PS5 Relapse Exploit | Hacker News Reader

PS5 Relapse Exploit

github.com

345 pointstherepanic238 comments

Can I use this to make backups of my game saves to USB?

Being somewhat naive to the gaming scene, I only recently discovered that the PS5 prevents you from backing up your game saves to your own physical media - something that was possible on the PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4.

Instead, you have to subscribe to PS Plus and enable cloud backups - and you need a separate subscription per user profile.

I only discovered this after my daughter lost a year of work in Minecraft due to data corruption, and I tried to teach her the value of backing up.

The PS5 may be my last console.

If things continue they may be everyone's last console. The next gen might effectively be a video player and controller interface for content rendered outside of your home. No physical games (or saved game backups) at all under this scheme, of course.

I've been saying this for years. These companies don't want you to own the compute hardware. They just want to flash the colored pixels in front of you.

Its true that owning hardware is really important especially at an age where privacy is becoming more and more critical. But the truth is hardware on the cloud is more efficient, it would allow devices to be literally be a screen and a wifi card, you can do anything anywhere. All consumer software is just colored pixels in front of you. To 90% of the planet a truly fast cloud streamed UI would be some much more capable and convenient. With generative AI more and more of our interfaces will also be generative. As the way we input things to most of our devices is literally pressing a location on flashing pixels, best experiences will naturally be optimized around a good screen and connection and that's just the nature of evolution for software being data <-> presentation medium

The main problem with cloud streamed is latency, and the other is fuck the cloud.

I, and probably a lot of the people here, spend so much time on the PC that every additional msec annoys me. If there's keyboard shortcut, then I'll learn it to avoid using the mouse.

Windows being a bloated slow mess even when run locally means that using it remotely all the time would be like torture.

I'm sure dealing with the 4k60 videos from my cameras would be a world of pain on the cloud too.

I don't need or want to pay a subscription for the tool I use for hours a day, with no advantages beyond vendor lock-in.

You need a computer either way... remote is basically all negatives when compared to local.

You are probably correct about 90% however.

90% of people are pretty ignorant about how their computers work, or how to use them more efficiently. They line up like lemmings to lose autonomy over their devices and pay subscriptions in exchange for the barest crumb of convenience.

One has to be naive not to understand that the whole cloud computing model is nothing else than being back at the timesharing days.

The big difference is the hardware evolution, now the rooms are full of server racks with sliding pizza boxes, and the terminals are prettier.

Ask Google, Microsoft or Nvidia why it's not in fact the future of gaming. You need to be rich enough to have fast internet and pay an expensive subscription yet poor enough to fail to afford a GPU at home, all while accepting low bitrate and high input latency. It's not a large addressable market.

Stadia played Cyberpunk at max settings when none of the home systems could do it. I played it on a Retina iPad, and thought it looked fantastic.

I've heard people play Fortnite Festival (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive) over Microsoft/Amazon cloud streaming.

"low bitrate and high input latency" is what you'd expect rendering offsite, but in practice, it seems to work surprisingly well.

I tend to think that Stadia (like many things Google) was killed before its time.

It didn't seem any worse than cloud gaming on Xbox/PS Now/Luna/Nvidia/etc.

> (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive)

I contest that rhythm games are the least latency sensitive. You'll automatically adjust to (consistent) latency and not notice it. You also don't get much feedback unless you miss a note.

Festival tells you how far off you are in milliseconds, and gives you extra points for perfect timing.

But that's still not an across the wire latency.

Also super fast loading times. Playing e.g. RDR2 on a physical console, by comparison, is painful.

Stadia worked absurdly well. One of the beta games was Thumper, a demanding rhythm game (I might be the reason why it was in the beta lineup actually). How well did that work out? Well, the latency made it hard to play... until I switched my TV to so-called "gaming mode". And then it was fine.

No kidding. The TV was introducing more latency than Stadia itself.

I also once tested it on hotel wifi. It worked great.

(Mind you, this was in Europe. YMMV.)

The business model however was terrible and killed the product IMO. Which, honestly, good: Stadia would have killed video game archiving efforts. If a publisher folds and Stadia and similar platforms stop streaming its streaming-exclusives, then those games are gone. Not worth it, no matter how well it worked.

yeah i felt so dumb with how constantly bad in home streaming was for me with latency and i just could not pinpoint the issue until one day i swapped my tv into gamemode and boom..... felt like i was playing on my desktop

Even if it worked for some games and users - this still demonstrates the fatal flaw of cloud gaming. Total vendor lock in and no user control.

If they decide one day to fuck you over, there is nothing you can do about it.

This is only a fatal flaw to you and me.

If Sony and MSFT decide to go down this route and it's the only way to play blockbuster games, it'll happen whether we like it or not because the market cares far more about playing the latest game than it does maintaining control over its own destiny so to speak. Very few consumers will eschew the Latest Thing and just happily play older games on their own PC (or console) to make a point to the publishers.

I still thing that if you burn enough people there will be pushback.

Pushback like there was to making Office 365 or Adobe subscription-only? Or pushback like there was to Google mostly killing AOSP? Or pushback like there was to ads in Netflix & friends? Or pushback like there was to <pick a subscription service> price hikes?

You'll note that all those things are still there, and their competitors are either not there or not significantly bolstered by people disgruntled by those changes.

> If Sony and MSFT decide to go down this route and it's the only way to play blockbuster games, it'll happen whether we like it or not because the market cares far more about playing the latest game than it does maintaining control over its own destiny so to speak.

Maybe, or maybe it'll live a giant gap waiting to be filled in by a new competitor in the console market.

We have had very... different experiences with stadia. It was not at all useful gor low latency games..

It is not suitable for competition ranked players. The average player will stomp over high ranked players.

Most people are not competition ranked players, they’re people who like to play a few hours of a game now and again.

I played the entirety of Assassins Creed Odyssey on Stadia. It did works surprisingly well. Xbox cloud gaming also worked well for me. It's great for non competitive games.

I wonder if this will maybe change in the near future or possibly already has? With things like starlink and fiber internet and data centers everywhere absolutely packed full of GPUs it seems like one or two more big players will try at least and possibly succeed with this model.

I don’t know much about gaming GPU workloads and how they differ from LLM inference workloads, but I’m definitely rich enough to pay for an LLM subscription and definitely too poor to afford the GPUs it would take to get anywhere near that level of inference.

Gaming is less expensive and more latency-sensitive.

That makes sense. But is the price difference between doing it on home hardware versus cloud hardware less significant than it is for LLM inference? And if so, is it mostly because LLMs need much more VRAM (or more exotic memory architectures)?

Why do you need to have low bitrate?

There are lots of techniques to hide latency.

I don't get the thing about the GPU: even rich people don't necessarily want to bother with owning a GPU thing. And whether fast internet is expensive depends on where you live. Here in Singapore 10 Gbps fibre to the home starts at around 20 USD per month; and we are in a really high cost of living country (we usually topped charts of 'most expensive city to live in').

You're conflating internet prices with cost of living when it's almost entirely unrelated. You live in one of the more densely populated areas around, that is significantly more important. I pay more than $100usd for 100mb bonded DSL because there are probably fewer people in my county than a Singapore city block.

Well, the comment I replied to suggested that cloud gaming wouldn't work at all, because of these economics.

