Something that I don't think folks consider the perspective of is that the big console manufacturers often act in the same vein that third party DRM/Anti-Tamper firms like Denuvo do in establishing relationships with publishers. Part of the value proposition with releasing on a console is that the platform provides a reasonable duty to protect sales, and they incentivize that themselves by the sales structure. Most consoles are sold at a loss, with revenue being made up largely through title sales. This puts the game publisher and the console manufacturer on the same team in ensuring that sales are protected, and as such decisions are made to tightly control what software can run on these otherwise incredibly powerful, compact machines.
Do want to clarify, I personally don't think it's the right play overall, but it's the play Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have been making for years. Now let's look at Valve.
Valve took their distribution platform, which already runs in lawless country on the largely unrestricted platform of PCs, and made a console experience for that with Steam Deck. Valve isn't incentivized to lock down the Deck any more than a PC is locked down, which is to say not very much at all. As a result, they can much more easily advocate for Right to Repair, modding, software customization, the works, because their existing market dominance as the biggest PC games distributor gives them that weight to throw around.
I'm happy that Valve isn't locking down Deck to customization in anticipation of shifting winds to get folks to target the platform, but we really can't call this an apples-to-apples comparison. Two very different companies with two very different histories of deal making with game publishers having latitude to do two very different styles of hardware control.
FWIW, Valve is probably also selling the Steam Deck at a loss. $400 for an Xbox One-tier AMD chipset in a nice-feeling controller case? Something tells me they're not banking on hardware margins to sell this console any more than Nintendo did with the Switch. Valve's real boon (IMO) is that they're teaching the rest of the industry how they should operate - first-party app stores can charge whatever fees they want for convenience, as long as third-parties have the same degree of control over the hardware. And guess what: it worked! The fact that Valve is talking about Steam Deck successors means they're not losing too much money, and I think it makes sense financially. If Valve takes 10-30% of every game bought on Steam, the amount they're making from Deck users must be monumental. I'd bet anyone 10:1 that there's a dashboard internally at Valve tracking how much money they've made from purchases directly on Deck hardware.
I think they might have been taking a small loss on the 400 USD unit, though with bulk production maybe it was closer to 0% margin initially. Just a gut feeling as someone not in the hardware fabrication specialization.
Sony has other monetization levers too, like that time on PS4 they pushed a mandatory, irreversible update that dropped support for a bunch of HDMI codecs, effectively downgrading millions of TVs overnight.
They got me. I went and bought a new TV. Not a Sony, but aggregate demand still affects prices.
You’ve sparked a realization that I am suddenly very uncomfortable with...
It seems like the biggest reasons we have such restrictive business deals around media (movies/music/etc) is because of the gigantic publishing companies that got the chance to grow throughout the media boom and who are now absolutely terrified by the fact that they are not needed.
As gaming budgets and revenue have been increasing over the past couple decades, I think what I just realized is that we might be seeing game publishers following the exact same trajectory.
That in another decade or two it could be game publishers who are sitting on top of piles of contracts, using their lawyers to try to sterilize the gaming landscape because they are terrified of losing their positions. They could even make deals with “the old guard” and lock down all entertainment under one umbrella...
> Most consoles are sold at a loss, with revenue being made up largely through title sales.
This is only the case for when the console gets released. The hardware stays fixed through it's life span and the cost of old tech either gets more efficient, the manufacturing process becomes more efficient, or the parts get cheaper. (With exceptions to disasters that spike ram production or halt chip production)
Hardware Refreshes: I'm sure someone is going to mention that.
Those are pretty much entirely new console releases .. but you rarely ever get to take advantage of the new performance improvements.
I seriously doubt this. The most expensive parts like CPUs and GPUs don't get cheaper. Their pricing for the entire life cycle is most likely negotiated and locked in at design time, in fact.
No one, not even Sony, can build PS5-class hardware and sell it at a profit for $500 at retail... not at launch time, and not on the last day of the product life cycle. Attach rate isn't everything in the console business, it's the only thing.
> From a profitability perspective, PS4 is also already contributing profit on a hardware unit basis, establishing a very different business framework from that of previous platform businesses.
They've been selling them at profit since the middle of last year [1], following the trend set the previous gen of consoles making profit on hardware in less than a year. Things in gaming, both in terms of prices and how consoles approach the business, has changed quite radically in the past ~decade.
After it took Sony way too long to get PS3 sales profitable, they said "no more" and made sure PS4 and PS5 sales were profitable within a year of release, just like the PS1 and PS2 were.
Xbox is sold "at a loss" only because Microsoft is still accounting for the massive cost incurred by RRoD failures, not that they're losing money per-unit.
Nintendo only ever sold the Wii U and 3DS at a loss for any real amount of time (and the Virtual Boy was a money pit if you count that.)
So yeah, that's basically only true for the 7th gen consoles, because the PS3 was overdesigned and Microsoft was willing to spend money like water to break into the market, then not sour their lead because of RRoDs.
> This puts the game publisher and the console manufacturer on the same team in ensuring that sales are protected, and as such decisions are made to tightly control what software can run on these otherwise incredibly powerful, compact machines.
There were consoles, for example the original Xbox, that while inferior to the counterpart had success only because the modding community and homebrew software that you could have used on them. To the console manufacturer opening up (like how Microsoft is slowly doing) to homebrew software is in the end a good thing, not a bad one.
It kind of is, there's a lot of demand now from console gamers to disable cross play with PC due to the abundance of cheaters. This was pretty evident in the Modern Warfare 2 beta.
more like
steam deck user: hey can i nuke steam os, install windows and play games and dual boot and and add a water cooled nvme drive and water cooler and replace broken parts with aftermarket parts?
valve: lol, go ahead. its your machine, do whatever you like
PC user: hey can i nuke windows and install a mainstream elf/linux distro (or your own)? microsoft: ofc, you just need a phd in software to workaround all the efi nasty blockades we did put in place _for you security ofc_, that with the help of hardware manufacturers. Go ahead, but don't fool yourself, we already got your money and since you are not the default install on any mass sold PCs, you'll stay at 0.00001% (scientifically insignificant).
Props to Dell on this front. I just installed Mint on a 2018 Latitude and it was easier than installing Windows. Everything just works including things like shortcut keys for volume and brightness. With what Valve is doing with proton and Linux gaming support, I'm as bullish as ever on the linux desktop.
Please dont recommand dell. They are easily bricked (for an average user). I use many model daily and a new 13' xps pro was bricked by... splitting the main partition in two. "Oh so the efi was borked and could no longer boot because it was choosing the wrong partition?" Nope the bios would NOT allow me to reach the F12 so I could boot to a usb drive or anything to fix this. I had to open the laptop then format the nvme drive (and they are not making it easy). Extremely dumb.
my anecdata. i have been running debian derivative on my machine for like years now and and only had to reinstall once because i fucked up a driver install.
last week i installed the same OS on an old machine for a relative, on a "fresh SSD" so no dual boot nonsense and it had problems right out of the box. Like memory leaks and printers wont install because apparently sane-devel cannot be found by HP install utility. Long story short, the printer is still not installed on that machine, it works but i had to install some alternate software like system monitors instead of supplied ones.
