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Dec 4 / Ozymandias

PS3 Blu-Ray and Game Discs being Ripped

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A few of you dropped me mail asking what I thought about the recent news that people have found ways to rip Blu-Ray and PS3 Game discs. Frankly, there's not that much to say. I was personally pretty wary about the ability of the PS3 to protect content due to its relative openess (ie, the ability to update firmware from memory cards, burned media, etc) as well as the ability to run an alternative OS such as Linux. Lots of potential security holes there, and it looks like people wasted no time in exploiting them.

Interestingly, a few folks thought I'd be happy about this (as I work for the competition), but that's simply not the case. I wrote months back about some of the problems with modchips and piracy; those issues still stand in my opinion. Sony is now going to be in an ongoing battle with hackers, updating firmware more often than they might have had to before (adding risk of issues/bugs), and quite likely losing software sales. That, in turn, can help depress industry investment in games for all platforms (as there is less income coming in to fund future development overall). This can also impact the likelihood of other forms of digital content coming to the platform – after all, what movie/music/game provider wants to see their content pirated? Today it's somewhat understandable that all PS3 Marketplace content is from Sony and/or first party. It's launch, after all. Six months from now, a lack of third party content will be a big red flag.

One can argue the cracking of the PSP helped contribute to its current decline (as well as the lack of ongoing quality games – there's just not much there). The good news is that no one has been able to execute a ripped game or play a ripped movie yet on the PS3. You may think it odd, but I'm hoping for all our sakes this doesn't happen for some time to give the entire next-generation ecosystem some time to mature. (For the record, I know it'll happen at some point as it does on all hardware platforms – we're not naive here.) But this sort of crack this early is pretty disheartening.

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  • it wont affect quality of first party games though

    btw, has 360 been hacked in public yet???

  • a

    How is the 360 standing up to piracy thus far?  My impression is that it is standing up well but it would be great to hear more.  

  • Joseph

    The disk have been ripped but, from what I understand Blueray has an extra level of protection that prevents the media, movie or game, from running.

    Is this much different from ripping a pure .iso image of an xbox360 or wii game?

    Honestly DRM isn’t my thing.

  • Jason

    The 360 has had custom firmware created that alters the DVD drive to enable it to play burned games.  That is one of the biggest problems with the 360 being regular DVD… everyone has a dvd burner and the capabilities to rip/burn games.  Trying to burn a copy of a bluray game you ripped is going to be a challenge for quite some time.

    And this post wasnt an attempt to educate people on how to pirate the 360, it was simply a response to an earlier question regarding the 360 and its current state of piracy.

  • Andy

    The first XBox 360 game was ripped the month after the console launched, and the console was announced hacked in March. There has been some recent news articles regarding a modchip too. I just did 1 minutes googling.

    No different than the PS3 really, and I agree that it is not necessarily good for the industry. Realistically, the manufacturers just need to make it difficult for the majority, as there will always be those who take the hacking as simply a challenge, and wouldn’t be customers anyway.

    Its funny that the music industry and the movie industry have continued to flourish despite the many readily available methods of recording them with multiple media formats though :o )

  • Aedrin

    "Its funny that the music industry and the movie industry have continued to flourish despite the many readily available methods of recording them with multiple media formats though :o )"

    You have to remember that a music CD or DVD does not cost $50-60. And with music CDs you can sample before you buy.

    For me, few games have been worth buying at the full price. I usually wait until the price drops to $30 or less.

    For handhelds the situation is different. I usually have no problem paying 30-35 for a DS game, because most games I buy are worth that. The problem with these is that recently games have been coming out at $39.99 which is starting to hit the limit. I think this is really creating a bad situation, and may have been part of the reason why the PSP did not do as well, since most games were $40 to begin with.

  • Chris

    Right, the data has been ripped, but this isn’t the same as breaking the copy protection. Right now, you can "rip" PS2 game discs, but you can’t play them without some way of bypassing the copy protection in the console. Similarly, you could "rip" DVD movies, but until the DeCSS code was released, you couldn’t play back the movies. So right now, people can grab a 20+ GB data file of the Blu-Ray movie, but you can’t do anything with it yet.

  • Porktree

    Piracy aside, I think that open platforms are better than closed ones.  As some one that chipped my xbox so that I could add a larger hd and play media from my pc and put in a dvd drive that worked all of the time I’d have loved to have a functioning unit out of the box. Similar to the craptastical way ipods force the use of itunes instead of just letting you drag and drop mp3′s to your mp3 player, forcing only one data path is a hinderance I don’t care for.  

    And, isn’t it amazing how the open hardware interface of the pc has stopped all development of good games on the pc…….not.  Closed systems are handicapped and that is never good for the consumer.