Thanks to your refinements, we know that remote gaming like this might not work for the hillbillies, but perhaps it might work in the centres of civilisation?

GeForce Now is doing much better.

Stadia had other issues beyond fast Internet, like asking a community focused on Windows/DirectX to add support for the Stadia/Vulkan stack.

At the last Stadia developers conference, a few months before it was killed, one of the talks was about doing something like Proton for Stadia.

EDIT: Here is the talk,

"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-N7wDCRohg

>You need to be rich enough to have fast internet and pay an expensive subscription yet poor enough to fail to afford a GPU at home

that sounds like a broadening market to me.

This has little to do with whether you can afford a GPU and everything to do with whether or not the publisher even makes the properties you want to play available on disc (hint: they won't).

Global access to high speed home Internet is growing not shrinking, there are plenty of ways to creatively manage latency especially when you control the endpoints, and at the end of the day the publishers can effectively force the transition by only making the latest blockbuster games available on the cloud model.

You and I will bitch and moan but the vast majority of consumers (really their parents who pay for them) will be happy their new console is small, light, potentially cheaper, and silent. No more boxes of games to store makes Mom happier. Eventually much of the hardware could be built into televisions from affiliated manufacturers so all you have to do is buy controllers and sign up for the subscription(s).

I still remember the outrage from Half-Life 2 requiring an internet connection to play due to the DRM. Similar arguments were made about games being rented instead of owned, objections about the internet requirement.

Stadia worked great for me on a typical 100Mbps cable connection in the US. Online multiplayer was okay with latency, not wonderful but not bad either.

I bet that would be great (for a specific subset of games). MMORPGs come top of mind.

It's never going to work. Why? Fucking physics. Unless games ACUALLY become glorified movies the latency makes multi-player games unplayable and many single player games.

With multi-player games you are running a local simulation and it gets resolved server side and then reconciled locally. This hides lag and works great.

You lose this with streaming. Latency is constant and total. It's just not realistic.

You lack imagination. There's plenty of techniques to improve perceived latency. Especially when you control the hardware at the edge.

You mention one great technique yourself already.

> You mention one great technique yourself already.

I believe their point was that this can't be done, since the "local simulation" is no longer running locally; it has to resolve & hide the latency _before_ it's transmitted to you, and you don't know what latency that frame will observe.

You can fake a lot locally with relatively little processing power.

For a slightly silly example, see what mosh is doing to hide ssh latency.

But... the frame is still being rendered behind a hop of latency? How does your local client fix a frame that was rendered on a cloud GPU once it arrives, to mitigate the latency of its arrival?

No I'm just actually technical not a larper so I know what I'm talking about. There is no technique for playing a YouTube video of a video game where your controls are streamed to the remote box.

> There is no technique for playing a YouTube video of a video game where your controls are streamed to the remote box.

What does this have to do with anything? Why do you want to restrict yourself to such an austere setting?

xbox 360 is my last console. disconnected 100% from internet. good times only

Yeah, like we don't have enough centralization, no control & force feeding already. No thanks, take your Minitel 2.0 and shove it.

Letting you backup saves to a USB deprives Sony the ability to sell this to you as a subscription.

For minecraft I'd suggest just installing steamos on an old laptop or something and sticking it behind the TV. It's a much better experience than game consoles, you can just do whatever you want.

Honestly, the steamOS environment is not perfect, but valve has made strides to make things compatible with almost everything under the sun and working hard on optimisation for all their peripherals.

For the previous poster, if they see this, it is to note that the java version will run natively but bedrock might require more fiddling...

The 360 was my last console for similar reasons. Everything became too coercive while offering less and less in return. Prior to the PS4/XBone generation, consoles were hugely subsidized - the hardware in consoles from that point onward tended to be retail quality stuff sold at near cost to turn a profit on the hardware as quickly as possible. Before you knew you were kind of opting in to get screwed, but they at least had the common courtesy to give a reach around.

> I only discovered this after my daughter lost a year of work in Minecraft due to data corruption, and I tried to teach her the value of backing up.

Ouch, sorry for her loss.

Thank you. It was tough for her!

> The PS5 may be my last console.

I'm in agreement with this. I'll likely do some kind of Steam Machine or self-build version running SteamOS. Would lose some exclusives but I don't think they're worth losing my freedom. Paying the money for a computer that I can't actually use leaves a poor taste.

Like GP, I too have been on PlayStation since 1, had all of them on day one, and still have most of them, but PS5 is likely to be my last. I haven't played anything on it since Ragnarok, only my daughter (7yo) uses it occasionally to play Astro.

With Sony's recent moves combined with a lack of games I actually want to play (Laufey might be my last on PS5), I can't see my buying a PS6, particularly with no disc drive.

I have a gaming desktop that runs CachyOS and I game on Steam as well as an ROG Ally running CachyOS and a gaming laptop for my daughter to play Minecraft running CachyOS, as well a reservation for Steam Frame, awaiting my order email.

I'm going to go back to PC gaming, buying on Steam or GOG (DRM free) where possible, and encourage my kids (at least my daughter who's into gaming) in the same direction.

Sony's PlayStation division in particular is no longer about gamers, it's been coming for a while, so I think done with them.

You could buy another one used if they aren't ridiculously overpriced just so you can play exclusives. Airgapped, what runs runs, what doesn't run doesn't...

If we manage to keep the dev tantrums/planned obsolescence at bay, all you will need, if the game devs or game engine devs are competent, is a lean elf(glibc)/linux distro: a set of glibc libs (interwined with the system ELF loader), the vulkan loader, libasound, a wayland compositor, and related linux userland interfaces.

In the future, we can expect a much simpler file format to replace ELF for CPU executables and dynamic libraries (ELF is beyond obsolete and overkill on modern hardware achitectures and its complexity is source of many issues), and maybe pure and standard GPU hardware command instanciable ring buffers, but that's much further away in the future, as we "don't know yet" (but we do for CPUs), and we still could get GPU vendor specific hardware command instanciable ring buffers (it seems this how the PS5 works).

Yeah, at least since Steam Deck launched & especially with Steam Machine now also being available consoles really don't make any sense.

All the lazy complaints about "I want it to just work", "I don't want to build & maintain a PC" etc. really make no sense any more.

And arguably the breaking point has been much sooner, with the PS4 & Switch both selling you back commodity hardware (x86 APU with FreeBSD for PS4 & ancient NVIDIA Tegra for Switch), just totally locked down, user hostile & with overpriced games.

Just to start a list of consoles that only allow saving to a paid cloud service, I believe the Nintendo Switch is the same model:

https://www.nintendo.com/ph/support/switch/data_management/i...

Was also burned by this when the WiFi module on my switch died. Had to send it away to be repaired, whereupon they swapped the main board (including all my saved games!). But the only way to backup before sending it away was ... Via the nonfunctional WiFi to the cloud.

I am in no way justifying or defending Nintendo decisions or actions here, I just wanna point out that if it was only the Wi-Fi card and not the entire NIC then you could have put it in the dock or a USB laptop dock, and connected it to ethernet.

I would still prefer to copies to an SD card, but you had options potentially

Switch supports SUB-Ethernet adapters - could have used that to satisfy their stupid cloud requirement.

If I know anything about those communities, they sit on a bag of zero days and another bag of leads to zero days in the bootloader or whatever everjail they need to break out of.

