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PlayStation People are starting to crack the PS5's security, likely leading to softmodding being viable in a few years.

Krvavi Abadas

Krvavi Abadas

Mr. Archivist
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Two parts here, actually.
First is the hacking group fail0verflow, who previously created the Wii softmodding scene under the name "Team Twiizers" (Referring to the initial attempts at modding the system, which used a pair of tweezers to bridge areas of memory. ) grabbing all of the PS5's root keys.


Second is Andy Nguyen, more commonly known as "theflow0". Posted a image of the PS5's debug settings being activated.


(Note that he's stated that whatever exploit he found will not be disclosed for now.)

For now, this isn't going to mean much to the general consumer. As this is merely the first step of the process.
But eventually this will evolve in various ways, with all of the typical features you'd expect from softmodding a system. (Emulators, homebrew, mods for single-player games, etc.)

Piracy as well, unfortunately. But that's just the natural way the community evolves.

For those of you wondering how the PS4 is faring currently. Basically every version below 7.55 works for softmodding if you can set up a basic webserver (or don't mind the potential risks of fully connecting your system to the internet, for running a 3rd-party host of the exploit.)
The bigger issue, at least on the preservation side of things. Is that no one has managed to crack open the dev-kits. Sony understandably put a bunch of protection onto them to prevent leaks, including a online activation system that connects to Sony's servers every 90 days.
ps4_devkit-768x353.jpg

We've had at least one filled with early builds end up in someone's hands, and with Sony now gradually winding down support of it over time. The deadline of Sony disabling the activation servers entirely is moving ever so slightly.
 
Krvavi Abadas said:
Piracy as well, unfortunately. But that's just the natural way the community evolves.
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Piracy alone should be enough reason to keep quiet about anything till the console is past it peak. ill be dammed is most of the people waiting for exploit are not solely for piracy, CFW and other mods are more a niche /hobbiest thing IMO
 
The always big question about these is, is the desire to go further good enough?

Nintendo consoles have like the highest level of desire for stuff like this for example.
 
I think the last time this happened to a console so close to the launch period was indeed the Wii. I might have missed a few but it's the one I certainly remember.

I do have to wonder if the extreme ease and widespreaded nature of hacking the Wii and running pirated software on it cut off its legs early. There's no way to prove that, of course, but I do feel like there was a pretty huge and sudden dry up of software on the Wii in 2010 or so.

It'll be a while before anything comes of this for PS5. I am shocked it happened so quickly, though.
 
Dopply said:
I think the last time this happened to a console so close to the launch period was indeed the Wii. I might have missed a few but it's the one I certainly remember.

I do have to wonder if the extreme ease and widespreaded nature of hacking the Wii and running pirated software on it cut off its legs early. There's no way to prove that, of course, but I do feel like there was a pretty huge and sudden dry up of software on the Wii in 2010 or so.

It'll be a while before anything comes of this for PS5. I am shocked it happened so quickly, though.
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The Wii sold extremely well and sold a ton of software, very hard to claim that this had any effect on sales. By 2010 the technology was so old and the novelty of motion control had pretty much worn off, that’s why software began to tail off. Also at that point it was either support HD consoles/PC or support Wii only since software for other platforms eclipsed what the Wii was capable of, and most devs weren’t gonna choose Wii. Even then it was still selling software and moving units, so much so they kept making new models. You don’t do that if hardware is failing or software isn’t selling
 
I don't think piracy affected Wii software much, but I still think it's possible it affected more niche late in life DS software in a notable way. Not the million seller, first-party titles like Pokemon, but the lesser known stuff like Ghost Trick, Radiant Historia, 999, Solatorobo, and Ace Attorney Investigations. It's impossible to really know since you can't treat pirated downloads as "lost sales" as the vast, vast majority of those downloads were never going to be purchases in the first place so we don't have any hard data on it. But anecdotally people on spaces like /v/ were openly talking about pirating all of their DS games back then a lot and the accessibility of the R4 was culturally known as a thing whenever I'd talk to people about playing DS games irl. In order to even know about those niche games you had to have a level of knowledge about the DS that was probably decently well associated with knowing how to pirate games. I also think it's at least a small part of why Ace Attorney Investigations 2 wasn't localized.

I wouldn't blame those games' poor performance on piracy, but I don't feel like it helped.
 
