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fillet on 01 May 2013
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BaldrSkies said:

Video games are luxury items, not necessities to life, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to get it for free (unless the developer provides it as such). Piracy is nothing but a false sense of entitlement among spoiled brats and misguided individuals.

Like fillet said above though, one needs to distinguish between pirates and "hackers". I think the better word would be homebrewers. There are enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in simply opening new possibilities on closed hardware, running Linux, adding new features, and creating their own programs. Unfortunately this also opens the Pandora's Box to be abused and run pirated software as well. Homebrewers are also far outnumbered by pirates. The average pirate doesn't care about these things, and usually has minimal technical knowledge. The only feature they care about is "duz it run free gamez".


Very true.

IF you take the PS3 which was opened up somewhat for "free gamez!!!" + homebrew about 2-3 years ago. This breach was plugged after 6 months by Sony so that only consoles on 3.55 or below could be hacked and access to PSN wasn't possible, games needed about 3.55 couldn't be played as it wasn't hacked entirely.

Eventually a device called TrueBlue was released which allowed pretty much all games to be played even ones above 3.60, but it was a highly monetized device, the actual code used was sold to a chinese company which exploited it for mass commercial piracy, it was different to this hack in that the hack was on the software level and the device was simply a con to make money - This is obviously immoral.

Eventually, other more moral hackers released the keys for the later firmware and the whole base LV0/LV1 of the PS3 in a direct attack at the makers of TrueBlue, effectively ending this commerical piracy. It's well known that these hackers had a small inner circle and had these LV0/LV1 keys for 2 years or so. This happened about 9-10 months ago, so now it is possible providing you have a hacked PS3 to play any game and connect to PSN.

This was a genuine move by hackers to swap one bad thing for something else that isn't as bad. Taking it from commerical piracy (same as what this Wii-U device will be about) to per user piracy with no monetry gain.

These hackers are more against piracy than anyone would believe here on VGChartz and even I think they take a line that is a bit draconian in terms of controlling what people do, they on occasions make the odd post to the effect of fuck all pirates and talk in a rather megalonaniac type way. Even so, they do firmly believe in just wanting to open stuff up for fun.

It does really annoy me though with people labeling "hackers" as the bad guys, sure they aren't exactly a shining example of ethical perfection but they aren't in it for the piracy. The end users are the ones responsible for that. People also need to understand that there's a massive difference between commercial piracy which this device will allow, as in people are making money from a device than the piracy end users indulge in on the PS3 currently.