When I lived in Bolivia I remember buying PS2 games in the market for 10 Bs. ($2). I imagine few people in Bolivia can buy these games. Same for other third world countries.
I imagine the exploit author reported it for the clout and a "good get" right? It's quite the feather in your cap.
That there is a huge market in less-wealthy countries for pirated games is a well-known fact. What strikes me as a leap is that there is some mastermind behind it all that has enough savings (or other liquidity) to buy these exploits for whatever you would consider the true value (if $20k is "ridiculously" low), and then needs to earn all that money back by selling game copies (presumably there is some hardware cost to burn discs) to a population that is large but, indeed, poor.
And this possibly cuts well beyond simple piracy. PlayStation enjoys exclusive control over who does and does not get to publish on their platform. A mechanism that earns them millions in licensing deals, to the extent that they can happily lose money on the sale of the hardware itself. The destruction of that mechanism seems akin to destruction of their entire platform.
This isn't a "we found your front door unlocked" situation. This is a "we found a bomb attached to your spine, and we know exactly how to dismantle it."
Plenty of folks would have welcomed a change to play those kinds of games if they were just a download away. Even multiplayer games aren't necessarily off the table if unofficial servers are created and can be used, and piracy aside, it's compelling to be able to run your own software on the devices you own.
In the modern internet connected era, piracy is almost completely solved. A good example is the Nintendo Switch. There have been several major exploits which have allowed full access to the system and priacy, and yet it has hardly touched their profits since multiplayer has become such a big aspect and network updates allow this stuff to be fixed.
Compare this to the Nintendo DS and DSI. You could buy piracy carts at almost every retail store and almost everyone was doing it. There was also no downside to the consumer since it didn't require giving up anything. Piracy was a massive issue for this console.
Maybe one could make it an adversarial kickstarter kind of thing. The public pools against sony, full disclosure vs. time-delayed disclosure.
Like, make all the scenes in the US sepia filtered, then make the Latin country’s clear filtered kind of jokes.
I've seen some interesting things out this way, like a 1980s IBM computer still running some dBASE II app in an auto parts store for it's inventory on a green phosphor screen, which I'd love to do some videos about
When I was a teenager there was this abandoned Catholic girls school in our neighborhood which we used to go exploring in dodging the security guard and etc. It had this huge hole in the gym floor completely filled with desks JUST LIKE IN THE GAME so that was a lot of fun to bring friends who had played silent hill to come and check out.
As for the console I also got extremely lucky and managed to snag one with no mod chip or any other alterations whatsoever. Now that we have software exploits for the PS2 through FreeMcboot it seemed like the best bet from a collection standpoint.
For some reason I've noticed that in Nicaragua families really like watching horror flicks together, it's like part of the culture there for some reason. I was watching the silent hill movie with one and they actually didn't know it was originally a video game.
Pyramid head sounds like a fun halloween costume for next year, a friend of mine went as a nurse from that last time. Can do it with some cardboard boxes I think.