Dunno, maybe that one was a dud but i definitely feel the pain points as are being described across the spectrum. the problem is, if i cannot set up the machine in say half an hour without any tinkering, that is a win and i expect someone else to follow the on-screen commands but we do have a lot to cover and that is not in a bad way. i am a full time linux user so i am a part of this community but its not prime-time ready yet.
I have installed windows 7 thousands of times, it always works. unless there is a hardware issue, out of the box the system works. that is not true on our side.
i have to say it but the last years linus-linux challenge needs to be appreciated and we need to do more tests like these and keep fixing those small and big issues.
> microsoft: ofc, you just need a phd in software to workaround all the efi nasty blockades we did put in
That's not a fair assessment. Linux used a whitelisted shim, which only included accepted entries in an easy-to-edit/hack EFI variable. Imagine writing your secret password on a normal VFAT partition that any OS can boot/read/change. This is the equivalent.
The proper way is to enroll the private keys with the bios, and sign the payloads yourself (or let your distribution handle that), which is way more secure and can be automatized if you select the custom secureboot.
> The proper way is to enroll the private keys with the bios
But a method of doing that wasn't included in the UEFI standard for obvious Microsoft reasons, so few vendors support it and those that do usually don't do it correctly, let alone in a standardised way.
Seems fair to me when your alternatives are install a signing key (for your Linux os) yourself to the EFI, disable secure boot, or allow MS to be the gatekeeper of what software can run on your PC, including the distro getting itself OK'd by MS with their separate OS key that might or might not be included by the OEM.
Happy to be corrected if things have changed since the last time I looked at things.
I have yet to see a firmware that doesn't allow me to enroll private keys. It's a basic UEFI features, and IIRC Microsoft requires that to be possible for intel hardware: if you don't, no Windows.
When you control the keys, SecureBoot is a good thing at least as good as encryption!
There are things that are fair to complain about, but on this, I don't see how Microsoft or anyone could have done any better to be playing nice with Linux while helping customers.
Because I bought the hardware, end of story. I shouldn't have to justify what I do with it after that. Not to Nintendo, not to Sony, not to you, and not to a court of law.
I didn't borrow it, I bought it. I pay for the power that lights it up, I pay for the network it connects to, I get to say what it does and when and how.
Yes it was advertised as a gaming console, yes it came with some games installed and it's very good at that, but it's also a whole-ass computer with the potential to do whole-ass computer things. I'm offended by having a computer sitting right there that can't be used to do some task that it might otherwise be capable of.
We'd never stand for arbitrary restrictions on other everyday items. Imagine if the can of soda I'm drinking could only be used as a drink. Oh you spilled some chemicals on yourself and you want to use this to rinse off quickly on your way to the shower? Sorry, drink output can only connected to mouth input, too bad about your arm. Like, what?
Objects are versatile and using that versatility is the essence of humanity. It's why we have opposable thumbs. It's why we're the dominant species on the planet. Backsliding from that in the name of copyright or some shit is inane, counterproductive, and offensive to the very core of my being.
> Because I bought the hardware, end of story. I shouldn't have to justify what I do with it after that. Not to Nintendo, not to Sony, not to you, and not to a court of law.
I wonder if you misunderstood the GP's question.
I don't think they were asking, "Why, as the manufacturer, should we consider your desire reasonable?".
I think they were asking, "As a fellow computer user, I'd like to better understand something interesting, and it sounds like you might be up to something interesting."
Personally, I use SSH to poke around. 99% of the time, I look at the directory structure, maybe learn something and then shrug with a “that was cool” and never look at it again. But there’s always that 1% where I find something truly interesting…
I would argue that you just shouldn't buy a PlayStation.
For Sony's customers, part of the appeal of a console is the locked down nature. Cheating in multiplayer games is far less prevalent in newer consoles because of this, and even when the consoles do get cracked wide open, the barrier to entry is usually high enough to make cheating a pretty rare occurrence. This is all accomplished without making the user install a kernel-mode driver on the same computer they likely use to file their taxes.
I'll also point out that unlike what the GP insinuated, Sony won't actually sue you for running an SSH server on your PS5.
So the problem is, once you detect a user is running arbitrary unsigned code on their system, how do you differentiate between them using that capability for cheating or running the world's most convoluted SSH server? Once the system is compromised, you don't really know what the user is doing, and as such any network traffic cannot really be trusted.
Well the other day my 6yo daughter was playing on the Deck and I SSH'd in from my phone, installed espeak, and started making a voice of god say whatever I wanted as she played.
I remember working out how to do this over the network with some combination of the utilities on the windows install when I was a student at school, I forget which windows exactly given it could have been any of the outdated 9x sort or even 2k at high school…
Anyway the fun thing was combining it with the (surprisingly not locked down) netsend command, so my little remote execution script would pop the cd drive tray open, and then they would get an “alert” from netsend saying “Feed Me!!!”
I wasn’t the sort of kid that pulled a prank like that on a teacher or the whole class, but it did get some laughs with the small circle of fellow computer nerds that would spend lunch or afternoons in the library using the computers to fool around learning Visual Basic, or play 90s online games, or for the few that new me… play proper LAN games… since I was the gatekeeper of by way of my perpetual habit of trying to lift the hood and work out how everything was setup, so I found all the fun network admin failures like group policy mistakes that left the empty second hard drive on a batch of computers as public read/write for anyone with local admin permissions on any computer on the network, or setting a local machine folder I had sufficient permissions to, to be network accessible if you had the machine IP, or telling them which computers I had left the burned cd copies of the games in (which were fully portable!, bless the pre-network connected DRM days)
Long ago my GF bought a linux laptop. She asked me install something, it was just an "apt-get install" away. I told her I had to type a few commands. She said she was busy now. Ok, ssh'ed into it and installed what she needed.
Allowing SSH/OS access can allow fun and interesting things other than gaming. Back when you were allowed to run Linux on a PlayStation 3, you could potentially wire up bunch of these for some serious computing power (at the time).
I'm not sure why you're being down voted because that was exactly what drew me to the Deck. I use their client, I buy their games, but I also have a work environment setup on the desktop side, and I can still play the games I bought off GOG. I also bought a pass-through power USB3 hub off of Anker's store on Newegg to use as a dock that fits nicely in the case.
Sure, but also, I'd love to get regular people buying these things, which is why I think "gaming console" is important. Let's see if we can get back to good computing and gaming, where you give up a little convenience for a ton of power and possibility.
I'm very old. So good gaming/computing means devices that are very open by default. "SSH server" can kind of be shorthand for "I can get in the guts of the thing and do whatever I want to it"
Yup, thus the PS5 jailbreak being a cool thing. However, the steam deck is open by default, which is a much bigger deal in the console world and far more exciting IMO.
By not forbidding things like this, it can become more than just a gaming console. For example, you might end up buying one second-hand with a broken screen and using it as a home server - it even comes with its own UPS battery!
First thing I thought reading this headline... "That's a few thousand
metric tons of e-waste that won't be going into a landfill soon".
I've little interest in gaming or PS5 hardware TBH. But the entire
conceit of locked-down appliances that could be reused as general
purpose devices, but are deliberately hobbled, is abhorrent to me.
