pory

GTA-specific work can’t start until the emu devs have GTA to work with. In the long run, emulating a game that’s getting a native PC release is not going to be an important part of emulating PS5 as a platform. In the short run, the emulator won’t have GTA before Rockstar releases its native PC release, this idea of “lol pirate the ps5 game to punish rockstar for delaying the PC game” is juvenile fantasy.

Backports work because the 13.4 firmware (or whatever wolverine needs) has been exploited. The encryption keys that are part of 13.4 have been dumped and extracted using that exploit, so now you can tell your 4.0 ps5 to tell Wolverine to “decrypt the game with this key” and it’ll do it. If GTA needs 14.0 keys, you won’t be able to do that until someone cracks 14.0 and dumps the key. You could give GTA the v13.4 keys just like Wolverine, but GTA doesn’t decrypt with 13.4 keys.

Similarly, pirates can create decrypted dumps of games (I don’t know about ps5 but definitely on other consoles) by passing the key through during the dump process. That still requires having the key though, and getting the key means exploiting the firmware that distributes that key.

This is how every game on PSN or discs for PS5 works. Disc copies are usually a month or so behind ‘latest’ due to pressing time. The last big ps5 release keyed to a vulnerable firmware is Marvel’s Wolverine.

Piracy on PS5 is always a game of catch-up. Exploit a ps5 firmware and you can pirate anything keyed to that firmware or older, but you can’t pirate (or buy) anything newer without updating the console and losing your exploit. Eventually, newer firms get exploited and the “pirate range” gets expanded. But new exploits take a lot of time and effort to find and it gets harder every time a vuln gets “burned” - I don’t think the GTA firmware will be solid forever but it’ll almost certainly last long enough that the game’s PC version will be out.

Currently PS5 emulation won’t be able to play GTA6 regardless of how good the emulators get. The actual game is going to be encrypted with keys for the latest ps5 firmware. Currently there is no known exploit for that firmware version which means there’s no way to decrypt and dump the GTA6 game files for use in an emulator (or for use on a piracy-enabled ps5).

You’ll see a fair amount of misinformation about this. The most common claim is “something something this is why no disc” but even if GTA6 was coming out on a disc, the game would be encrypted against the exact same keys the download version is so would-be pirates would still be waiting for a latest-firmware PS5 exploit.

Honestly it’s one of the few scenarios I did consider at the start. On the one hand, your megacorps like Disney (for example) absolutely want to replace human artists with slopbots. On the other hand, Disney does not want Joe Rando to be able to type “make me a Spiderman comic” into the slopbot.

Personally, my favorite thing about GOG is that I don’t need a client at all. I can access my whole GOG “library” without a storefront launcher app installed on my computer. Since I keep the installer files backed up, I don’t even need to sign into an account. If I wanted a storefront/launcher app in between me and the games, Steam is a better one. GOG is for launcherless DRM-free games.

Yeah, the ease and safety (and incredibly good/available guides) of piracy on 3DS made it so a lot of kids/noobs got in during the freeShop days and just kind of expected piracy to always be that easy. “Actually finding and having a reliable source for the game files” is always the actual hardest part of piracy, but freeShop kids never had to do it.

As soon as the first proof of concepts showed up (a command line PC tool that generated CIA files from a key pair, followed by CIAngel which did it directly on the 3DS but still needed an installation step via another app) it was only a matter of time until someone Frankensteined the open source CIAngel and FBI together and slapped a cute browse UI and json parser on top. Thus freeShop was born.

The 3DS was already thoroughly pwned before freeShop, but pirates still had to actually use a yucky computer to download yucky “files” to do their thing. FreeShop opened up piracy to a new level of tech-illiterate user, and when Nintendo closed the gaping security hole those pirates that didn’t know what a .cia file actually is were left floundering. That was the scene that inherited Switch piracy. Dozens of competing closed-source “shops” that all used their own proprietary databases to pretend to be freeShop. Paid piracy apps. All so that users wouldn’t have to plug in their microSD card (later, the Switch itself via USB) to pirate games. Traditional “download the file from a torrent or trusted HTTP source and then put it on the SD and install it” piracy was always possible in the “shops” era.

This headline is bad. It implies that moderating a piracy subreddit is why this dude got sued. This guy hosted direct HTTP downloads of Nintendo ROMs.

Bit of piracy history: for a long time on the 3DS, Nintendo’s shop system was bugfucked. If you had a valid key pair, you could download games directly from Nintendo’s servers and that keypair wasn’t tied in any way to your console or account. That means one buyer could “share pirated games” by posting a couple 32-digit codes they got.

This led to an on-3ds app called “freeShop” that handled a community database of valid keypairs and used them to download and install pirated games directly from Nintendo’s servers.

After Nintendo patched the system and disabled the freeShop, pirates had gotten used to the convenience of on-device downloads and installs. A very common type of piracy app, especially on the Switch, is “pirate shops”. The user would still be able to pirate on the console directly, but the backend is a traditional server sending actual dumped files (rather than fooling Nintendo into delivering the files directly).

These pirate shops are fundamentally the same thing as hosting/connecting to an open server full of roms. The guy in this lawsuit was operating multiple pirate shops. The whole thing with internet piracy is accountability: you’re not gonna get away with a google drive link to Avengers Endgame Dot MKV for long.