A prominent video game developer believes that Sony will ultimately fail to effectively combat so-called “piracy” on its flagship Playstation 3 console.
Former Ubisoft Massive CEO Martin Walfisz – who developed the company’s new DRM technologies – explained that the lack of a modchip makes it quite difficult for Sony to detect cracked consoles.
“If the [George Hotz] hack works as reported, I don’t believe that Sony can regain any control. And given that it seems that users won’t even need a hardware mod-chip to play pirated games, I don’t believe that Sony can even detect which users to lock out from PSN,” Walfisz told GamesIndustry.
“[Sure], 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.
“[So], I would assume that pirated copies can be stored on the HDD as well, making it so easy to use that PS3 piracy, given time, might even surpass the handhelds.”
According to Walfisz, Sony’s only possible option is to “revise” the PS3 hardware itself, which would clearly be a very costly (and rather dubious) endeavor.
And while altering the hardware may work for new consoles, there would obviously be issues with ensuring backwards compatibility with the already-released games.
So, yeah.
It seems as if Sony is just going to have suck it up, or release the next-gen Playstation console earlier than expected.