IN 2022, with what we know about climate change, pollution and
e-waste, locking devices is simply spiteful and must be made illegal.
> I've little interest in gaming or PS5 hardware TBH. But the entire conceit of locked-down appliances that could be reused as general purpose devices, but are deliberately hobbled, is abhorrent to me.
I don't mind the idea of a closed platform for 5-10 years. But I do feel there should be legislation to sunset all devices as open. It's a shame we still have reverse-engineering efforts on 40+ year old computing devices.
Before Sony stripped Linux from the PS3, they were being used to build super computers. Heck, my undergrad program tried getting on that hype train and we got two PS3s running YellowDog linux and were starting to put together a grant proposal for a small compute cluster when Sony broke the news.
If you've ever used Kodi, it started as the "XBox Media Center" project. So Kodi would probably not be what it is today without people jailbreaking the OG XBox so they could use it for a media "PC".
People are still playing Quake Arena, Doom, and other og XBox games on real hw, thanks to jailbreaking. With root access users are able to patch the games so they can be pointed at community servers to replace the deprecated XBox Live servers that used to power the online multiplayer.
Similarly, we're seeing a bunch of games from the last couple of generations that reach out to company servers that are now being shut down. Jailbreaking provides life extension in some of these cases as well.
>Before Sony stripped Linux from the PS3, they were being used to build super computers. Heck, my undergrad program tried getting on that hype train and we got two PS3s running YellowDog linux and were starting to put together a grant proposal for a small compute cluster when Sony broke the news.
The PS3 was built on very exotic hardware, PS5 is just a regular x86 computer.
Playing with Linux on a PS3 at least had a bit of a novelty factor, with PS5 there’s none.
Did those PS3 supercomputers end up being a good investment? Probably not.
> If you've ever used Kodi, it started as the "XBox Media Center" project. So Kodi would probably not be what it is today without people jailbreaking the OG XBox so they could use it for a media "PC".
The market has moved long past that. The OG Xbox had something to offer that you couldn’t easily get elsewhere, that’s not the case anymore.
> People are still playing Quake Arena, Doom, and other og XBox games on real hw
> Did those PS3 supercomputers end up being a good investment? Probably not.
In our analysis at the time, it was an economical supercomputer that could hit our needs. It doesn't have to be the best investment, just a decent one at the time. You seem to entirely discount the fact that sometimes the journey is just as important.
In this case, half the purpose behind the grant proposal was education and outreach engagement. The novelty of using PS3s was enough to get some traction with local highschool students and introduce them to computing topics in new ways.
> The market has moved long past that. The OG Xbox had something to offer that you couldn’t easily get elsewhere, that’s not the case anymore.
And who's to say people experimenting with the PS5 won't be creating something new we'll be talking about in 10 years? These are powerful machines, why artificially restrict what they can do?
Homebrew alone gives people ways to play with hardware they wouldn't normally be able to experiment with.
> A handful of hardcore enthusiasts.
~5k active participants in the Insignia community is more than a handful. Sure, it's not hundreds of thousands but it's not exactly public yet either. And there are thousands in similar communities for the PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii to name a few. Either way, these communities directly demonstrate that jailbreaking hardware does indeed extend a console's lifetime.
>You seem to entirely discount the fact that sometimes the journey is just as important.
I don't. I very much acknowledge that the PS3 was a very novel piece of hardware, but the same doesn't apply to consoles in general.
>And who's to say people experimenting with the PS5 won't be creating something new we'll be talking about in 10 years? These are powerful machines, why artificially restrict what they can do?
They might, no doubt. But there's nothing novel about developing on a PS5, at least the original Xbox offered a unique form factor in its price bracket.
>Homebrew alone gives people ways to play with hardware they wouldn't normally be able to experiment with.
Yes, but PS5 hardware is just regular PC hardware. It's not exotic and exciting like the PS3 or Xbox were.
>~5k active participants in the Insignia community is more than a handful. Sure, it's not hundreds of thousands but it's not exactly public yet either. And there are thousands in similar communities for the PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii to name a few. Either way, these communities directly demonstrate that jailbreaking hardware does indeed extend a console's lifetime.
These are communities consisting of some thousands of people, but we're talking about hardware that sells 100+ million units.
Maybe not in wealthy countries. In Argentina hacked PS2s are still pretty commonly used, and repair shops service them (OK, maybe not anymore? I left six years ago). Jail-breaking absolutely extends the lifetime of consoles.
Not with regulations preventing this market from realization obviously.
People are not going to take PS5's and reuse them but if it was legal to build products around PS4's reuse you can bet your ass a sizeable amount of PS5 users would love to make use of their old hardware. It would take a while for killer apps/products to release but stifling it before there's a chance seems like a huge waste to me.
I understand your pessimism but in this case I ask you to dream a little more.
> if it was legal to build products around PS4's reuse you can bet your ass a sizeable amount of PS5 users would love to make use of their old hardware
The fact that people aren’t already doing so with regular general purpose computers seems to entirely discredit this theory, no?
There's a massive second-hand market for many general purpose computers. Plenty of people, myself included, buy used hardware almost exclusively.
Beyond that, many people are creating home theater PCs, home labs, home automation systems, arcade cabinets, custom car audio head units, drink robots, and more using commodity hardware. Often times these are reused hardware, which cuts the cost on hardware by a significant margin.
Just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean it's not happening.
The deck has a suite of apps that will install and configure whatever emulator you'd like. Then, you simply scp over roms and it'll also automatically add the relevant game entries to the steam library.
This is very handy as someone who plays randomizer ROMs, I have a script that can generate a bunch of new Super Metroid runs for me and automatically upload them. Prior to the Deck, this process involved manually fiddling with SD cards across devices.
On the Nintendo Switch, it allows you to mount your console as an SFTP device and wirelessly transfer your screenshots without even turning on the console. Pretty fun stuff, especially in the motley years of 2017-2019.
What's it with Nintendo and fucking up basic use cases anyway? Seriously, are they expecting USB-based jailbreaks or why not even include something a lot of players have been shouting on the web for years now?!
Yes. It's defense in depth; the 3DS was hacked dozens of ways over its lifetime. Via specially crafted saved games in some cases. There were a few media-based buffer overflow hacks too, iirc. The DS before that could get hacked by certain sounds via Bangai-O Spirits level transfer.
It is, but the core vulnerability of the chipset (Tegra X1) still exists AFAIK. Granted, you need to hardmod to jailbreak a Mariko model (launch models can be softmodded), but that's basically the same thing that happened with the 3DS.
It's a different exploit. The original exploit is an issue with the Tegra's recovery mode (RCM), requiring a USB payload to be sent to the Switch at boot every time.
I believe the hardmod is a voltage glitching exploit, as described for the Vita here: https://yifan.lu/images/2019/01/Injecting_Software_Vulnerabi... . It is able to inject code through the onboard memory then load a payload from a memory card rather than USB.
Same reason I need a terminal on Linux: to have access to everything in the computer, not just the stuff exposed in the GUI.
I can also easily transfer files between systems that way. I do this with my phone, it's so easy to connect via the network and copy files, no need to deal with USB stuff. Ever tried to transfer a video or screenshot from PS4 to any other device? Easiest method I found was making a PSN chat group, asking the other person to leave the group and then using it to share the data to myself so I can see it on my phone at a lower quality. It's so stupid.