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GamerJM said:
I don't think piracy affected Wii software much, but I still think it's possible it affected more niche late in life DS software in a notable way. Not the million seller, first-party titles like Pokemon, but the lesser known stuff like Ghost Trick, Radiant Historia, 999, Solatorobo, and Ace Attorney Investigations. It's impossible to really know since you can't treat pirated downloads as "lost sales" as the vast, vast majority of those downloads were never going to be purchases in the first place so we don't have any hard data on it. But anecdotally people on spaces like /v/ were openly talking about pirating all of their DS games back then a lot and the accessibility of the R4 was culturally known as a thing whenever I'd talk to people about playing DS games irl. In order to even know about those niche games you had to have a level of knowledge about the DS that was probably decently well associated with knowing how to pirate games. I also think it's at least a small part of why Ace Attorney Investigations 2 wasn't localized.

I wouldn't blame those games' poor performance on piracy, but I don't feel like it helped.
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Games like those were absolutely hit by piracy which is why those releases dried up. R4 cartridges were super well spread. In my high school I knew ten people who owned a DS and eight of them had R4’s and stopped buying games entirely. Why would you when it was that easy.

This PS5 news sucks. The piracy crowd is always significantly larger and hungrier than the mod crowd whether they want to admit it or not.
 
xghost777 said:
Games like those were absolutely hit by piracy which is why those releases dried up. R4 cartridges were super well spread. In my high school I knew ten people who owned a DS and eight of them had R4’s and stopped buying games entirely. Why would you when it was that easy.

This PS5 news sucks. The piracy crowd is always significantly larger and hungrier than the mod crowd whether they want to admit it or not.
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People in college all owned a DS and R4 because they had to choose between paying for food/transportation or games 🤷
 
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Ostia said:
The Wii sold extremely well and sold a ton of software, very hard to claim that this had any effect on sales. By 2010 the technology was so old and the novelty of motion control had pretty much worn off, that’s why software began to tail off. Also at that point it was either support HD consoles/PC or support Wii only since software for other platforms eclipsed what the Wii was capable of, and most devs weren’t gonna choose Wii. Even then it was still selling software and moving units, so much so they kept making new models. You don’t do that if hardware is failing or software isn’t selling
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This, but also i'd imagine the attach rate for games on the system was a bit skewed in the first place.
A very large chunk of the audience buying the system, particularly early on, was doing it solely for Wii Sports, which was a pack-in title for most of it's life cycle (outside of Japan, at least. They always had it separate over there.)

Personally, i think the ideal timeline for softmodding would be within 3-6 months after the successor console has launched. But it seems highly unlikely for the community to be waiting that long.
There's also the current issue of there not really being much stock for the PS5 currently. Which has meant full-scale movement over to that platform has currently been frozen in place over the past several months.
 
GamerJM said:
I don't think piracy affected Wii software much, but I still think it's possible it affected more niche late in life DS software in a notable way. Not the million seller, first-party titles like Pokemon, but the lesser known stuff like Ghost Trick, Radiant Historia, 999, Solatorobo, and Ace Attorney Investigations. It's impossible to really know since you can't treat pirated downloads as "lost sales" as the vast, vast majority of those downloads were never going to be purchases in the first place so we don't have any hard data on it. But anecdotally people on spaces like /v/ were openly talking about pirating all of their DS games back then a lot and the accessibility of the R4 was culturally known as a thing whenever I'd talk to people about playing DS games irl. In order to even know about those niche games you had to have a level of knowledge about the DS that was probably decently well associated with knowing how to pirate games. I also think it's at least a small part of why Ace Attorney Investigations 2 wasn't localized.

I wouldn't blame those games' poor performance on piracy, but I don't feel like it helped.
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Piracy is an easy scapegoat when your game doesn’t find an audience. Most of those games did fine, enough for the series to continue getting localized and see western release anyway.
 
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Krvavi Abadas said:
This, but also i'd imagine the attach rate for games on the system was a bit skewed in the first place.
A very large chunk of the audience buying the system, particularly early on, was doing it solely for Wii Sports, which was a pack-in title for most of it's life cycle (outside of Japan, at least. They always had it separate over there.)

Personally, i think the ideal timeline for softmodding would be within 3-6 months after the successor console has launched. But it seems highly unlikely for the community to be waiting that long.
There's also the current issue of there not really being much stock for the PS5 currently. Which has meant full-scale movement over to that platform has currently been frozen in place over the past several months.
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The Wii had an attach rate of like 9 I don’t think that was an issue. Also attach rates aren’t the best metric of a platform’s health anyway.
 
