What can Sony do?

How Sony plans to respond to all this in terms of stopping the hack from a hardware/software point of view remains to be seen. There has been some talk about rumours of Sony having the ability to remotely shutdown PS3 units permanently using the PSN’s automatically updating news system which is always on when your unit is online regardless of if you are signed in or not. These have not been confirmed however it is an interesting possibility.

There is also discussion on the chance of Sony going back to the old style of protection, serial numbers or CD keys for each game. These would require you to have your PS3 online when you initially put in a new game so that it can check your CD key against a database on the PSN. Unfortunately serial numbers have long since been compromised for PC games, and if the PS3 is completely open then there is nothing to stop hackers bypassing PS3 game keys in the same way.

The situation looks grim, and although there are still plenty of legitimate users of PS3’s out there, the advent of game breaking exploits like those in Modern Warfare, and the trophy system being compromised will inherently lower the gaming experience for other users. The worst thing for Sony as a company is obviously the effect on their bottom line by piracy, which they had eluded for so long. Let’s hope Sony have something up their sleeves to combat this, otherwise it’s a sad day for the PlayStation community.

Feel free to jump into a discussion about this on our forums!