Allows easy file access with sftp and sshfs, can be used to kill a misbehaving program from your phone or PC if you're stuck on a black screen, can be used to monitor resource usage from another machine.
A lot of things. For example you can use it to copy files (moovies, music, etc) on the drive of the console to watch them. Or you can download data from the console itself (screenshots, video recordings, etc).
You can use SSH to run commands to automatize things, for example turning off the console, launching an update, installing new software, etc, while not being in front of the TV.
Finally you can use it to diagnose problems on the console, for example you can connect to run a diagnosis, from which you may find out that the hard drive is causing problems and you should replace it, or the console is overheating and thermal throttling, etc.
Need is the operative word, there isn't a need, sure there are technical people that want to poke around or the "because its mine/I can" crowd but for the vast majority of console players they don't even know what SSH is.
I started playing games back when you had to mess with and resolve IRQ and DMA conflicts in DOS so I love having a console I can use as an appliance. You don't need SSH on every internet connected device you own.
Game consoles have a very strong case for being closed because cheating ruins their primary function. And players absolutely will cheat even if it means spending thousands.
Other devices do need some level of local access because bad software is often the limiting factor of usefulness.
I can think of many cases where you would want to do that. Remotely start download of a game, pull save files of it, Add a movie or series to watch, turn off remotely in case you forget and many others.
Not disagreeing with the overall premise that having SSH on PS5 is pretty cool, but a lot of those things you mentioned are available without SSH on it already.
You can kick off download of a game through the official app. Which will also notify you when the game is ready to play and then when it is fully downloaded. You can also see which games you have installed already and free up space by deleting some of them. And the last thing, you can also use the app to download the recent screenshots and video clips you took of your gameplay on the console.
All of this works from anywhere, as long as both your phone and the console have access to internet (they dont need to be on the same network though).
An app is very different from ssh. I can ssh from my laptop. From my friends laptop. Until recently I didn't even own a smartphone. Apps are a terrible way to encapsulate this in.
It isn't app-only. You can also login into PSN in your web browser and trigger game downloads from there too. Iirc Steam allows it too, so you can trigger the download on the go from any web browser, and it starts downloading on your machine at home.
If the console is properly designed, it's more of a want than a need. Even if the focus here is more on startups, this website is called hacker news after all.
Microsoft has yet to totally lockdown their hardware. They usually provide a way to disable secureboot or to enroll your own keys (with a few specific exceptions).
Apple's macs are also fairly open. You can install your own bootloader, and boot whatever you want on them. There's a secureboot, but it can be disabled.
> With developer mode enabled on a Microsoft console, it’s possible to install and run UWP apps. When developer mode is enabled, retail games and other services won’t work.
I think I can see why it hasn't been used much, especially given that UWP app framework has been deprecated not that long ago.
I don’t remember with complete certainty, but I’m pretty sure developer mode on the Xbox can be turned back off relatively easily. You can use it like a dual boot and keep your games and data.
Still a pain in the ass, and I never did it because there’s a big button that _does_ erase all your data in the process of switching that you can click by accident.
A meme is necessarily a joke but a joke is not necessarily a meme. A meme often, but not always, has a visual component to it. A meme is a cultural phenomenon. It is shared virally and evolves in the process.
EDIT: After reading the Wikipedia page like the two people that replied to me, it is now clear to me that a meme is not necessarily a joke.
You've got the technical definition correct, but the vast majority of usage of the term meme today is the colloquial usage, which is centered on humor, and has only a passing similarity to Dawkins' idea. Really, it's used today as a replacement term for what used to be called an "image macro", but also extends to cover video content.
For better or worse, that ship has sailed. Convincing people otherwise is going to go about as well as convincing them to not use "literally" in a figurative sense.
From my online gaming experience, Gen Z seems to be adopting new usage of ‘meme’ that is decoupled it from virality. It’s used to discredit something as being a joke, falsehood or myth.
Wiktionary documents this usage since 2018:
> (Internet, slang) A myth circulating as truth, such as ineffective practices presented as effective.
An idea circulating through the population is more than sufficient to qualify it as a meme. "Virality", meaning prolific spreading, was never a necessary condition. Some memes are popular but some aren't, that has always been recognized.
Also jogging is quite literally a meme, from the 60s and 70s. That's when the pairing of the term and activity became popularized and spread through the population.
Meme seemed to be evolving to simply mean an image with some text on it. I’m glad for this new direction. At least it is related to the original meaning.
That definition is already antiquated, since that shift had already mostly happened by around 5 years on most internet platforms (internet culture evolves quick these days). As other commenters have mentioned, it's now "evolving" to be more or less synonymous with "joke"
A meme is NOT necessarily a joke. An "internet meme", a subset of memes, is generally a joke, but "meme" itself is a singular unit of culture, and includes many non-funny things
I would argue also that all jokes are memes: that all jokes ultimately have a core meme to them.
Yup. It's not a coincidence that it sounds like "gene". The idea was precisely to treat it like that - memes get passed from generation to generation, get mutated, mix with other memes.
Ironically enough, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance videogame from 2013 had a villain character who went on a monologue about memes, and a lot of people were confused by the way he used that term. But he described that original Dawkins definition really well.
> We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture — they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair… All memes. All passed along.
Not exactly. Memes are just cultural bits that get passed around, and virality is more like a measurement of how much they get passed around. Jokes have intrinsic memetic qualities (like this innate desire to get told again, for comedic value), which makes them great memes.
Certain others can elaborate further but back during the tenure of the PS3 Sony did attempt to prosecute individuals for publishing research into exploiting it. So not entirely a joke/meme.
That reminds me of a video that I watched a few months ago about how an earlier generation of PlayStation got jailbroken very late in its lifecycle because Sony decided to disable Linux (or something like that, I don’t remember). As long as that feature was available, nobody cared to hack the console because they could do what they want, but as soon as Sony pulled the feature, the console was hacked in a very short time.
Yeah, hobbyists like the US Air Force Research Lab
(I imagine, I don't have any info to suggest they actually had to literally jailbreak their PS3s in order to build their supercomputer, but just making a jab)
If it's good enough for the USAF, it should be good enough for hobbyists to have a go around with it!
I think USAF and other companies were likely part of the reason Sony removed Linux support. Generally, a PS3 was a lot cheaper than the equivalent PC/server.
Sony typically sells consoles at a loss and makes profits from the game sales. The likes of USAF, researchers, and other companies were buying PS3s in bulk, and using OtherOS functionality without utilizing the primary use of PS3s: games. Often these projects didn't need any GPU power, and OtherOS had nearly full access to the CPU (iirc it had access to the main PPE and 7 out of 8 SPEs). Thus, Sony likely was not making enough money from the consoles USAF et al. bought.
IMO that is Sony's problem, selling special purpose hardware that could be general purpose but locking it down so that your business model is secure... after the point of sale... seems a bit sneaky.
I enjoyed many hours of gaming on the PS2 and I bought it (in part) because I would be able to install Linux on it. I still managed to become a Linux guy today, in spite of the rug by Sony, and I suppose there's nothing overtly wrong with clarifying with an update that the primary intended use of your product is in fact its primary intended use, but as a hobbyist (dang it, now I've gone and done that again)...
