If you grew up in Mexico or in any Latin American country, sure at some point in your life you lived with pirate games for consolessince these could be found almost in any tianguis.
dare I say that many of us find in this illegal market the only way to know those titles that we now love so much, because their prices were affordable for the average salary that our parents earned.
To date, there is still talk of piracy in PC titles, but have you ever wondered Why aren’t there pirated games for consoles anymore?
The colorful piracy stalls
The last time I came across a blatant sale of bootleg titles at a swap meet was when the xbox 360 and playstation 3 were still breathing and they were just beginning to fall to their successors.
In one of the many posts dedicated to gaming there were shoeboxes full of games arranged alphabeticallyall inside plastic bags that stood out for having the covers printed with a minimum quality.
The famous “clones” they had another deal and were placed on the walls. They came in their hard box and the print was a bit better, but their origin was still noticeable when you looked at the back and you came across images of a Bugs Bunny or dealers’ marks.
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These types of scenes became more strange as the PS4 and Xbox One began to gain ground, as they included some locks that made it easier to block fake copies.
Why are there no more physical pirated games for consoles?
In 2013 they hit the market PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, consoles that changed the characteristic DVD player for a new technology that then began to sound more and more. The blu ray.
Sony had already included it in the PS3so it had a bit more protection, but with the release of its successor several things changed.
To begin with, the famous Cinavia system, which hid watermarks and steganography (secret messages) on discs. The consoles could detect them and check them against the recorded information to determine their authenticity.
This system it only worked with movies and put a stop firstbut stopping pirate games was more difficult.
The developers’ trick to find fake copies
When creating a Blu-ray, either recordable (BD-R) or rewritable (BD-RE), manufacturers add calibration datamanufacturer information, the type of disc and even the tracks included. The reader can identify their presence and determine through them if it is a legal copy or not.
To provide an extra security lock, bad sectors are added directly from a master disk castwhich are fixed by inserting them into the console.
When a Blu-ray is copied from a source other than the original, this corrupted data is not carried overso its apocryphal origin is identified by its perfection.
If this wasn’t enough, unique marks called “Rom Marks” are createdwhich prevent the making of copies.
As you can see, this series of processes makes it very difficult to make pirated copiesbut they do not eliminate it completely.
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There are ways to hack consoles and even reverse engineer corrupted sectors. to get them to run correctly, but it’s very cumbersome, and maybe impossible to make it profitable with physical copies.
We will always mention that resorting to piracy is not a good optionsince you put your security in the hands of strangers, who you let install anything on your PC.
It’s difficult, but it’s always better to save money and recognize the work of the studios that put their hands to work to bring us such impressive works.
It’s still possible to find the occasional booth with PS3 or Xbox One titles, but they’re pretty rare and not as crowded as they used to be.
Have you seen a stall with pirate games lately? Tell us in the comments and Follow us on our social networks.
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