pory

GTA-specific work can’t start until the emu devs have GTA to work with. In the long run, emulating a game that’s getting a native PC release is not going to be an important part of emulating PS5 as a platform. In the short run, the emulator won’t have GTA before Rockstar releases its native PC release, this idea of “lol pirate the ps5 game to punish rockstar for delaying the PC game” is juvenile fantasy.

Backports work because the 13.4 firmware (or whatever wolverine needs) has been exploited. The encryption keys that are part of 13.4 have been dumped and extracted using that exploit, so now you can tell your 4.0 ps5 to tell Wolverine to “decrypt the game with this key” and it’ll do it. If GTA needs 14.0 keys, you won’t be able to do that until someone cracks 14.0 and dumps the key. You could give GTA the v13.4 keys just like Wolverine, but GTA doesn’t decrypt with 13.4 keys.

Similarly, pirates can create decrypted dumps of games (I don’t know about ps5 but definitely on other consoles) by passing the key through during the dump process. That still requires having the key though, and getting the key means exploiting the firmware that distributes that key.

People will not be able to play it without updating their PS5 firmware (which for most people happens automatically). You can’t downgrade firmware versions. So by locking the game behind the latest update (a version that currently blocks piracy and homebrew), the game can’t be pirated via PS5s until someone finds an exploit on a version that can run GTA.

This is how every game on PSN or discs for PS5 works. Disc copies are usually a month or so behind ‘latest’ due to pressing time. The last big ps5 release keyed to a vulnerable firmware is Marvel’s Wolverine.

Piracy on PS5 is always a game of catch-up. Exploit a ps5 firmware and you can pirate anything keyed to that firmware or older, but you can’t pirate (or buy) anything newer without updating the console and losing your exploit. Eventually, newer firms get exploited and the “pirate range” gets expanded. But new exploits take a lot of time and effort to find and it gets harder every time a vuln gets “burned” - I don’t think the GTA firmware will be solid forever but it’ll almost certainly last long enough that the game’s PC version will be out.

Currently PS5 emulation won’t be able to play GTA6 regardless of how good the emulators get. The actual game is going to be encrypted with keys for the latest ps5 firmware. Currently there is no known exploit for that firmware version which means there’s no way to decrypt and dump the GTA6 game files for use in an emulator (or for use on a piracy-enabled ps5).

You’ll see a fair amount of misinformation about this. The most common claim is “something something this is why no disc” but even if GTA6 was coming out on a disc, the game would be encrypted against the exact same keys the download version is so would-be pirates would still be waiting for a latest-firmware PS5 exploit.

Honestly it’s one of the few scenarios I did consider at the start. On the one hand, your megacorps like Disney (for example) absolutely want to replace human artists with slopbots. On the other hand, Disney does not want Joe Rando to be able to type “make me a Spiderman comic” into the slopbot.

Yeah, the ease and safety (and incredibly good/available guides) of piracy on 3DS made it so a lot of kids/noobs got in during the freeShop days and just kind of expected piracy to always be that easy. “Actually finding and having a reliable source for the game files” is always the actual hardest part of piracy, but freeShop kids never had to do it.

As soon as the first proof of concepts showed up (a command line PC tool that generated CIA files from a key pair, followed by CIAngel which did it directly on the 3DS but still needed an installation step via another app) it was only a matter of time until someone Frankensteined the open source CIAngel and FBI together and slapped a cute browse UI and json parser on top. Thus freeShop was born.

The 3DS was already thoroughly pwned before freeShop, but pirates still had to actually use a yucky computer to download yucky “files” to do their thing. FreeShop opened up piracy to a new level of tech-illiterate user, and when Nintendo closed the gaping security hole those pirates that didn’t know what a .cia file actually is were left floundering. That was the scene that inherited Switch piracy. Dozens of competing closed-source “shops” that all used their own proprietary databases to pretend to be freeShop. Paid piracy apps. All so that users wouldn’t have to plug in their microSD card (later, the Switch itself via USB) to pirate games. Traditional “download the file from a torrent or trusted HTTP source and then put it on the SD and install it” piracy was always possible in the “shops” era.

This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.

Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.

This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.

After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).

These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.

Smaller creators? Aus’s laws include M (whatever Aus’s system calls it) rated games, not just porn. The majority of AAA stuff nowadays is rated M, especially when we’re talking about Steam and get to bypass the whole ‘does Nintendo count as AAA’ debate.

EA and Ubisoft and their ilk are probably not happy with this either.

That’s a really high confidence value to have for a future where Bungie exists. They’re already halfway purged, you don’t come back from something like Marathon by trying really hard with half the resources you wasted on Marathon.

Well yeah. If i wanted to use a browser applet, I don’t see why I’d use MS at all. But for this specific use case (diagramming and flowcharting), Visio (imo) is pretty far ahead of LibreOffice Draw and that’s the only serious offline non-MS option for this.

I was looking for one of these yesterday and honestly they’re all pretty clunky web browser applets. If I’m replacing a Microsoft Office program I want a fully featured desktop app, not a .io website, yknow?

But the work is already illegal. This is probably more about getting court injunctions against services (like, for example, Reddit) that might have the guy’s PII. Obviously voices covers his tracks, but getting a bunch of his anonymized data might reveal a slip-up.

You can refund early access games too

Facebook killed it I think. They came in swinging the money dick right when the tech started getting interesting and immediately VR became about “being part of a software ecosystem”.

And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin’s Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality “real, good indie games”. And for every real, good indie game there’s a hundred asset flips and ai slop “games”.

And what percent of the “games that barely make anything” are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, “percent of new games that are trash” is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is “pay Valve $100 once”. This is a total junk statistic.

Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.

It is not “Krafton free”. Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn’t just “the publisher”. There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there’s some number of lifetime sales that, if they don’t ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they’d be legally required to pay out the “bonus” that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it’s still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.

Honestly even the absolute best case for this game is still “the more you care about it, the better it is for you to wait until it’s out of Early Access”. Early access for an “exploration first” game means your exploration is going to find a bunch of “come back later” walls, placeholders, and bugs. That’s the point of Early Access after all. I’d have enjoyed Subnautica a lot less if I’d played it during Early Access and was waiting on a patch to let me explore the Aurora.