There was actually a class-action lawsuit about this, but Sony played a lot of games to keep the rationale for locking out OtherOS out of the discovery process. It wound up being just another one of those kinds of settlements - i.e. a large-sounding number being awarded to so many plaintiffs in the class that its basically pennies per person.
My guess is that they don't want to say the quiet part out loud: i.e. they took away OtherOS because they weren't getting the tariff exemptions they wanted and they don't actually want people using these devices for non-royalty-bearing activities (e.g. piracy and homebrew).
Sony loved those labs. They were pushing an idea at the time that it was legally not a game console but instead a general purpose computer, which helped them with import tariffs in a lot of jurisdictions. It's also great marketing. "You can have the power of a super computer under your TV".
As fun as things like that are, AFAIK most of those types of PoC exploits are done using SOHO printers. There are two specific cases I am thinking of, one where a pile of extremely confidential data was captured by pulling documents that had been sent to a printer for printing or faxing; in that case it was an insider who was copying docs they shouldn't have access to. In the other case it was a pretty nifty attack where the attacker was able to pivot using credentials taken from a printer to access other systems.
There are also several publicly available tools that can be used to pop printers, and use them for other bad things, but it's not an area I have spent much time in other than from a blue team/IR perspective. Printers, like alot of other hardware, are usually poorly maintained, but at least patching has mostly gotten easier and most infrastructure scanning tools will report vulnerabilities and weaknesses in them now.
Seriously a bit miffed at the characterization of people who have bought a piece of hardware to install Free and Open Source Software on it (and then been absolutely rugged by the manufacturer) as "pirates out to save/make money, and hobbyists too"
Every business I have ever worked at has either been built almost exclusively on Open Source software, or a bank that ran almost exclusively on Microsoft.
They disabled Linux because it got jailbroken and that was how they jailbroke it. If they didn't jailbreak the PS3 they wouldn't have disabled Linux. I think it was GeoHot who cracked it, I think it was because they used the same cryptographic key for all machines or something like that.
This isn't a story of how taking away freedom from users resulted in piracy, this is a story of how piracy took freedoms away from uesrs.
Your memory may not be as good as you remember. This history wiki doesn't seem to imply any causality between the jailbreak and the removal of OtherOS.
> This appears to be in response to the announcements of PS3 hypervisor exploits that rely on the use of OtherOS (specifically, Linux), since in the past Sony has insisted that they had no plans to ever deprecate Linux support, let alone force it in this manner:
> 2. You got your facts/timeline wrong. GeoHot didn't publish his hack until after OtherOS was disabled.
Turns out I really don't. The other person posted the timeline. GeoHot pulled it because they allowed OtherOS. They obivously found out some how, removed it and then GeoHot announced the bug. Maybe GeoHot did responsible disclosure?
Oh my, no, there wasn’t any “responsible disclosure,” but rather some serious animosity from Sony. They sued Geohot, and won an injunction against him hacking on any Sony products.
Thinking back on it, I don’t think geohot ever even disclosed the specifics of the bug, or publicly released any PoC before Sony sent the lawyers after him, and he was legally (and morally) prevented from hacking on Sony products after
Seems to be a different exploit, since the one you linked mentions you can't run arbitrary code with it nor install custom packages, while the video in the Twitter does allow you to install new/overwrite packages.
Nice one, from the video it looks like he chained a browser vuln with a kernel vuln to make his jailbreak. Assuming it's a JIT optimization bug (as browser vulns often are, but I'm just guessing here), I wonder if Sony might attempt to mitigate this in future by disabling JIT, as Apple has done with its Lockdown Mode.
Looks like the other thing they could do for this particular vector is prevent https requests from being intercepted and replaced - why should the user be permitted to override certificate errors in this case? Doesn't make sense.
Funnily enough, I think the CVE they're saying it is is wrong? The link to the project zero itw tracking page is for CVE-2021-30858 which is an IndexDB UAF, which is a completely seperate bug; the MITRE tracking page for CVE-2021-30858 just has the boilerplate "a malicious page can cause an exploit" from Apple, and doesn't say if it's for the IndexDB or FontFaceCache bug, so I think the Jailbreak people are just confused on this one.
> Most importantly we plan to have fun with this project
That seems like the wrong main focus for a security project. I'd have preferred if the "most important" thing was to provide a secure browsing experience, but, to each their own...
Nah; with years of experience in the security space, and a chunk of those working at a browser vendor, watching bug classes vanish (even if it's the expense of some usability) is worth it when I imagine the tears of bad guys who have to work harder, and the users who won't have to go through the charade of credit monitoring services offered by some of the worst companies in the world.
They are specifically calling out that it's not ready for prime time, and that it will have an impact on users. In practice, many very effective security controls for browsers (and other software) get tuned down or disabled by default because they break too much of how the web works (SameSite cookies are a good example), or because it creates friction in customer acquisition or growth.
Because that is what JIT does is it speeds up performance at the costs of some security vulnerabilities. Just about every browser vulnerability in existence would have been mitigated by simply disabling JIT. I've disabled it myself and browsing was so slow that I had to re-enable it.
Gotcha, was just making sure I understood correctly. I’m just surprised that console manufacturers would go through the effort of shipping a JIT for a built in web browser.
I don’t think I’ve ever opened a web browser on a console except on dreamcast for the novelty of it.
> "This exploit achieves read/write, but not code execution. This is because we cannot currently dump kernel code for gadgets, as kernel .text pages are marked as eXecute Only Memory (XOM). Attempting to read kernel .text pointers will panic!
> As per the above + the hypervisor (HV) enforcing kernel write protection, this exploit also cannot install any patches or hooks into kernel space, which means no homebrew-related code for the time being." [1]
Feels like any time a console gets jailbroken, it's always a JavaScript use-after-free exploit in the browser webview that they use to open the user manual. IIRC this was true for the PS Vita, 3DS, Wii U, among others? I wonder if at some point console vendors will stop using webviews entirely?
I think it's because webkit is an open source project with known bugs/vulnerabilities. Bugfixes in upstream webkit version may not be included in the console version of webkit yet, so hackers can have easier time testing for potential exploits simply by testing those known bugs.
I do suspect that this is a big part of why the PS5 doesn't include a browser, despite one being available on the PS4. It's a shame really, would love to be able to browse the web from my PS5.
Yep, this is exactly why. Sony got too scared of having a fully user-facing browser this time around because of all the Webkit exploits slamming the PS4.
It actually leads to frustration as an ISP employee; we get reports of end user devices getting slow speeds and the built-in PSN speedtests can often give us bad results (eg, a customer might be rated for 100x100 and the PSN test yields 20x5) -- running a browser-based speedtest we might be getting full speed to the device indicating a PSN issue. Removing the browser takes that troubleshooting option away from us.
It is amazing how consistently garbage PSN speed tests have been for over a decade. I remember the results being wildly off on my PS3, PS4, and now PS5.
Why aren't they using some sort of sandbox, apparmor or selinux based security? The places where foreign data and code are allowed in consoles should be pretty limited.
