Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in.
https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848
https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448
The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.
I wonder if you really even need to hack the console. It might be easier to, say, subvert Rockstar's supply chain to put some code in the next GTA that spent a few cycles doing whatever botnets need to be doing.
They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care.
The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
TPM designs that protect against such an attack will become a commodity reducing the cost to include it onto a console. Every desktop, phone, laptop, tablet, microwave, fridge, server, etc will all need TPMs. The demand and scale exists for this to become cheap over time.
You can't read it without breaking it.
That's the part I'm sad about - that we won't get emulated games that look and feel better due to faster hardware in the future. Money isn't an issue for me.
I wasn't buying something that was trying to nudge me into spending another $400 on different pixel colors, or worse, different characters, abilities, or effects.
Modern video games have adopted techniques used by the gambling industry to trigger essentially addiction, because game companies prefer 3 whales to a thousand happy individuals buying the game a single time and playing it forever happily.
Because they were not satisfied with making a million dollars off a video game. That wasn't enough money.
Nobody said that.
> though in a third world country you probably aren't entitled to basic necessities either
I think you should travel more before writing that kind of comments.
And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.
With digital distribution, you still pay the full price, but your copy is "single-use" in essence. You're never getting any of that money back. And, the only way to buy games digitally is "new" for that full price.
And wallet and income of the consumers in region X of the world do not stretch magically because game companies in region Y decide to invest more on games. It is not that simple.
Well, even the PS4, actually [1].
Except it's usually not pirates who find these exploits, rather curious tinkerers that want to unlock the full capabilities of the hardware that they own. The pirates / script kiddies usually come in after the groundwork has already been laid by these true hackers. E.g. the people who hacked the Switch in fact condemn piracy and any discussion of it on within their communities will lead to an immediate ban.
I'm proud to say that I've hacked my Switch, but have never pirated anything on it. An impressive homebrew scene has formed around the console, which has produced gems such as Mission Control, allowing you to seamlessly pair third party controllers. I use it with my PS4 controllers.
Pirates will always find a way, the Nintendo Switch had all the countermeasures you mentioned, the latest revisions also have a patched bootloader but someone figured out that they could still boot a custom firmware via power fault injection on the SoC.