I saw a post from someone who worked in the scene recently, seems they were someone famous. I don’t follow things so I’m not sure. Basically they were giving up because new people to the scene were just discovering things with AI and then immediately disclosing them to the world, allowing Sony to patch them before they really got used.

It sounded like things may have changed.

Might've been 'PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727627

I didn’t see it here, but I do believe that’s it!

Sucks for the hoarder, but that is indeed how bug bounties are supposed to work. The first reporter gets the payout, disincentivizing sitting on valid vulns.

I think the hoarder just wanted to have rooted PS5

Unfortunately the goal here wasn't to get the bounty, it was to keep it out of the hands of Sony who'll patch it.

The issue, as I understood it in this case was that he wanted it kept quiet until GTA6 launches, because announcing it to the public also announces it to Sony, and they'll patch it; normally that's fine, everyone just doesn't update, but given GTA6 is apparently quite popular, my understanding is that he wanted to let everyone get that one last update that allows GTA6 to run before they're stuck on that version.

That was my sense. It takes time to figure out how to use a bug as an exploit.

So normally if the community found this stuff I guess they’d work together to make a jailbreak. Maybe they already were working on that with bug X but hadn’t told anyone.

The JoeClaudeUser posts publicly “Hey everyone I found bug X over here! I’m awesome!”.

Now it can’t be used because Sony will fix it. If they had already been using it behind closed doors all that work is flushed.

That's exactly how I understand it, and from further reading, it seems Sony has now patched it already so it's game over.

Makes sense. In their position it would be stupid not to.

I bet my $5 they already knew about that exploit, but no one made "official" report it, so they can turn the blind eye.

"PS5 running Linux" was hot news months ago.

There's no logic to any of it, Sony can run LLMs too!

Yes. But that is work, time and money.

They don't want to sacrifice any of that.

While he's a legend in Vita and PS4, he's also reported many PS4/PS5 exploits to Sony before [0] [1] so I'm not really sure what his point is.

[0] https://hackerone.com/reports/826026

[1] https://hackerone.com/reports/1379975

Can you still access Sony's servers (e.g. to buy games, collect achievements, etc) on crackable versions of the system software?

I'd expect you'd have to play offline, which might be a nonstarter when the disc drive costs extra, and live service games are popular.

GTA6 will not have a disk release, which is why this is important for some people.

And people expect to have a decently working release from day1?

Not a big player myself, and I mostly play older game I can buy for less than $15 but every single time I have heard about a big game launch in the last decade, the games were released in early beta quality, crippled with bugs according to the tests and news.

You hear about them _because_ they launched in a poor state; not because _every_ game launches like this.

Yes; there have been some pretty high profile cases of games launching in terrible state, and Day 0 patches have become an industry standard, but acting like all (or even most) of big games launch like this is just sampling bias.

Plot twist: They're actually TLA staffers who don't want their backdoors burned.

Those highly valuable PS5 exploits for spying on foreign leaders?

Their kids' console will be on the home network if they don't have someone competent managing their security.

I noticed this exact flavour of frustration in the webOS jailbreak scene. Some newcomer proudly announced a vulnerability they found only to be met with hostility because it was seen as premature and unnecessary given there was already an existing jailbreak available that had yet to be patched.

Instead of being angry with people who publish exploits, they should be angry with Sony for patching the exploits or for locking down the console in the first place.

I am the customer, most people are customers, in an ideal world there would be customer protection laws serving us and not the content industry. But that is not how laws work. Realizing this actually radicalized me.

They should be angry at sony? wtf?

It's literally their job to keep their consoles safe, this is not just about piracy. A vulnerable console could do all kinds of stuff users don't want.

Then also piracy: The game industry is already struggling, good luck explaining that one of the rare non live service offline single player games (after all those are the games most hurt by piracy), which has been in development for years, didn't sell because you left a disclosed exploit wide open and now everyone loses their jobs.

It is just about piracy. Sony's repeatedly demonstrated they don't care about their users' safety (see: numerous high profile data leaks), and these bootloader exploits aren't the sort of thing a virus can exploit.

Sony is totally in their right to act this way, it makes business sense for them, and I would do the same in their position. Customers do benefit e.g. from working anti-cheat, subsidized consoles, offline play etc.

But does that mean I have to like it? No, of course not!

Would I prefer to have root on my own machines to do whatever I want with them, knowing that it conflicts with other people's interests? Sure.

I guess my point is: If you treat the status quo as a fact of nature, non-negotiable, then you direct your anger at your peers. You can't change Sony or how society works, but you can yell at people on X. If you realize Sony is also just people and everything is in principle negotiable, then... well it is actually pretty silly that there are some people spending a lot of time building these baroque ultra-secure systems, and other people spending a lot of time cracking them (and bickering with each other) - where they could all just, I don't know, not do that.

At a glance, it looks like it exploits a bug in WebKit's JavaScriptCore JavaScript engine.

Does the PS5's WebKit use JavaScriptCore with JIT enabled? Have to wonder if Sony will respond by disabled its JIT, to narrow the attack surface.

Their store and possibly their entire main OS menu sure feel like "webshit" on the PS4 and PS5. I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't using Webtech for layouts, formatting, and scripting (with Javascript).

On the PS3, only the store was webshit, and it performed so amazingly poorly (and crashed all the time) that I never bought anything on it, and I doubt I'm alone in that. The PS3 could have handled a website well (obviously), but not the trash heap of a "web app" they used.

From what I can tell, they didn't learn a lesson from this, they've just benefitted from beefier hardware to keep their newer stores usable (and I may be imagining it, but performance on menus and in their store already seems to have declined a lot from when I purchased my PS5).

Given all that, I'm not sure how much Javascript performance they can afford to give up without making their entire system's UI experience totally suck. They could improve the quality of their system and use of web tech to improve performance, like it's a joke any of this isn't perfectly, buttery smooth on a system that powerful even if it is Javascript and HTML and CSS... but given they never seemed inclined to do that even in the pre-AI-slop days...

> On the PS3, only the store was webshit

I mean, only sort of. Almost all of the UI portion of XMB was written in PSJS (PlayStation JavaScript), which was their internal scripting language of choice. It manipulates ha is almost exactly a webgl context in order to draw to the screen (which is the main reason why the PS3 supported a pretty low perf opengles library in addition to gcm).

They could apply a different policy to their web-based dashboard GUIs (if these do exist) than to the web browser.

It seems like a case of their skills couldn't match their ambition. To much tech and not enough restraint to manage it.

I say this because on the Wii, a considerably slower machine, they kind of managed it well. The Store and even the system setting menu are just HTML rendered using Opera.

JavaScript is the gift and grift that keeps on giving. A security nightmare when in Flash, but a gate way to freedom nowadays.

Flash didn't use JS, but rather ActionScript. Which was very much inspired by ECMAScript, especially AS3 -- but Flash's security holes were all of Adobe's doing. Good times.

I wish they waited until gta6

The exploit has been fixed in 14.0. Realistically gta6 will require it

Use this exploit to bypass the check.

I think the point they're trying to make is that, assuming this is an implementation of the bug that caused the PS5 Linux dev to quit, it was known about and had been being sat on intentionally to prevent it from being fixed before GTA 6 came out, but some other group found it and reported it.

