Walfisz: PS3 could suffer more piracy than PSP

Looks like times are going to be tough for Sony in coming days.

With the PS3’s inner working laid bare, the system could face greater levels of piracy than those seen on handheld systems.

Martin Walfisz, one of the founders of Ubi Massive, told GI.Biz that without needing a specific mod-chip to run homebrew and pirated software, it’ll be very tough to detect which consoles have been compromised.

“If that hack works as reported, I don’t believe that Sony can regain any control,” Walfisz said. “They could try to employ a similar system to Xbox Live, so that people running hacked systems won’t have access to PSN. But Sony won’t be able to stop people from running pirated game copies as long as the machines are not hooked up online.

“And given that it seems that users won’t even need a hardware mod-chip to play pirated games, I don’t believe that Sony can even detect which users to lock out from PSN.”

He also warned that piracy levels on the PS3 are likely to climb to those seen on the PSP, if not further, considering the large install base of the system.

“They way the PS3 seems to have been hacked, it is now completely open. The hackers can create pirated copies that completely mimic the official Sony digital signature, making it extremely easy to use pirated copies of games, without the need for any hardware chip modifications.

“I would assume that pirated copies can be stored on the HDD as well, making it so easy to use that PS3 piracy, given time, might even surpass the handhelds.”

Sadly, he also informed that the only way for Sony to tackle this threat is to release new hardware, which he thinks won’t be happening anytime soon:

“I don’t think that they can do much. Once a console is hacked this completely, the hardware manufacturer can’t really do anything. They could maybe update their hardware for new console sales, which would be a long and expensive process, but that won’t stop users from running pirated copies on the current hardware. And updating the hardware needs to be done in a way that doesn’t prevent users from running already-released games. I doubt that can be done.”

He echoed that games console must constantly be connected to the internet if they wanted to remain secure and free from hacks.

There’s a lot more that he spoke about and Gamingbolt will be bringing you more on this soon.