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walsufnir on 27 October 2014
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sc94597 said:
walsufnir said:

It doesn't prevent it but it gives the owners more control over the machine and what it is able to do. Add to this that digital only is definitely an obstacle and not so easy to prevent, given some decent drm and encryption.

You are right that nowadays digital only is still a bit far away but bandwidth will increase and it is definitely what both Sony and MS want (and of course 3rd party).

I think by the time the industry goes fully digital, Sony/Microsoft will no longer exclude non-oem consoles and will provide either streaming services or a sort of software as their platform (a la Steam.) That essentially will make the now closed platforms -- open platforms and it will open up to more piracy, not less. Piracy will probably not be as rewarding though, because games will have more and more online content that depends on centralized servers. Of course, one can always play on "pirate" servers but that will limit install bases extremely. We are seeing more traditionally single-player games like Dark Souls (RPG) (i.e), having more and more online/social interactions, and that will be the death of piracy more than anything else in my opinion. That is a good thing for the homebrewer because it allows fewer obstacles to 'exploit' systems for unique homebrew applications and emulation. Piracy would actually work in the advantage of the publishers/developers, because it would act as single-player demos for players to test out their games and get hooked, and then want more through multiplayer/social content. 


Following the discussion from failoverflow regarding WiiU-hacks there is actually no need for homebrew on consoles anymore.

Especially as new consoles shift more and more to PC like hardware one can easily buy a cheap PC for emulation and stuff. There is no "coolness" factor nowadays to have an open source emulator ported to a console. Leaks nowadays would only lead to piracy and that's it, in my opinion. Not that it wouldn't be nice to have one box to do all your standard gaming stuff where you can also hook in your usb data for a rom or iso folder, though ;)