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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Can a player with a pirated version of a game with a multiplayer mode on his console enter multiplayer lobbies? Could a player in theory pirate their game to give their units unfair advantages and then hop in a lobby with other players?

I don't really care what people do in single player.

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People who do stuff like that on other hacked consoles like Nintendo Switch have gotten their console banned from online play. Unlike on PC, you'd be banned from every game and the ban follows the hardware, so it's unlikely cheating will be a widespread problem.

If they can (which I doubt) it's easy to fix in a bulletproof way on the server-side. The game server should require a token from Sony servers and Sony would only issue such a token to an account that actually bought the game.

I wouldn't call it bulletproof. I might as well fake my identity as someone who bought the game. Sure they can prevent things like an account being connected to multiple servers/games at the same time, but you can still cheap out by just looking for interested people in different time zones. Probably even automated by a platform if you want to go the extra mile.

Fast forward to today: That's how it's done at the moment.

What about games installed from disc? No account has purchased the game in that scenario.

License on disk, and if the license clones (i.e. it's pirated), you blacklist it. All of these problems have been solved for a long time, the solutions just suck for consumers :)

I imagine the solution would be to have every individual disc to have a unique serial number that is already approved on Sony's auth servers. A pirate couldn't fake their way inside the online system without guessing a correct serial number which also hasn't been activated on another console.

How do you differ that from, say, me borrowing the disc or buying it second-hand?

You just count the number of consoles the disc has been seen at in the last week or so. Legitimate borrowing will have a low number. A pirated disc that's been copied hundreds of times will have a much higher number.

You can also make the disc acquire a lock on its UUID when it plays in multiplayer, and while the lock is held nobody else can acquire it. If you see too much lock contention it could suggest that the disc is being copied at scale (as it normally should never happen, but you can allow some leeway in case the lock wasn't released due to a legitimate issue).

So the pirate modifies the ID in the rom?

They'd need to find a valid ID which requires a valid disc and the new ID will have the same problem.

They'd need an infinite source of valid IDs which would mean they'd need to buy discs for each ID at which point the piracy problem is kinda solved?

Or they do what pirates have been doing since at least the '90s, when registration codes and IDs of this sort were already common: They crack the algorithm that generates the IDs, and create as many as they want.

Given that this is online multiplayer there doesn't have to be an algorithm; instead all IDs are just random and are checked online. There is no algorithm to reverse-engineer; unless you have access to the server there's no way to make your own fake IDs.

Discs are pressed from a master copy, I don't know of an economical way to embed a unique code on each one.

Would that work for physical games? If you can fake the disc...

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