This is a different exploit. This one is a kernel exploit, the one that caused the drama is a hypervisor exploit. A kernel exploit lets you pirate games but running Linux requires a hypervisor exploit.

Note that Sony significantly improved the PS5's security on firmware 14.0 and above, likely to prevent GTA 6 from getting pirated. Ripping a PS5 game apparently requires a hypervisor exploit, and the last known one was sold to Sony. This means that nobody will be able to rip GTA 6. Even if it was ripped, they would then need to "backport" it to run on hacked PS5s running earlier firmware versions, which would take some time and expertise.

Given how good PS5 emulators have already gotten, the goal may actually be to rip GTA 6 and then distribute pirated copies to play on PC. Which would be much worse for both Sony and Rockstar, given that they don't want to make an official PC release yet - so by the time they do, many PC gamers who would have otherwise bought the game at PC launch will have already finished it. Sales would tank.

An interesting thought would be what would happen if they manage to exploit past GTA6 release, and actually manage to ship a PC-compatible GTA6 version based on that exploit. Surely Rockstar got a lot of cash to be console-only on launch - but the hype around the game would destroy PC game revenue. I hope this happens and they just let me buy the game through steam for honest money as a response of the pirated version.

This is probably going to the be holy grail later this year. In light of the recent explosion in decompilation/recompilation efforts, the first one that can get a copy off their machine and running on PC will get a lot of clout. Essentially, if they won't release it on PC, the people will just release it themselves. LLM assisted recompilation are a mighty force that is yield results with surprising speed.

There are already some PS5 games getting this treatment.

GTA6 won't be released for PC?

It hasn’t been announced. GTA 5 was released for PC about 18 months after it hit consoles.

Eventually it will, but it is console exclusive for some indeterminate amount of time. Google seems to indicate that this was 19 months for GTA5. Not entirely sure why, the tinfoil hat theory seems to be it's to encourage people to buy it a second time to play multiplayer with their PC friends. Alternatively, it could just be it's easier to get some fixed targets out the door than worry about broad optimizations.

A bit disappointing either way though as someone whose only console is a Nintendo Switch 2.

Considering the low end will be the Xbox Series S, that puts it not too far out from the Switch 2.

However, the CPU would be way behind the and storage on Switch is somewhat limited. I don't think people would want 180GB chewing up the 232GB of available storage on the system.

It would be in the impossible port territory but it seems like it could be JUST within grasp. This is all dependent on how well the Series S performance is. If it stinks on there, I doubt they will ever bother with a S2 release.

Not initially, perhaps 2 years later

half of gta 5 online revenue is from PC. They will definitely release GTA 6 for PC, maybe half a year after the console release to get people to double dip (those who bought it on PS5 and then buy it again on PC cause they prefer playing on PC)

Couldn't you spoof the update to the PS Store to still get the ROM?

Playing PC Games from Steam on PS5 would be a win.

Might be a reality quite soon! https://github.com/boykopovar/AnyPS5

This is the opposite of what GP asked for.

Whoops, guess I flipped it around!

All good! What you linked is a very cool project too!

The fact you need to hack hardware you legally own just to get full control over it is insane

Stallman as right, yet again!

How so? Not only these restrictions exist for a reason, but you are perfectly aware of these restrictions before you purchase the said hardware.

I wouldn’t say people are perfectly aware. It seems obvious I should be able to at least back up my save files but that was disabled on the PS5 and instead you need to purchase a separate subscription. A lot of basic features that were available in the past are going away.

The only reason is greed from Sony.

Neither of those things make it any less ridiculous. What it really amounts to is that you're not really purchasing the hardware.

Is it practical/sensible to turn a PS5 into a general purpose computer? What are the specs?

Digital Foundry [1] (a popular game graphics YouTube review channel) not just put Linux on it, but made it run games, sometimes even with better perf than PS5 itself does. I'd say if you can do this, then it's pretty much general purpose!

[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/05/playstation-5-li...

Back in the day, the Amiga had a Mac emulator (named Shapeshifter) that would run software faster than on a real Mac using the same CPU/clock rate.

No need if you can get a BC250 for less than a PS5 these days - though even that may be difficult now

The BC250 is interesting, but you need a PSU, a case with a fan and a fan duct to push air through the heat exchanger or something similar. A used PS5 already has all that, plus the nice feeling it’d annoy Sony.

Also, the square tower Xbox has similar specs, and who doesn’t like to extend a middle finger to Microsoft?

iirc it's something akin to R5 3600 + RX6700. 16GB of memory shared between RAM and VRAM (at most 12GB can be allocated to VRAM)

No, but you can use a PS2 to guide a missile

You can run Linux (and NetBSD, obviously) on a PS2.

Will Linux on the ps5 be back?

God I hope so. Some of my fondest professional memories were my early Navy days, hacking together PS3's into a big ol cluster

Edit: Reading through the exploit, looks like linux compatability for older (non 13.6) is possible. 13.6 needs a new hypervisor exploit.

Out of interest, how well did the Ps3 cluster work?

I say this because the Cell processor was an absolute beast BUT the whole system was so RAM constrained that is felt like, it didn't matter how quick your code was if you simply couldn't get enough data into RAM.

I just remember some code that would blast through what was available and then just spin for millions, sometimes billions of cycles just waiting for the next chuck to arrive.

No first hand cluster experience myself, but quite well if your workload could deal with its limitations. Noteworthy examples:

* Breaking SSL (finding MD5 collisions): https://hackaday.com/2008/12/30/25c3-hackers-completely-brea...

* Analyzing high definition satellite imagery for 1/10th the cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster#:~:text=...

this is a kernel level exploit and afaik ps5 linux requires full hypervisor... so not yet, but probably soon.

Is there any reason why we need the ps5 software? Is the processor locked to it? Is there a security microcontroller which needs it?

Edit looks like the answer for both questions is yes

just get a bc-250...

I'm not heavy on gaming so I can't justify buying PS5 just for the games, but my god, if I would be able to thinker with it - I'd buy it in an instant!

I don't think Sony is interested in customers like you.

My friend bought a used BC-250 (basically a PS5 on a board) and modded it into a gaming PC the other week. Costs like 1/3rd the price of a PS5

https://bc250.info/

Going back a few years to covid lockdowns, work from home exploding and a shortage of computers, I thought the mirror image of that was something MS should have tried. Enable a variant of windows on the xbox (probably locked down) so people can plug in keyboard/mouse and do some desktop tasks on the recently released consoles, and it'd also serve to seed a userbase for the gaming side.

Guess I shouldn't have updated my spare PS5 after all. Just wait for the inevitable patch cycle.

If this lets you install Linux that would be neat.

Unfortunately holding the PS5 controller gives me crippling pain in my wrists and it also doesn't have any games I care about, but if it could become a Linux media PC, you've got my attention. Especially once its price drops due to the next gen coming out.

> Unfortunately holding the PS5 controller gives me crippling pain in my wrists and it also doesn't have any games I care about

Juice might not be worth the squeeze, but have you tried one of their Access controllers?

https://www.amazon.com/Access-Controller-PlayStation-5-Gamin...

No, but I'm using a PS4 controller with my Linux PC. Really comfy controller, I just had to replace the original charging port since it stopped working with usb-c and also I had to replace the rubber pads inside.