I still remember the dirty COW exploit on Android and it was useless because all you are getting is root in some heavily restricted namespace.
They often are heavily isolating the browser. This is the reason a kernel exploit is also needed, but getting the first foot in is often an important part and most easily accomplished with the browser.
Game consoles are some of the most secure and heavily exploited systems around, since there is a very strong financial incentive to secure them and a strong incentive to break 'em open (compared to almost any other consumer tech).
It's surprising that they deploy all of that debug stuff onto the console and then hide the switch behind a big lock to be picked. Why not just not deploy it?
> Apparently the debug stuff are needed for servicing
Yeah, that makes sense. I'd have thought it would be better to have an ephemeral debug client that's deployed from remote if you have the key to the big lock, but perhaps that's for the PS6.
> Plus if someone manages to run custom code, having the debug options or not becomes irrelevant.
Agreed, but it might be harder as they have to write custom tooling to inspect the system.
Not to mention it can break stuff. If QA tested everything with the debug stuff being on the console but temporarily hidden, that's how you want to deploy it as well, otherwise you're gonna have retest and surely fix a bunch of stuff before deploying.
Yes yes, systems should not act like that, probably means everything is too tied together. But real world systems do act like that, especially in things with not too high stakes and with high focus on shipping stuff quickly.
I remember people using PS3 as compute cluster [1] some time ago. Is this still possible with PS5? My general question is: are there and what are some non-gaming purposes of jailbroken PS5?
If I remember correctly, the PS3's CPU is uniquely suited to the kind of work people use clusters for. It provided a halfway point between CPU and GPGPU, and at a price point which couldn't be beaten.
The PS5, on the other hand, basically uses medium-range off-the-shelf computer components. Its most powerful feature is the extremely fast SSD, but that is not very useful for a compute cluster. Nowadays anyone wanting a compute cluster would just fill a server rack with GPUs and be done with it.
The PS3 had a unique CPU design that made it suitable for certain specialized tasks. The PS5 is much closer to an off-the-shelf gaming PC, and so I don't think there's any good reasons to use a PS5 in that way, especially since PS5s are difficult to even buy in the first place.
I am entirely supportive of the user's right to do what they please with their devices (a right which may soon be enshrined in European law under the Digital Markets Act), and I celebrate jailbreaks as a means of liberating users from oppressive vendors. That said, I cannot help but smile at the fact that console hacks are almost always exploited from the web browser these days. If you need more proof that the web is a bloated, complex platform which is impossible to secure, then here you have it.
> (a right which may soon be enshrined in European law under the Digital Markets Act),
That only applies to a handful of companies, no? And even then, the gatekeeper can take "appropiate measures to protect the integrity of the operating system".
i mean that's just part of the exploit chain, looks like sony probably didn't keep the kernel up to date either. a browser is just the easy starting point bc it's a widely-understood piece of open source code an attacker can use.
While I applaud people being able to use their hardware the way they want to, I know that this inevitably leads to rampant cheating and will ultimately ruin games across consoles as most of the big games these days support cross play.
Could you elaborate please? PC players play on jailbroken (in a sense) machine. Why this "rampant cheating that will ultimately ruin games across consoles" did not happened already with jailbroken PS4?
> Could you elaborate please? PC players play on jailbroken (in a sense) machine.
Yeah, which is why if you go on subreddits for any major multiplayer game that supports crossplay between PC and consoles (like COD Warzone), you will see a lot of people recommending to turn off crossplay to avoid dealing with cheaters, because pretty much all of them come from PC.
I usually have no issues playing with crossplay enabled on release of a new game, but a month or so after, I end up disabling it most of the time for that exact reason.
PC games have these weird all-powerful anticheet detection software. I'm not sure what its doing, but its trying to catch bad actors. Slightly scary the permissions it uses. (I play a little fornite on my partner's pc occasionally).
That game (fort nite) seems to have interesting change in visuals, random NPCs walking around and different looking characters natively. I wonder how much of that is an attempt to tamp down on cheating.
Mostly because PS4 didn't get hardware hacked. All of the hacks were software exploits that could be patched before folks were able to leverage them to bring their consoles online with cheats. iirc it did happen a couple of times though.
>PC players play on jailbroken (in a sense) machine.
PC games also ship with anti-cheat. Why ship anti-cheat to a console that's supposed to be secure?
Is it because in a PC you can have other programs running in parallel that can look into/modify the memory bits of a running game and in the process “hack” it? But in a closed system like a game console you can’t just run your own unapproved software, which drastically reduces the number of ways a game can be “hacked”.
Because a jailbroken PS4 doesn't stay jailbroken with a reboot. The system's secure boot hasn't been broken. So a system update that fixes the exploit and requiring that firmware to go online is all that's needed to keep jailbroken PS4s out of online multiplayer games.
Breaking this would require an exploit in the bootloader.
Several games I play have implemented match making that allows you to play against only other console players. There are still soft/weak cheats, like recoil control and silly name-tag hacks, but the hard cheats, like aimbots, simply do not exist on consoles.
Windows is a gaming platform, as is Linux in a lesser degree.
So not more than already happens, and games can require anti-cheat software to be installed.
Anti-cheat is cancer and doesn't do much to prevent cheating anyways. The only way to prevent cheating is moderation, but that doesn't "scale" (even though every time you ban a cheater they have to re-buy the game and is actually a net plus)
I don’t agree. I think anticheat CAN do plenty. Many game companies don’t have the resources or care to build entire divisions around anticheat. Hardware bans are extremely effective when done right. Not many games do invasive hardware bans though.
It can, but usually doesn't do anything but make your system less secure. I'd have no problem with anti-cheat systems, but they by and large don't work.
Of course it scales if you allow dedicated servers run by a 3rd party admin, like TF2 or Factorio or so many games of the past. But most companies these days don't want to give up that control.
That's just the thing, it scales very well if you're only running first party servers for a _paid_ game.
Escape From Tarkov had a big issue with cheaters because they would farm ingame currency, then sell it for real cash (Real Money Trading - RMT). This was literally a job for these people. Everytime they got banned, they just bought another account (~40$) and kept farming. If a support person bans one such person per two hours (at a generous 20$/hr Russian salary), the company literally makes money off of cheating.
I get why Free To Play games have cheater issues (even though for example Fortnite is raking in cash), but for pay to play games, I just don't get it.
It depends on the anti-cheat systems. Some games are significantly easier to cheat in than others for rather obvious reasons. Anti-cheat has a very hard problem in that you're shipping your binary to an obviously-hostile environment where people will do anything and then some to get the upper hand.
If you attended Kernel and Hardware hacking courses at security trainings, you're likely sitting next to either some cheat developers, or some anti-cheat team members.
Aren't most anti-cheat systems basically rootkits? Mandatory anti-cheat sounds like the greater of two evils compared to walled-garden hardware. At least the latter is upfront about what you're getting.
Stadia implies a lot of work into virtualising PC games. I wonder if there's a world where that same tech could be used to deploy games as local VMs, where "anti cheat" is actually a hypervisor feature.
I hope you're right but I suspect the same anti-cheating measures can't work on PS5 and Xbox because I doubt those vendors give the low level of access required to make such tools work.
