We’ve seen video game piracy all the time on PC, and even with really old systems with counterfeit cartridges. But what’s stopping people from doing that now?
I understand there’s security measures in place, and probably some form of encryption. But people have found ways to reverse engineer any console and mod it, so what’s stopping them from reverse engineering their encryption and burning their own discs for a legit console?
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TL;DR: Why can’t people just burn game data onto discs to pirate / duplicate them?
In: 4
On certain consoles like the Dreamcast, there was nothing stopping people from burning a copy. Piracy was utterly rampant on the system, and one of the factors that led to its demise.
For other systems, the discs actually contain a sector of data fairly close to the spindle hole. Commercial burners and blank media aren’t capable of writing data to this area of the disc, since it’s outside their normal specs. On the original PlayStation, what people used to do is insert a legit disc, and quickly swap it with the copied one. Was finicky, but you could avoid the copy protection checks that way. Later consoles used more sophisticated methods. These had to be bypassed by a “mod chip”. Modern systems use online authentication.
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