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GamerJM said:
I don't think piracy affected Wii software much, but I still think it's possible it affected more niche late in life DS software in a notable way. Not the million seller, first-party titles like Pokemon, but the lesser known stuff like Ghost Trick, Radiant Historia, 999, Solatorobo, and Ace Attorney Investigations. It's impossible to really know since you can't treat pirated downloads as "lost sales" as the vast, vast majority of those downloads were never going to be purchases in the first place so we don't have any hard data on it. But anecdotally people on spaces like /v/ were openly talking about pirating all of their DS games back then a lot and the accessibility of the R4 was culturally known as a thing whenever I'd talk to people about playing DS games irl. In order to even know about those niche games you had to have a level of knowledge about the DS that was probably decently well associated with knowing how to pirate games. I also think it's at least a small part of why Ace Attorney Investigations 2 wasn't localized.

I wouldn't blame those games' poor performance on piracy, but I don't feel like it helped.
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Yup. Capcom famously passed over publishing AA Investigations in certain parts of Europe due to rampant piracy. It absolutely did kill later years DS software sales for anything that wasn't an absolute marquee title (ALA Pokemon) or complete shovelware. Wii games were also hit heavily by this, with the likes of Xenoblade being pirated around 1 million times when it first came out in Europe.

People always point to the big name successes when they talk about how piracy doesn't affect software sales, but those aren't usually the ones that really suffer; it's actually the smaller and lesser known titles that suffer the most from piracy (especially those that target a tech savvy audience that know how to pirate).

Suiseiseki said:
The always big question about these is, is the desire to go further good enough?

Nintendo consoles have like the highest level of desire for stuff like this for example.
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This is also very true. Nintendo's platforms are disproportionately targeted by hackers and pirates compared to everyone else; most likely because of the high demand for Nintendo's own titles and the unique qualities of their platforms (I mean, who really cares about running homebrew on a PS5 or a Series X when they're literally just PC hardware in a box anyway?)
 
Some software on the DS was absolutely hit by how rampant piracy was for that device, but I also doubt it'll ever happen on that scale again. There were regular ass retailers in my country selling R4 cards as well as ad campaigns and stuff. Many parents who didn't know any better just bought the cards loaded with games for their kids because why wouldn't they, everyone did. "Modern day" piracy isn't user friendly (for the lack of a better term) enough to ever really hurt commercial sales in a significant way again.
 
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same as with X-T team ,all they are doing is pocking the nest till they get sting. Sony lost many cases in the past that set the current standard for the legality of homebrewing, but im sure the manufacturers have not just stay crossed with their arms

I wont be surprised if at some point they get so fed up with this that implements so weird stupid shit, like "you no longer buy the console, you have a 1 time payment which allows you to rent the console for an unlimited amount of time" and as the console is rent instead of owned, different standards of "personal use" apply.

There is also the possibility they use their PI to "caught" a hacked on the record with the intention that breaking into the console is to enable piracy
 
garf02 said:
I wont be surprised if at some point they get so fed up with this that implements so weird stupid shit, like "you no longer buy the console, you have a 1 time payment which allows you to rent the console for an unlimited amount of time" and as the console is rent instead of owned, different standards of "personal use" apply.
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Implying that media corporations aren't already pushing for the end of private ownership en-masse. While piracy undoubtedly hurts smaller games and developers, the big corps that would be implementing this theoretical technology would do so for the same reasons they've gone full speed ahead on digital games, FOMO, and so on. It's ultimately not about lost profits, as much as it is about control across the board.
 
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Previously on Lost said:
Great news for preservationists
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Gashead said:
Damn right!

Can't wait to preserve GT7 2 days before it comes out.
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Its is great news for preservationists, let's say years down the line the ps5 game online mode goes offline or something modders can make their own online private servers. An online mode no one can experience can be experienced again. Also in the future they can hack games to run better etc. They did so with bloodborne on ps4
 
The whole denuvo debacle recently makes me think perservation for newer games isn't that weird of a concept.
 
lemonfresh said:
Its is great news for preservationists, let's say years down the line the ps5 game online mode goes offline or something modders can make their own online private servers. An online mode no one can experience can be experienced again. Also in the future they can hack games to run better etc. They did so with bloodborne on ps4
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You are thinking at the niche possibilities while ignoring the main issue. like you cant tell me face front you are worried about servers for a console that is not 1 year old.
At least wait till PS6 is out, THEN there might be a chance for a more reasonable count down to server kill.
 
