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
There’s a few different DRM schemes out there but a lot of them rely on leveraging unique hardware – like Freddy’s example with discs having data where consumer-grade burners physically can’t reach.
Another scheme I remember hearing about is encrypting the data on the disc and then creating a custom chip that holds the decryption key. A “legitimate” company can buy the chip and integrate it in to their appliance but unapproved companies could not. IIRC this was how DVD piracy-protection worked in the early days, until someone reverse-engineered the key which allowed unauthorized parties to start reading the discs.
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