note that this happens on Hacker News, so what can you expect from the public at large: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729068
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoAll goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous suffer from free rider problems. Blaming "self-entitled consumers" is an excuse, not a reason. Every time I take a whiff of my neighbor's cooking, I am freeloading off a positive (for me) externality. Any producer of such goods knows the risks.
- pjmlp 11y agoBecause around 1983 the amount of crap was so much that it drove the entire videogame industry to a crash, as no one knew any longer which games were worth buying. Nintendo then introduced the concept of locked down consoles as a way to control game quality. http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-video-game-crash-of-83 http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-g...
- SteveNuts 11y agoBut we have the internet to research things before we buy them now
- km3k 11y agoI wouldn't assume most video game sales are well researched.
- Zikes 11y agoPlus it's hard to find a major games journalism web site that isn't getting paid by the developers or publishers for good reviews, or threatened with blacklisting.
- benologist 11y agoIt's also very easy to find gameplay videos and see the game for yourself.
- Zikes 11y agoNot so, in the case of Nintendo. They've instituted a strict policy against posting long-form gameplay content unless you agree to monetize the video and send them 40% of the proceeds. If you don't agree, they'll submit a DMCA claim against the video.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
- gambiting 11y agoQuality control. In our studio we have an entire team(at the moment 4 programmers + 1 artist + 1 designer + 2 QC testers) who do nothing else but check our games for compliance so that Sony/MS actually accept them. I think it's a really good thing.
- dahart 11y agoNeed is relative. The console manufacturers are all publishers too, locking their ecosystems provides them the following benefits, all of which they want, but not all of which you "need" or want. - DRM. This prevents piracy, as others here have pointed out. This aims to prevent unauthorized copies, but it also gives them control over primary markets, and over payment systems. - Quality. Locking allows them to review and approve content before publication. It raises the overall quality of the ecosystem, and reduces shovel ware and bad actors. This is good for publishers, because it increases safety and consumer confidence. This happens to be good for consumers too, because you get less crappy, less crashy software. (This doesn't meant you don't get crap... It just means that overall there's less crap.) - Control. A locked ecosystem controls many aspects of the second hand market, even more so as downloading takes over hard copy. It has in the past also allowed publishers to have proprietary advantages. - Ratings. They review content for age appropriateness. It could be self reviewed like the Google play store, but they prefer to be certain. Especially important for Nintendo. Anyway, they would not be able to reap all the benefits if it were open, and they're in charge, so I guess it won't happen soon. I slightly disagree with the premise that locked vs ecology is the dichotomy. The locked systems do have ecologies, they're just probably different than the one you want, and unfortunately they shut out us makers and experimenters, relative to the platform itself, so they are ecologies of pure consumers.
- Dolores12 11y agoThey sell you hardware cheaper and then make money selling games.
- Aissen 11y agoI'm guessing it doesn't mean the console is "cracked" yet since you'd need to attack the hypervisor and boot chain-of-trust to do that.
- muraiki 11y agoGiven that this uses a FreeBSD kernel vulnerability, what is the impact of this upon general FreeBSD usage? It sounds like an arbitrary process can read and write to the memory of another process. I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but this is something I'm not really familiar with!
- muraiki 11y agoFrom talking with people on #freebsd on freenode, it sounds like freebsd should be unaffected. The system calls involved are Sony-specific additions to the kernel.
- yifanlu 11y agoThis uses an known (and patched) FreeBSD vulnerability (BadIRet). It only works on PS4 <= 1.76 (pretty old now) and is not publicly available (CTurt does not have permission to release it). I think this whole article is just an advertisement for this "green Monday" sale tacked in on the last paragraph.
- Chol 11y agoThis could be interpreted as an announcement for 32C3 https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/677033828917993472 https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/677033828917993472