Very cheaply made given the price, but it's one of the few controllers with a touch pad that works on Linux. The touch pad is nice to get the mouse cursor out of the way.

Truly we live in a golden period where any of the major console vendor's controllers can be reasonably well-supported on Steam and Linux. My own Gaming PC's main companion is a spare Switch Pro Controller that I took out of rotation due to a stick-drift issue but then repaired.

The way things have been going, it seems unlikely we'll see a price drop any time soon.

Also PS5 Emulation is advancing at an insane pace. https://x.com/BrutalSam_/status/2104554823240860065

Is the emulation layer thin enough for a non-stupidly specced computer to run stuff? Or is this more of a theoretical/advancing for the future thing?

PS5 emulation on x86 hardware will be more like running wine, so as long as your PC is as powerful as a PS5, performance should be close...eventually. The real performance bottleneck will be the GPU translation layer, much like converting DirectX to Vulkan isn't trivial, so isn't converting GNM (PS5's graphics API) to Vulkan, even tho the APIs are close (IIRC, they're cousin APIs)

The main problem is that PS5(and Xbox) has unified memory, that's the whole advantage of these systems. You can put your texture in one place in memory, have the CPU write to it and the GPU can immediately read it from the same address once you are finished. It's an absolutely huge performance advantage, that the typical PC architecture doesn't support and doing such a thing will always incur the penalty of having to transfer the data from system ram to GPU vram - with enough bandwidth and fast memory the issue can be somewhat mitigated, but it doesn't change the fact that on PS5 your GPU can start reading the data the CPU just wrote nanoseconds after it's done, on a PC you need to wait for the transfer first.

https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/explorer/glossary/what-is-resi...

"When a game is running, the CPU needs access to a graphic card’s memory, and by default it can only access 256MB at a time. However, resizable BAR removes the size limitation so the CPU has access to all of a GPU’s memory, theoretically allowing for improved performance. This adjustment lets the CPU request much larger chunks of data from the GPU, which can improve performance in games that can benefit from this change."

Yes, I'm aware of it. It's purely an addressing simplification and you are still limited by the GPU bus speed if you want to access any data on the GPU by the CPU. And it only works one way, the GPU cannot be given an address in RAM and expected to magically have access to it, the driver has to copy the data over first.

There's also a Switch emulator that's being made for the PS5 that's a port of Eden. It's called ProsperoEden and can already run some games [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXGiTuSAZ5o

Heck, someone in the emulation community dropped a preview that they're a couple of months out from creating a Switch game recompiler - which generates native x86 windows builds AOT. It's incredible.

I have to imagine that AI has significantly increased the velocity of technically demanding hobby projects.

The recompilation scene has exploded recently. Seems like it could be the future of retrogaming where you get an actual native build of every game. Also opens the door to full mod support of old games as well as being able to run more demanding games on hand held devices that previously didn't have the power to run certain emulators.

I really wish the Ashai Linux team pivoted and spent more time making quality emulators for past platforms. The current crop of emulators are much better than they were 10 years ago, but the Ashai team has a real knack for reverse engineering and figuring out all the bugs. I think having a really well polished set of emulators would be really cool from a game preservation standpoint.

If sony released jailbroken ps5 I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unsure why they do not let us use it as much as we can. They would definitely sell more.

they aren't in the business of selling consoles (duh). they are in the business of selling games. jailbroken consoles can run pirated games ...

consoles are sold at a loss, best information i can dig up is that this is still true today, even after all the volume.

Way back in the 90s and early aughts, Toys R Us used VAX terminals (and then, emulators on PCs) to do a lot in a local store.

Inventory of other locations, and the individual details of a stocked item were one of the functions. This additionally displayed the markup/profit percentage for a given item. I understand that these numbers may not have been completely accurate, but will be sufficient for demo purposes.

Most toys, movies, and video game titles claimed a ~20-30% margin. Private label clothes and such, slightly higher. Game consoles showed ~1-2%. When employee discounts were finally adopted, it maxed at 10%, and thusly items like game consoles were excluded.

AFAIK they stopped losing money on PS5's about 8 months after release.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

They don’t make much money (if any) selling hardware.

Sony is barely making money on PS5 hardware.

That just seems weird to me? PS5s are expensive.

Those BC250 are 1/3 the price. Or is that just because they're old?

The BC250 uses fail SOC that can not be put into PS5. Rather than just throwing them away, they can turn off what is broken and sell it.

Because they don't make money from the hardware. If you don't buy games for it, there's no point in selling you a console, from their perspective.

Then you have Steam Machine. Also take a look at its price tag.

Cool, now we can have disks again :-)

Honestly I am not even interested in PS4 and especially PS5 exploits, the only reason I have PS3 is to play split screen games with kids or kids alone, the push to online play killed consoles for me, PS3 was the peak of split screen gaming, PS4 and PS5 have significantly less split screen games than PS3 and let's not forget you can play PS1 and PS2 split screen games on PS3, so I guess for someone not playing split screen games these jailbreaks are relevant, but for me they killed their newer consoles with abandoninh split screen games. I bought our previous PS3 Slim for 40EUR including shipping, after one year it died most likely because of RSX (random artifacts, no overheating), now bought PS3 Super Slim for 50EUR, will see how long will last that, but anyway if it would be 40-50EUR per year of offline split screen gaming I am fine with that, using HEN.

and since someone asked me here recently what we play, here copypasta:

What we/they play:

my favorite game (but they are sick of it, not appreciating it, most of the time I win) is Worms 2 Armageddon (part of Worms Revolution collection)

Blur - racing with fun for me and son

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing or Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - all of us including dauther

Little Big Planet - co-op platformer, all of us liked it until it got really difficult

NHL Legacy edition - all of us ocassionally

MotorStorm - Pacific Rift - racing, seems only son, but I can bear it for while

Children like (but without me):

Minecraft - PlayStation 3 Edition - they play it offline like all games we have, I guess it is co-op

Rayman Legends - co-op platformer

The Simpsons Game - co-op platformer, but needs to think, can get stuck in places

and since we watch together MotoGP and F1 they recently started to play F1 2013 - Complete Edition, but seems too difficult, for racing the best fun is first Sonic all star racing or Blur

on PS2:

LEGO Batman - co-op platformer, but requires lot of thinking

Shrek 2 - same as above

we liked from PS1:

Crash team racing, but now it is replaced with sonic with better graphics on PS3

Circuit Breakers (USA) - racing, all of us

FoxKids.com - Micro Maniacs Racing - racing, but with running characters

Tom and Jerry in House Trap - they like

Simpsons Hit & Run for the PS2 was a great game. Sounds like you and your kids might enjoy that.

>but they are sick of it, not appreciating it, most of the time I win

I agree with not going easy on your kids, but I think it's a good opportunity to motivate them to work together to beat you

if they would gang up on me I'd stand no chance and it wouldn't be fair, then I can't play at all (what would be the point playing against them if I'd be dead after just few rounds, I don't mind losing in the end, but dont like being dead after short time and just them playing long without me) and as I said they are already winning sometimes (like 1/4th games maybe), just not that often (in my other favorite games like sega all star racing and blur we are already pretty even with older kid), everyone should play for themselves

> This project is intended for educational and security research purposes only. It does not endorse piracy, unauthorized access, or misuse of commercial devices.