  • Anonymous

    Re: "And, isn’t it amazing how the open hardware interface of the pc has stopped all development of good games on the pc…….not.  Closed systems are handicapped and that is never good for the consumer."

    Have you even looked at PC game retail sales over the last five years? They’re down… significantly. And piracy is one of the primary reasons… and also a reason publishers are moving to console development.

  • Aedrin

    "They’re down… significantly. And piracy is one of the primary reasons…"

    What information is this based on?

    I think it has to do with a lack of stable and interesting games.

    I think the primary reason is that it is easier to develop for a console considering the limited hardware configurations. Thus it takes less money to develop the same title.

    I wouldn’t say that piracy is the main reason though.

  • Kosher Infidel

    Re: "I think the primary reason is that it is easier to develop for a console considering the limited hardware configurations. Thus it takes less money to develop the same title."

    Limited?  Not really.  Stable is more like it.  Companies enjoy knowing that every system will have the same capabilities and therefore they can calculate sales figures and relative success.  With a PC, you never know who has what MOBO, what GPU, how much RAM, what type of RAM…it goes on and on.

  • Anonymous

    Re: ""They’re down… significantly. And piracy is one of the primary reasons…"

    What information is this based on?

    I think it has to do with a lack of stable and interesting games.

    I think the primary reason is that it is easier to develop for a console considering the limited hardware configurations. Thus it takes less money to develop the same title."

    This information is based on years of conversations with publishers. I can’t give you specific names or details, but it’s a known issue and concern to the industry. :(

    However, I do agree that a benefit of console development is the single, stable platform – that does help a great deal.

  • Tuomas Salo

    What do you think about the not-so-recent news that people have found ways to rip Xbox 360 game discs?

  • Joseph

    Chris-

    So this isn’t anything you couldn’t do with a blueray drive on a PC.

    That doesn’t sound like a very big deal.

  • Anonymous

    Re: "What do you think about the not-so-recent news that people have found ways to rip Xbox 360 game discs?"

    It’s a bummer. But no one expects hardware to be bulletproof forever. And there’s still plenty of protection left, so all-in-all, not feeling too bad.

  • ExTester

    Piracy will be a big problem with open systems like PCs or the PS3(once they get it running).

    Its seems not long ago that Doom3 was released and look how much money was lost with all the pirated copies. They were able to accurately track which distrobution network was the best. It was between USEnet(newsgroups) and BitTorrent. It was published in numerous magazines. iD games lost millions in sales.

    Then you have the whole case of Half-Life2 source code being released that pushed development back even further. I’m sure they were thinking, why are we developing for a community thats wanting to screw us over?

    What about Ubisoft and the lawsuit because they used a Russian company(Stardock?) anti-piracy software to protect their games?

    When developing for a closed platform, there are a lot more perks to develop for it rather than an open platform. Think about it. Higher return on investment, lower software piracy rates, smaller hardware specs to troubleshoot, etc.

    I’m just curious though.. I mean if developers get wind that the PS3 is easily hackable. Why bother developing for it, especially with its low marketshare? It just translates to investors as a console that has "the potential" for an even lower attach rate.

  • Sean

    Piracy is rampant on the 360 at the moment, with Microsoft seemingly unable to put a stop to it with the dashboard update

    Need to get a grip soon because if the PS3 stays relativly secure then it may become the platform of choice for developers/publishers

  • Englishman

    Isn’t Blu-ray security going to be as much on the hardware (by which I mean television) side as on the player’s? I’m asking from a relatively naiive (note the spelling of the word Ozymandias! lol) viewpoint. OK, so this doesn’t apply to games as much as movies, but it’s my two cents’ worth after all…..

  • Porktree

    Extester said:

    "Its seems not long ago that Doom3 was released and look how much money was lost with all the pirated copies. They were able to accurately track which distrobution network was the best. It was between USEnet(newsgroups) and BitTorrent. It was published in numerous magazines. iD games lost millions in sales."

    Did you play Doom3? It didn’t sell because it lacked innovation, game play was rote, the online system was awful and it had nothing going for it but graphics – a nice little suckfest that I regretted buying.

  • ExTester

    @ Porktree..

    Yes I played Doom3 and I know it left a lot to be desired. But your missing the point completely. There was a huge demand for Doom3, and all the demand would have generated a lot of sales. Even if the game sucked, they would have made a lot of money off of it just from people buying it the first week. But since it was pirated, they lost a ton of money. And thats more or less the point.

    I mean there are pleanty of games that come out for consoles and they just plain suck. But that doesn’t change the fact that console games will not suffer from a situation as in Doom3 where there was rampant piracy goes on..  

  • JackFetch

    I knew piracy would be a problem when they put Linux on the PS3. The ability to run a second OS was just stupid. Add to that suing import companies out of existence and they are creating their own piracy problems.