Please educate me about consoles and DRM

[Baldrake]

I really only play PC games. How do consoles do DRM? I know you typically have a disk and can't play without it. What's stopping people mass copying these disks? Yeah, how do consoles manage to be the DRM nirvana that makes publishers all happy?

[bhodi]

Proprietary drives, Proprietary media. They put all sorts of hard-to-duplicate-with-standard-blanks bits on the disk and make them readable from the drive.

There is also now central authentication via xbox live and such.

[Mrbloodworth]

Gone are the days of disk swapping =(

[Baldrake]

So how come there aren't factories in China that have reverse-engineered all this producing copies by the truckload? Sounds like it'd be enormously profitable for them, and China hasn't shown itself particularly excited about protecting publishers' copyright...

Gone are the days of disk swapping =(

What do you mean by disk swapping? Surely you can still lend your xbox disk to a friend to play on his machine for a bit? He just can't copy it, right?

[Yegolev]

Disk-swapping is a method of playing a duplicated disc by first booting one disc then putting in the copy.  Haven't done it myself.  The DRM on consoles is mostly thanks to proprietary hardware.  If you're not playing a game on the intended hardware, you are emulating and that generally sucks for newish software.

[bhodi]

So how come there aren't factories in China that have reverse-engineered all this producing copies by the truckload? Sounds like it'd be enormously profitable for them, and China hasn't shown itself particularly excited about protecting publishers' copyright...

There are. Go to any street vendor in china and you'll find copied games. (Er, Hong Kong.)

You can't get them around here due to logistics issues and also the fact that if you get too big the government comes and stamps you down. Small, local sellers are ignored but once you go global you're a menace.

[Trippy]

So how come there aren't factories in China that have reverse-engineered all this producing copies by the truckload? Sounds like it'd be enormously profitable for them, and China hasn't shown itself particularly excited about protecting publishers' copyright...

Consoles aren't popular in China (yet). Not much demand for pirated console titles over there.

[Mosesandstick]

The biggest markets for pirated console games are the technologically advanced SEA countries. Singapore used to be a haven, but thats all been removed. You can still get them but they trickle through Malaysia. Malaysia has been cracking down but their main crackdowns have been on pirated movies (guess why? America + lobbies, yay!). Thailand is a haven for pirated console games as is Hong Kong. You can get pirated games in China but the market isn't that big.

[NiX]

So how come there aren't factories in China that have reverse-engineered all this producing copies by the truckload?

What Bhodi said plus it's much cheaper to burn from home. Consoles aren't a DRM nirvana. I'll put it this way, my roomie and I only used the original GTA4 disk to beat the last 2 missions of the game and we've been playing Rock Band 2 for almost a week and a half. Console DRM is just as useful as PC DRM and the LIVE verification is easily passed with "stealth" patches that most 360 ISOs have pre-patched onto them.

[Mosesandstick]

You do mean burn an ISO or whatever on to a disc yeah?  You have a modded console?

As someone mentioned earlier, manufacturer's put a lot of funny stuff on discs that make them really hard to be copied by at home.

[NiX]

Yes and yes. We've never had a problem.

[Jimbo]

Back in 1990, when I was stationed in the Phillipines, down town Angeles City was where we could get US Nintendo games and Sega Genesis pirated for the system.  You could get your choice of games crammed onto the stick, it was pretty cool, but pirated as hell.  They also had things where they would make cassette or Cd's for you (which were pirated too).  Haven't been back, so not sure if they still have the wild buying and selling like they used to in that town.

[Azazel]

So how come there aren't factories in China that have reverse-engineered all this producing copies by the truckload?

What Bhodi said plus it's much cheaper to burn from home. Consoles aren't a DRM nirvana. I'll put it this way, my roomie and I only used the original GTA4 disk to beat the last 2 missions of the game and we've been playing Rock Band 2 for almost a week and a half. Console DRM is just as useful as PC DRM and the LIVE verification is easily passed with "stealth" patches that most 360 ISOs have pre-patched onto them.

I know 360 DRM was defeated long ago. no idea on PS3. You have a 360?

[NiX]

Technically I do. My roommate has two: Modded one and an elite.

[Baldrake]

I'm still not quite getting this. It looks like 360 games are delivered on DVD's in standard ISO format. But something in the 360 firmware is able to differentiate (via some kind of check) between an original DVD and a copy. Mod chips seem to replace the 360 firmware with a different version that doesn't do the check.

Is this the basic idea? Can anyone elaborate?

[NiX]

I don't quite know what the mods do actually. I know they're done to the DVD drive and nothing else. There's no chip like the original XBOX mods.

[Fordel]

I'm guessing the most pirated console was the Original PlayStation. You'd take your system to your local electronics/gameshop, pay the dude like 10 bucks to install the chip and off you went. You have a burner? Grats you're a high seas pirate yaarrr!

So ridiculously easy.

[Azazel]

PS2 was/is exactly the same.