Sure, "education". Releasing exploits for software vulnerabilities has very little to do with education. The relation to piracy is clear however.

Are you against accessing hardware that you own?

Only if the main use case is piracy.

Pirates don't usually bother hacking consoles. It's easier for them to just bypass the security on the disc drive. That's why we had "mod chips" for decades

>It's easier for them to just bypass the security on the disc drive.

This is just not true.

So why did they drill holes into the Xbox 360's DVD drive when they could've just hacked the hypervisor all along? :)

We are talking about PS5 here.

The PS5 has had modchips for decades?

I'm pretty sure my original comment both specifying a timeframe longer than the PS5 has existed and hardware that never was produced for the PS5 would suggest I was talking about other devices

"It's easier for them to just bypass the security on the disc drive" is a statement about the present, and as such it is false.

"That's why we had "mod chips" for decades"

See when you only take half of something someone said, then run off with it and draw incorrect conclusions. You sound foolish

I mean this in the kindest possible way: Xbox 360 launched over twenty years ago; modchips on Xbox/Playstations haven't been a thing for... a good while now.

Yes. And that's why I said "decades". Unfortunately the person replying did not realize I was speaking in a historical context

The irony of posting something like this on HACKER News of all places must have escaped you... this term is tightly related to breaking hardware/software systems apart to understand them and it is very common to share your findings.

What people decide to do with them is on them, and fixing the exploits would be on the manufacturer if they care about this so-called "piracy".

The main use case is here is not understanding. It's software piracy. When hacking game consoles, understanding is just a fig leaf.

> fixing the exploits would be on the manufacturer

That's what responsible disclosure is for.

Tough luck, I will run my non-piracy related homebrews on the hardware I own, and learn about the way they work now.

> That's what responsible disclosure is for.

Good one, the maximum bounty for PlayStation is $50k for critical ones. But on average they only pay $10k for such "bugs"... as a reminder in 2025 the Sony's PlayStation (Game & Network Services) segment generated approximately $30,000,000,000. Talk about a "fig leaf".

Don't clog the liability sink pls

From a non-gamer is there any reason there isn't something like an Apple TV Pro that would be a 4K gaming console? I imagine they have hardware capable of this in their existing inventory. Would it be the major game studios are kept locked in to XBox or PS consoles?

A walled garden living room appliance that allows you to purchase a revokable digital license to download games only through the manufacturer's store?

Apple TV, PS and Xbox all meet that definition. I'm not following what you're pitching…

I think this is a multifaceted problem: - Apple TVs as they currently are can run RetroArch and some other more demanding games just fine, though not at full 4K - Game engine developers (Unity, Unreal are most notable) work very hard to add optimization tools for mainline consoles, and Apple has only recently started to really bolster this with the GPTK (game porting toolkit) and more Metal/GPU focus - Ouya and other similar Android standalone boxes have been underpowered for years, and the AI hardware inflation will make this segment harder to get into

Developers need to optimize and debug their game for each console. Xbox/PS are completely different platforms (UWP vs heavily customized BSD) so fixes don't transfer over. Adding another incompatible target with new store guidelines and system APIs adds a lot of work so Apple would have a hard time convincing them.

Now add the perception that Mac users don't play games and Apple devices are made for people already in their ecosystem. The only way they could gain market share is competing with Steam Machine as a more open platform, but without a giant library of existing games.

My Macbook Pro is my favorite emulator machine, and CrossOver is incredibly good at running most of the games I want to play.

OSX has also recently released a proton-style compat layer so we are seeing gains there as well.

For a long time Apple was outright AGAINST games. They wanted their machines to be for musicians and artists, not bratty kids.

Apple is still against games. Next year they'll remove Rosetta 2, and all the games that require it will stop working. There's no upcoming Vulkan drivers, or upstream support for Proton. CrossOver is expensive and incomplete.

The best gaming hardware will always be the hardware you keep on you; be it a phone, GameBoy, or a Mac. macOS is basically last-place in supporting PC gaming though, and Apple has no qualms letting it die again.

They’ve stated an intent to exempt games specifically:

> Beyond this date, we will maintain a subset of Rosetta features designed to support older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel frameworks.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

Ah, good catch. Gotta keep Tomb Raider around for a few more keynotes, I suppose.

i was referring to the game porting toolkit, didn't know about rosetta 2 deprecation though, disappointing.

honestly, I just use it for emulators like PS2 Dreamcast etc...

All good. I'm just frustrated at Apple for letting macOS fall behind Asahi on features like FEX and Vulkan support.

Mac users deserve to have a platform where games and software work forever once you buy it. It doesn't take much work on Apple's behalf to support it, so it's worrying to see them shift away from well-maintained software stacks and industry-spanning standards to focus on their own fragile runtimes.

XBox no longer uses UWP (ERA runtime), that is left around for compatibility mode, nowadays modern XBox development is classical Win32.

One of the reasons C++/CX was killed was because of this, even though UWP application developers were fine with it, apparently game devs were quite vocal against it, even though they love their compiler extensions in other platforms.

Apple tried this, I forgot which year, there was a push to make the Apple TV a console. Arcade support, controller compatibility, it all shipped. You can plug in an Apple TV and pair an Xbox controller right now and play a surprisingly large number of AAA and indie games, from Resident Evil VIII to Slay the Spire. It was too little too late, though. Most games are played on phones, and the console market is falling apart. Microsoft seems to be pulling out, Sony is basically shipping locked-down gaming PCs with a couple of exclusive games. Nintendo is holding course more or less, but their main value propositions are simplicity and first-party exclusivity, and phones already ate the first half of that.

As someone who used to be into console gaming but has been out basically since the PS2, this is an interesting summation of the current state of things. Do you have any color you'd add with regard to the Steam Machine and its potential?

As someone with a Steam Machine, somewhat low potential. It has a console like experience but not everything in the store supports it. It's open then other things but there are plenty of multiplayer games that refuse to support it due to Anti Cheat.

It feels like R&D project that Steam is doing so in case Microsoft gets really aggressive and locks down Windows 11 to point that Steam no longer works, they have fallback option.

Whatever anticheat company can come up with a decent enough anticheat for linux (stay out of my fucking kernel) and pair it with some kind of server side anti cheat heuristic may win the day. I know a lot of people who are steamdeck kids and are experimenting with steamos or other linuxes on the desktop because they are sick of windows in general.

I'm about ready to pull the trigger on my windows gaming pc to move it to linux because I honestly don't really play anything that requires anticheat anymore. Too old to bother with multiplayer that isn't co-op anymore. I think the last game I have with anticheat in it is elden ring and I don't pvp there either so I can just disable the online stuff and ignore the anti-cheat all together.

The new Steam Machine is a horse of a different color. Unlike AppleTV, the hardware supports the same Proton compatibility layer that people know and love on Steam Deck. The majority of Windows-only titles on Steam run without issue, making the Linux experience quite tolerable.

Apple's policy on macOS, iOS and tvOS is to prioritize native ports at all cost. The difference in compatibility is thousandfold; even games that have native ARM/Mac builds like Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky only work on macOS and not iOS/tvOS.

The Steam Machine will probably still flop, but Apple's failure vis-a-vis making gaming work is self-inflicted.

You might be surprised to hear that Death Stranding now does have an iOS/iPadOS version.

