After weeks of unrest and bad press for Call of Duty: Black Ops developer Treyarch, the company has apparently switched on what it calls "built-in security" measures for the PS3. Why wait until now to crack down? We don't know, but as for the root of the Black Ops hacking problems on the PS3, Treyarch is placing much of the responsibility on the PS3 itself.
"As a platform provider this problem is much graver and has much broader implications to Sony than it does to us," said Treyarch community manager Josh Olin. "To us, it's like, [the PS3 security issue] has implications on our game security but we built in a lot of in-game security that we were leveraging and utilizing so it was kinda like flipping on a switch for that. I remember the meeting after all the headlines broke, though, and we were like ‘well, I guess, it’s time to turn on the security for the PS3 now!'"
We don't know exactly what Olin means when he says "were leveraging" - when did the switch get flipped? - but we do know that a swath of players were recently banned from the Call of Duty: Black Ops PS3 servers on suspicions that they were cheating.
Olin isn't placing all of the blame on the PS3, however - he also called out the hackers themselves, saying, “It’s unfortunate and I think the hacking community with their rational that it makes their homebrew apps possible on the PS3... I mean, okay, that’s their argument but they know the larger implication to the players who don’t want that and the people who can now modify their game data.”
For now, the problem appears to be somewhat better controlled. But, as Olin points out, if PS3 security flaws are ultimately to blame, there could be significant implications for future titles.
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