- Joined
- Apr 30, 2023
The level of complexity of some of these setups means changing anything, especially to try and secure things further, makes it very likely you will break it.
Any service which is past it's growth days in any tech company gets put into a mode in which there is no real funding, no resources to do much of anything other than keep things spinning for another few months. Any change beyond that gets into a business decision of cost vs value.
For the Wii U download servers specifically, there's no new money on Wii U but keeping downloads available as long as possible can help lead to new digitals sales on new platforms as consumers will be confident their purchase are available long term. That's the value.
The cost to maintain this? A small amount of additional COGS (AWS bills? idk what they're operating on), some team that gets saddled with dealing with rotating any certs that aren't automated and maybe button pushing every now and then, and oh yeah some dozens of pirates at any given time also downloading from the same service.
The reality is that the cost of the pirates is insignificant vs the investment needed to get rid of them.
As for how it's discovered, once comm made by a device can be intercepted (easy when you control cert authority store on a hacked wii u) you can find the exact URLs that are being accessed. Then you just need to decrypt the contents, nominally difficult unless someone screwed up cryptography which is more common than you'd think.
It was probably more down to the time frame they were working with. From what I understand PS2 wasn't in development from the moment the PS1 released like a modern console, they likely threw it together in a 2 year timespan. Requirement comes in to make it work with all PS1 games? Bolt on the same-ish processor and reuse it as an IO controller is a lot easier than write a software compatibility layer... PSP's took many years to become near flawless.