Not an person you're address your question for, but I would say that Steam Machine is a thing Valve released as an addition to their library. Average Steam user has a library for a few hundred of dollars, he can buy a console that guaranteed to has games on it. Its potential depends on PC gaming overall which is bright as people still buying PCs and love to play games on it.

Video games are still video games. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are still the main platforms.

Microsoft is trying to reason about how gaming fits into their computer-centric empire. They've been using the Xbox brand for a new gamepad shell in Windows, for their cloud gaming subscription service, and for the gaming section of the Windows Store.

Steam has built the most popular computer game download service. They're renowned for having sales - you can get the Arkham Trilogy for $5 with some regularity when it would cost you $30 on Nintendo's eShop. It's a meme that most Steam users end up impulse-buying hundreds of cheap games and only playing dozens of them.

Microsoft and Sony have both bought a lot of previously-independent game studios. They've often let them continue publishing on other platforms. For instance, Sony's Spider-Man games are also available on Steam.

There are rumors that amid Microsoft's clusterfuck of an Xbox strategy, the next Xbox is going to share a lot of infrastructure with Windows, including the ability to play Windows games. This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games.

> This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games

That's not what happened, Sony's decision is more about the poor saels of its single player titles on Steam, they are now focusing their PC releases for online multiplayer games instead

Microsoft sells less consoles each month than the previous gen Nintendo Switch sells today

A lot of publishers are skipping Xbox, citing not enough players/sales

They have nothing to worry about Xbox

https://i.imgur.com/TrI3q6e.png

Which makes sense. Exclusives is basically the best reason for buying a PlayStation, so if they stick them all on PC, that’s not gonna help them much.

As you’ve said, Microsoft is basically toast. They’ve been sinking for multiple generations.

The console you mean, Microsoft even with all the layoffs is one of the biggest publishers and studios owner around.

Yeah. Obvious MS the company is not in any danger and everything will be fine.

Xbox the division has been losing money and each generation has a smaller and smaller share of the install base. They’re arguably close to irrelevancy at this point. Knowing Microsoft, they won’t give up, but it might actually be smart to stop trying and not have another Xbox generation.

SteamDB estimates SM sold 4MM copies on Steam, SM 1.5 sold 2MM, and SM2 sold 1.25MM.

1.5 years ago, the developer announced that SM2 had sold 10MM copies on PS5 and the franchise had sold 50MM copies overall:

https://x.com/insomniacgames/status/1757662718604013868

https://steamdb.info/app/1817070/charts/

https://steamdb.info/app/1817190/charts/

https://steamdb.info/app/2651280/charts/

You forget that XBox is also the umbrella brand for Microsoft Game Studios, for Microsoft PC is also XBox, although the whole marketing around it is a mess.

This is fairly outdated, it was certainly true in 2013 but these days xbox is pretty much dead, playstation is stable but flat for a long time, PC has overtaken both, and mobile has shot to the moon.

The Steam Machine is a very niche product, but PC gaming is the main gaming platform outside of phone games.

XBox is PC as well, at least in what relates Windows being owned by Microsoft, and the of studios that are still owned by them.

Steam Machine also has the issue that they don't have any significant number of native games, they are dependent on Windows gaming ecosystem as source.

Steam Machine owner here! As of like three weeks ago.

The Steam Machine's biggest problem in general: it's launching into a headwind, because of hardware shortages. It should have been like $650-$700 for the base model, instead it's $1100ish.

The Steam Machine's biggest strength, overall: the Steam library. Absolutely massive.

The Steam Machine's nerd-gamer appeal: you can also run emulators, use it as a desktop, and play games from other stores (Epic, GOG, et c.). Nb this all comes with a big asterisk, as you're very much into non-console-like operation with any of this—I had to intervene with Heroic's installation of The Outer Worlds (from Epic) once to get it running with functioning cutscenes, which took me probably 30 minutes including a lot of trawling Reddit and forums to figure out the most-recent version of Proton that would work [I doubt I found the most-recent one, but I did find one more-recent than the first suggestion I saw], and then again on about my fourth play session when an update caused it to misplace its own saves (my only indication was all the saves had disappeared—they hadn't moved, it just wasn't finding them there anymore) for some reason, which I doubt would have happened on for-real Windows, and also any time it has an update available it silently fails to launch until it's updated, but I'm not notified of this until I re-start Heroic itself. This is some real computer-gaming and Linuxy bullshit (which is to say, it sucks and wastes your time) not a console experience. Still a benefit that it's there, but comes with a caveat that someone who just wants it as a console won't/can't/shouldn't engage with any of this.

Where the Steam Machine struggles as a console: Yes, it has tons of games available from many, many consoles of multiple generations, running natively (not emulated console games—though, mostly through proton, but Wine Is Not [an] Emulator), including very recent games, giving it a library that dwarfs that of any (... non-"hacked") console. HOWEVER:

1) Couch multiplayer sucks. Very few PC-first games include it, and a lot of console ports will have had it removed (since, who local-multiplayers on a PC now that the Internet is widespread? That hasn't been a normal feature for PC games since, like, the DOS era). If you want lots of couch multiplayer options you're gonna need to deal with console emulation (and I can tell you, bluetooth pairing is better on here than most Linux systems I've thrown together, but it's still bluetooth pairing under linux... hope you like either cords, or headaches) most likely, not just playing Steam games, at which point you're outside the space of treating the Steam Machine like a normal console and into wrestling with a computer.

2) Parental controls basically don't exist. You can have restricted-library child accounts after you jump through some very annoying hoops ("sorry, this just-created kid's account seems to be in another country from the family you're adding it to, based on its purchase activity... which doesn't exist, there has been no purchase activity")... but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it. It's a total joke compared to a Switch or PS5, neither of which are, themselves, exactly amazing at this. In short, its account management is tacked-on crap, they do not adequately-well support having multiple people using one of these, even if you don't factor in the various ways a person could get around it on account of the thing actually being a fairly ordinary Linux OS.

Where the Steam Machine struggles as a gaming PC: Hope you don't love playing the very-latest online multiplayer games. Odds are pretty good you'll be excluded by anti-cheat.

This leaves it a damn nice device for, almost exclusively: 1) people like me, a (to put it mildly) power-user who can benefit from its more computer-like aspects while also appreciating just putting it in its default Steam-only environment and relaxing, and who doesn't give a damn about online multiplayer, AND who can afford it; and 2) people who want to treat it as a console and play almost exclusively local single-player games (and have some money burning a hole in their pocket)... and this'll probably only be a great use-case if they already have a largish steam library, since otherwise their needs are likely covered by a Playstation or X-Box and starting from scratch on a steam machine with no owned games won't be very appealing. Which means it's kinda only a great deal for people in this category who were also already PC gamers.

That's a pretty small market of ideal customers, IMO. I'm rooting for the thing overall but I'd hesitate to recommend it to most gamers.

> but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it.

This part does not make sense to me, because as far as I'm aware the Steam Machine runs basically the same OS as the Deck and my Deck absolutely prompts me for my PIN every time I bring it out of suspend, the same as my Xbox does. I'd find it really strange if the Machine wasn't capable of doing the exact same thing.