When the xbox360 was jailbroken a lot of games were immediately ruined, at least until Microsoft figured out how to ban modded consoles from online play.
Nintendo learned their lesson with the 3DS, where they *could not even detect* if you were playing a pirated game online.
You could also directly download any game from the eShop CDN witbout buying it (because the only authorization method was a key per game, not bound to a user, so freely shareable for modded consoles) until like a year before the eshop shut down.
Now with the switch they send tons of telemetry and ban at the first suspicious report. I haven't heard about non modded switches being banned though.
Switch jailbreak usually involves blocking Nintendo servers when booted into the modded OS to prevent bans (since CFW is not permanent on the switch for now)
"Often when the PS5 panics (at least in webkit context), there will be awful audio output as the audio buffer gets corrupted in some way."
Hmmm... when I bought the PS5, for a few days everything was fine. Then it started to have garbled sounds whenever It booted up. If I power cycle the monitor the sound issues disappear.
Couldn't bring it back to its normal state. Maybe just some quirks with the monitor... maybe someone is sitting inside my PS ;D. Monitor has no issues with the Xbox.
At least it's only on boot. My Xbox controller's headphone jack only produces garbled sounds. It also has the wobbliest headphone jack I've ever seen. No bluetooth headphone support even though the console transmits audio to the controller using bluetooth. The only other option to output audio is the HDMI-connected screen, but that disables volume controls. The volume controls that always take 10-15 keypresses to reach because it's the very last entry of the menu and the cursor can't loop around.
The dedication jailbreakers have to the craft is truly admirable. I remember back in the mid-1980s coming to the realization that the war between people trying to build copy protection and those trying to crack it was an unwinnable war. I thought this as I copied the latest version of CopyWrite so that I myself could just copy whatever program I wanted at the time.
I still can't buy the PS5 in my country. To me, Sony is dead. I've had every Playstation console from the start and have bought one within months of release, it has been almost TWO years now and still there's nothing. I'll never purchase any of their things ever again.
The pandemic was tough on the supply chain of many things, including consoles. Supply has been improving though my guess is next year it will be available in most stores. It is still on high demand they are selling all they make.
That kind of news always increase sales, so they can benefit from it if they damage control correctly, a new model is just around the corner, so it's all good i guess
Sony are already selling every unit they can manufacture, and many places still have waiting lists, lotteries or one-unit-per-customer limits on the PS5) even after raising the MSRP (which actually lowered the effective price to consumers by pricing less-efficient scalpers out of the business of scalping). Sales can't increase because they have no more PS5s to sell.
I wonder when companies will move to more adversarial tactics like banning accounts to try and stay ahead in the jailbreak arms race.
We’ve seen similar tactics for gaming anti-cheat purposes for quite some time. Companies like Tesla have threatened to disable services to discourage reverse engineering and software modification.
Companies do ban hackers [0]. For whatever reason it's never clear what triggers the bans however. It does seem likely bans only are used for those who go online, or submit spurious data to the services.
Still the reverse engineers, by and large, do not go online. If they update it's from a pre-downloaded firmware. So there is not much to ban.
My local Costco has had them for months. You have to buy it in a bundle with an extra controller and a game (and maybe a few other things), but it’s at MSRP for all those things.
Going through the hassle of wasting time and nerves to pirate games that are very cheap to get after a few months after release or in sales is beyond my comprehension.
This is Hacker News after all. Tinkering with stuff like this has gotten people into soldering, emulation, PCB design, low level coding, etc., which then gets you into software/computer/electrical engineering.
It's not just about saving 50 bucks every now and then. At least for some, it's about satisfying intellectual curiosity as well.
A bit off topic, but I recently bought my first Xbox (series x) after owning every generation of PlayStation since launch. There were 3 reasons I opted for the Xbox: availability, aesthetics of the device itself (in my opinion the new PS5 is hideous), and most importantly Xbox Game Pass.
I am amazed at the number of high quality games on there for a relatively small monthly fee. Buying one new game at full price is the equivalent of around 6 months of game pass. So for the same price I can either have 2 new games a year, or have access to hundreds of games.
Subscription services like that make piracy completely redundant. Game pass is spotify for games, and I haven't bought or pirated music since I started using spotify
With an active life it took me more than two years to reach 140 hours of gameplay in horizon zero dawn. I have enough games to play until I am dead and beyond.
Game pass is nice if you aren't picky about what games you play. But if you feel like playing a game that's not on game pass, you are paying for nothing.
The biggest benefit to Game Pass that is seldom acknowledged is having the same game library for everyone. My friend and I can play together with hundred of titles to choose from, without having to convince one another to spend money.
We like this so much we sent an older Xbox One to a third friend with the idea to get him to buy Game Pass so we can all play together.
I dread the end of this early growth period for Game Pass.
Microsoft is much better about backwards compatibility and preservation than Sony, too. I have a library of Xbox and Xbox 360 discs I can just put in my Xbox Series X and still play, often with improvements. I can even still buy many titles from those generations digitally and play them on my Series X.
Meanwhile, Sony's missing many landmark titles from two generations, and your only option for playing PS3 games on a PS5 is streaming.
"I have a library of Xbox and Xbox 360 discs I can just put in my Xbox Series X and still play, often with improvements."
Not to take away from Microsoft's achievement (and commitment) here, but of course much of that is dependent on remote servers to supply the necessary patches, or in some cases going so far as to just treat the original disc as a DRM dongle that enables an entirely image to be downloaded.
This is backcompat that allows you to play titles from the last twenty years right now, and that's still a huge improvement over anything Sony or Nintendo have done in the last generation or so [1], and reflects the degree to which Microsoft sees that as a killer feature of Steam. But it's not super likely that this will still work in another twenty years— the only archival-quality solution is keeping the old hardware working or hoping for the best with emulation.
[1]: But do note that a Wii U can natively play Wii games, and can be jailbroken to natively play Gamecube games, since all three systems are iterations of the same underlying platform. The launch versions of Nintendo's handhelds always supported at least one prior generation of game card/cartridge as well. And of course the initial "fat" SKUs of PS2 and PS3 could both play the generation of games immediately prior— and none of this required internet access.
AFAIK you cannot even use an Xbox for the 1st time without connecting it to the internet. PS on the contrary you can pop a game and it runs offline. But it seems they have been working on removing these constrains which are truly crucial for preservation in the future.
Indeed... So many PS3 games I missed out on because of Sony's negligence. They used to be better. The PS2 included PS1 hardware inside it. Early versions of the PS3 included PS2 hardware.
Cramming a PS3 on the PS4 made no sense, unless you wanted a 599 dollars console vs a 399 dollars.
PS3 had a shaky launch precisely for that reason, it launched at 599. The PS4 launched at 399 (a hundred bucks cheaper than the Xbox One btw and one the reasons it got a massive lead since the beginning)
Sometimes the game simply disappears from the store front but you can find it in your library. Sometimes it disappears from your library too, and you can request it via some process (https://delistedgames.com/get-your-games-back/). Sometimes you need to write the company in order to get a new key to whatever platform it is still available.
I looked at the games mentioned on the landing page and it's mostly online games whose servers are getting shut down. While that sucks and we should totally have the right to host our own servers without some asshole corporation C&Ding them, this isn't what I was talking about.