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It was the only way to stop Microsoft's meteoric rise in LatAm countries. Sony is playing underwater 4D backgammon while Microsoft and Nintendo are playing checkers
 
Right, the DS was definitely hit by convenient piracy more. I was just thinking of the Wii since this is a very similar timeframe, lol. I do like homebrew and hacking my devices, but that's because I'm tech savvy. I don't do it for current platforms, though. I like to use the online services and I buy all my games nowadays.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, it'll be interesting for sure. I don't think Sony wants another PSP situation.
 
Dopply said:
Right, the DS was definitely hit by convenient piracy more. I was just thinking of the Wii since this is a very similar timeframe, lol. I do like homebrew and hacking my devices, but that's because I'm tech savvy. I don't do it for current platforms, though. I like to use the online services and I buy all my games nowadays.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, it'll be interesting for sure. I don't think Sony wants another PSP situation.
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Yeah it definitely also happened on Wii. Post 12 definitely highlights how bad it got since Xenoblade for sure didn’t sell a million copies in the US. Just sucks the smaller games that need every sale they can get usually are hit the hardest. I remember hearing Skyward Sword got hit bad too. I think because you couldn’t point to one set thing like the R4 cartridge, it’s harder to point to where it exactly became an issue. Developers/publishers would have known when it became less worth it.
 
Dcubed said:
Yup. Capcom famously passed over publishing AA Investigations in certain parts of Europe due to rampant piracy. It absolutely did kill later years DS software sales for anything that wasn't an absolute marquee title (ALA Pokemon) or complete shovelware. Wii games were also hit heavily by this, with the likes of Xenoblade being pirated around 1 million times when it first came out in Europe.

People always point to the big name successes when they talk about how piracy doesn't affect software sales, but those aren't usually the ones that really suffer; it's actually the smaller and lesser known titles that suffer the most from piracy (especially those that target a tech savvy audience that know how to pirate).
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Capcom's attitude towards Europe isn't really linked to piracy, unless they want to still try and claim that as an excuse all these years later.

Piracy doesn't kill sales, this is one of the oldest arguments on the Internet and time and again its shown that the majority of people who pirate were never going to buy in the first place.

No one makes these arguments for PS1 and PS2 games despite them being some of the easiest and cheapest to pirate for during their prime. People keep forgetting a lot of the DS 'unloved' gems sold to absolutely fuck all marketing or low print runs (Ghost Trick is one of those that I distinctly remember buying and no one I knew had heard of. It was barely in shops either.)
A lot of publishers were guilty of sending games out to die back then and loved to blame it on things like piracy.

I'd love a viable CFW solution for PS5, I hope it leads to stuff like patches for older games and removing online requirements for stuff like Gran Turismo Sport single player.
 
The most successful consoles are in some cases very easy to hack/mod. It‘s difficult to argue how big the risk versus the benefit is. Developer/Publisher who don‘t make the biggest profit were hit the hardest. In our current gaming landscape there are many „free“ games and online gaming is very popular. If you pirate games, you might not use any online features.

I hack all of my consoles. Cheats for offline games can sometimes make games more enjoyable. And it adds features. Atleast Nintendo does not ban me, if i only use Homebrew and not pirate or cheat in games online.
 
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xghost777 said:
Yeah it definitely also happened on Wii. Post 12 definitely highlights how bad it got since Xenoblade for sure didn’t sell a million copies in the US. Just sucks the smaller games that need every sale they can get usually are hit the hardest. I remember hearing Skyward Sword got hit bad too. I think because you couldn’t point to one set thing like the R4 cartridge, it’s harder to point to where it exactly became an issue. Developers/publishers would have known when it became less worth it.
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Xenoblade was nearly impossible to find and copies were extremely expensive, and that's not on pirates.
 
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Sony, specifically, probably isn't too happy about this. IIRC, an urban legend points to the great PSN hack and the hacking/piracy of the PSP having a rather sharp impact on Sony's mentality. More specifically, it impacted Sony's handling of the Vita.
Or so urban legend goes.
 
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