I have a Deck and never figured out how to make it do that. I also researched all this again when I got the Steam Machine and was setting it up, hoping something had changed, and found nothing but other people complaining about this still being absent (as recently as this year) and info on the rather painful set-up for creating a restricted library for children's accounts (which worked, but, still no PIN lock for accounts).

Maybe it's a PIN to unlock the device period, but not per-account? The former is a lot less useful to me than the latter, and I may have overlooked it. I don't want to have to intervene any time someone else wants to use it, I want to let other people use it without worrying they'll (intentionally or accidentally) end up seeing the wrong library, or messing with anyone else's saves, or anything like that.

If that functionality does exist and I've just not found it, I'd love a clue to send me in the right direction.

I just fired up my Deck and it's Settings > Security which seems like a pretty obvious place. I have mine set to trigger a lock screen on wake/power and if desktop mode is requested, which are the only two options on that entire page.

This is a setting somewhere in the Deck or your Steam account, my Deck comes right up into my account without ever asking for a PIN or password or anything.

It's definitely deck-specific (or maybe Big Picture specific), neither my desktops nor laptops have ever asked for a PIN nor would I want them to.

It's a very buried feature, but the deck actually supports home directory encryption as well, though you have to SSH in from another machine to set it up. I really think it should be made default because of the very real use case where users use desktop mode, sign in to things in the browser and then take the device out in public where it could be stolen.

> Nintendo is holding course more or less, but their main value propositions are simplicity and first-party exclusivity, and phones already ate the first half of that.

Someone at Nintendo had the genius idea of charging you a subscription fee for internet access.

So, you can play Pokemon Champions on a Switch 2 for $35 / year, or you can play it on your phone, which has an internet connection outside Nintendo's control, for free.

Nintendo's value proposition really seems to be "we will screw you as hard as we can, and we hope you like that".

It's really not much different than PSN or Xbox Live, so I don't think it's fair to say that Nintendo "had" the idea.

They all do this. Sony charges for PlayStation online too.

It's not good, but it's not just Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo is the most reasonably priced.

> Someone at Nintendo had the genius idea of charging you a subscription fee for internet access.

Microsoft had that 'genius' idea with the original Xbox. The others saw that people will indeed pay for such a thing and copied the idea with the PS4 and Switch.

Err, Pokemon Champions does not require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to play online.

I have no clue where you're getting $35 from. It's $20/year.

$20 / year for a single Nintendo account; $35 / year for a single Switch.

Yep! Some more details, many of which kill it:

The Apple TV chip is currently quite old. It would be fine for much indie stuff or streaming but pales against a modern phone/iPad.

Have to buy games from the App Store meaning limited selection. Few bother because no one plays games on Apple TV. And since it’s the same as the iPhone app it’s often optimized for that even if the Apple TV was more powerful.

The other big Apple sin is Apple tried a push but (at the time, later changed) demanded games worked with the Apple TV remote only. At least for Apple Arcade. They “had to” because they’ve never sold a gamepad. Only 3rd party ones which weren’t very good.

So you have to buy games from Apple that are either super simplistic (to work well on phone) or advanced but old (RE VII), play on an old chip, on a TV while it was probably designed for a phone, and pay $70+ to Nintendo/Sony/MS to buy a good quality game pad.

Surprise. It never went anywhere.

There was a rumor that they’re going to try again with a first-party controller. If they’re smart they will just white label one from a good company. And they should absolutely push cloud gaming with PS/MS. Steam Link is a good idea.

A new Apple TH is rumored any day now (and has been for a long time) but between the high original cost, the insane cost increases due to RAM/storage, and the price of buying a controller, it just doesn’t seem worth it. Buy a Series S or Switch 1/2 and be happier.

It's got an A15 in it currently, so 5 years old, but it still runs pretty great a lot of games that you would play are made for ipad and developers tend to assume a lag of at least three years on processors for that market (no one is buying a new ipad every year). I use my appletv with moonlight to stream off my pc and use an 8bitdo controller with it and my switch2 (8bit-do ultimate 2 wireless).

It’s no slouch but it’s also no PS5 or Series X.

Streaming would be ideal but Apple fights that because they don’t get a crazy cut. They could do easily be THE streaming box but prices and dumb rules kill it.

I love my Apple TV but the price was already crazy.

It's my primary tv interface and while expensive it beats all the built in primary interfaces shipping in tvs today.

I don't think apple is interested in making it a gaming console, gaming has never been apples focus except when the iphone was new and they wanted to drive adoption.

there is the steam machine but from my experience it is a matter of hardware drivers and support.

Steam Machine is GREAT. But it still has warts around controller support etc...

Also, a lot of AAA games do not work on steam machine because of aggressive anticheat and DRM, and those vendors don't provide Linux builds. No spyware, no game.

The software for the UI just isn't there for Windows machines. There have been attempts but it is always janky and you end up pulling out a keyboard anyway.

Devs are afraid of piracy so they like the walled garden. They don't want emulators running because then they have to compete with the 90s-2015 era which is the golden age of gaming, and their newer games don't stack up ( except in graphics ). Nintendo doesn't want to compete with Mario Kart Double Dash on the Switch 2.

Also: Modern PCs absolutely MOG the Switch 2 and Xbox. The games are all in the same engines and cross-platform anyway, so piracy ends up useful.

>Also, a lot of AAA games do not work on steam machine because of aggressive anticheat and DRM

That said, these games fall pretty much exclusively in the competitive shooter space. Which isn't the kind of thing you usually sit down at the couch with a controller to play. If you aren't in to competitive online games then proton has basically 100% compatibility.

A pro device is going to be expensive. Non gamers won't buy it, let alone $60+ games.

Consoles come with a controller and enough storage to be usable for games. The largest Apple TV 4K is 128GB and it's really common for games to easily be 50+ GB or even considerably more. 100 GB is not even that uncommon anymore (e.g., Call of Duty, FF7 Rebirth, Baldur's Gate 3).

When Apple first launched the Apple TV game store they required games be playable with the horrible remote. Understandably even games that would have been fine on the hardware didn't bother and while Apple later relented and allowed games to require a controller it's still an extra purchase that's needed.

Call of duty is kicking close to 500GB to 1TB depending what you have installed.

That said, I think the hardware is totally capable they just don't have a layer to run win32 or Linux apps natively (like proton for m series) so they'd have to commit to what valve is doing for linux, for macos

Google tried this with Stadia. I was a pretty happy user of it, but I think it probably exposed the weakness of US bandwidth/ throughput. Still trying to find what to do with the two controllers but it was the best refund experience I've gone through and Google probably regrets setting my expectations like that.

https://christopherklay.github.io/stadiacontroller/

Yup, thanks! I had it connected to my Mac for remote ps5 play for a while but it felt flaky.

They’ll probably need to design new silicon that is much more GPU oriented (with less CPU) than anything they have in the A or even base M series to handle 4k gaming at sub-M Max prices

A console-optimized lower-priced higher-GPU variant of the A series could be useful for local AI in so many products that don’t come with a capable processor (eg homepods, TV, the monitor they put a whole iPhone chip in)

I could see something for around the price of a Mac Mini with a controller that’s og MacBook plastic white/black

Gaming consoles are affordable platforms, and Apple is not doing that.

Then to actually have games, Apple would need to make stable tooling and convince developers to port games to their platform. And convince everyone that they will support it and not drop it.

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