I have hundreds of video games. On steam I think it's over 200 titles. I can't tell if something I purchased ever disappeared from there. What I do know is I have lots of titles on my account that aren't sold on Steam anymore. Some GTA games with the original soundtrack, several EA titles that used to be sold on Steam once upon a time.
Is there a way to use this site to check my gaming accounts to see if I lost any games?
This is FUD, titles don't disappear from your Ps5 library when they get delisted.
If you buy a single player game digitally you should continue to have access to it for the life of the console as long as you aren't banned for doing something like disputing a credit card charge. (Which admittedly is a concern.)
Different provider (Steam) but related to your comment on disputing charges:
I returned a faulty game as is my legal right under UK law, Steam said they didn't allow that because they had their own much more restrictive rules. Eventually, I raised a PayPal dispute and PayPal choose to refund me (the amount was ~£1). They retaliated with restrictions to my account ... such restrictions as retaliation for fair exercise of rights granted by law is something that needs addressing.
I've noticed that game libraries, like Steam, now explicitly try to remove consumer rights with a click-thru pseudo-contract that directly contradicts UK law (roughly 'you give up rights to a refund'; whilst the Consumer Rights Act explicitly applies to digitally supplied goods).
Just thought this was a related point of note. Suppliers of intangible media have a little too much free rein.
There was a demo for a horror game called P.T. on PS4 made by Kojima. It got cancelled and the demo was eventually delisted from libraries preventing players from re-downloading it. The only way to play it is if you already downloaded it prior to delisting and never uninstall it. For a short while there was a way to download it via a web link, but Sony eventually shut that down.
It did disappear from your library, it just wasn't auto-uninstalled from your system. But you can never ever download/install it again. That's why systems that have it installed already go for so much money on eBay.
You are technically correct but I did write "if you buy a single player game digitally..."
Nobody bought P.T.
The Scott Pilgrim game was delisted on the Ps3 when the license expired, and I can still download and play it today. Being delisted just means new customers can't buy it.
There's no way Sony's terms of service allow developers to pull games from the library after purchase, that would be a remarkable business failure on their part given how much leverage they have in negotiating the TOS with developers.
If we’re talking about PCs you could buy an old office PC on eBay for $150 with a 7th gen Intel CPU and 16 GB of RAM and play a glut of low power games, retro emulators, etc. And if you’re willing to shell out another $150 for a 5 year old GPU you’ll be able to run just about any game, albeit on the lowest settings most of the time.
That's a very American view on prices. Multiply those by 10 for Brazil.
It's cheaper to fly to America and buy game consoles or PC hardware and fly back than it is to buy them in Brazil. Just be sure to hide your price tags from customs (or have a nice little bribe ready)
A stand, chain lube + cleaner, tubes+tube patch kit, chain brush, floor pump, chain drive tool, cable cutter and a set or two of wrenches/screwdrivers cost you more then a 200/300 euro switch plus at least one 60 euro game?
And you bought these? You didn't inherit all this stuff from your grandparents together with an "Oma fiets" or two when you born?
jokes aside, I do imagine that you might have more specialized tools. specially if you're working with some of the older sport bicycles that need love.
not really, e.g. music can be much cheaper to start (find an old guitar/digital keyboard) though get expensive if you want good instruments later on, i guess. sure ash cheaper than my shooting habit tho :)
True, to a degree. I won't ever pay 10-15€ for a 10 year old pc game but paying 1-3€ to have it in my steam library and not have to deal with wine/proton by hand is often worth it.
It's not just that, it's to enable emulation. I'm not sure how pirated games would fare anyway in an online world nowadays, but getting emulators running is very interesting to me.
In Bolivia when I was teen, I loved to go to the markets and buy pirated PS2 games. Each one would be about 10 bolivianos. (Around $1.50 ish?)
Without these pirated games myself and all of my friends and people I knew would not have been able to play games period. Imagine buying a $60 + import tax for ONE GAME on a Bolivian salary? Ludicrous.
I'm very happy the PS5 will finally open and allow gamers in third world countries to play. The PS3 and PS4 to my knowledge never had that freedom the PS2 did back in the day.
Also note that there are thousands of games that are free to play on PCs. There are even lots of old commercial games that can be downloaded for free now, legally.
Just because you can't afford a particular game doesn't mean that there aren't other options. As a teen I couldn't afford every game I wanted either.
I got a PS2 as the big birthday present. Back then the free PC games were KNIGHT online, gunbound, Gunz online, Tibia.... slim pickings. Today kids have Fortnite and such, I agree.
It is if you just don’t play current AAA games. I mainly do my gaming on a WiiU. Console and everything cost me $100 used. It plays pretty much every Nintendo game ever made short of the switch titles. Games are very cheap and of high quality.
A good table saw costs more than a gaming set up and it only does one thing. You will need more than one type of saw. You might need a planer, a drill press, a lathe. The list keeps getting bigger.
Or maybe you want to do machining(high end hobby), now you need a garage which will cost you ten thousands of dollars or you rent one for a hundred or maybe four hundred dollars per month. Then you need machines which cost more than 5k dollars and you guessed it, you will require multiple machines like that.
Not to mention you can buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 for about $150 on eBay with a bundle that includes dozens of game discs. These consoles are over a decade old but they still hold up fantastically well.
I don't know about you but I started programming because of Minecraft and learning about running a business by playing prosperous universe and this gave me some insights that make me suspect that money and it's non neutrality is the biggest unrecognised problem in economics. Remember economics 101 doesn't even have the concept of money or time. In fact econ 101 is an utopia that we want to reach, not how economics works in practice.
Positive reinforcement is worth more than people complaining that you are wasting your time by doing the wrong thing. People on HN say you should be curing cancer instead of building a factory in factorio. The former is a poorly defined multidimensional non linear search space with high chance of failure, the latter is a well studied problem with tutorials and guides. That is negative reinforcement.
Lots of hobbies are essentially "useless". The focus on being constantly "productive" seems toxic to me.
If you enjoy a hobby then it's not useless, enjoying it is the point of a hobby! So enjoy playing video games, growing houseplants, playing golf or whatever hobbies you have without feeling guilty about not producing as much as you could.
Eh, it depends. Every hobby has its benefits and its drawbacks.
I learned a ton of English, strategy, stress management, shortcut keys, programming and whatnot from games. Some games also took a lot of my sanity, sleep, relationships with living beings, etc. :)
Don't feel bad enjoying a hobby. The universe is your playground.
Maybe no shockingly obvious “improvements” but I’ve noticed friends and family who don’t game have a much harder time following the gps while the gamers usually have it on silent and glance every now and then with no issue. I bet there are a lot of mini things like that gaming improves.
Wait until you hear that some people don't even have indoor plumbing, 24h electricity and enough protein to eat, let alone extra income to waste on children's entertainment.
> PS5 User: hey can I install a SSH server on my PlayStation? > Sony: NOOOOOO YOU CAN'T DO THAT THAT'S' ILLEGAL WE'LL SUE YOU FOR VIOLATING TOS
> Steam Deck User: hey can I install a SSH server on my Steam Deck? > Valve: It's already included. Have fun.