DF Direct Q+A: GTA 6 - Will AI Enable "Pirate" PC Ports? How Will Sony React To The PS5 Jailbreak?

Richard Leadbetter (0:02)

Hello there, and a warm welcome, of course. Of course, to this, the latest edition of the DF Direct Q&A show. I'm sure the format is self-explanatory by this point. Joining me on the panel, first of all, John Lineman, hello.

John Linneman (0:13)

Hey Rich, that was a very warm welcome. I felt it all the way here in Germany. Thank you.

Richard Leadbetter (0:18)

And it was sincere as well.

John Linneman (0:19)

Of course, it always is.

Richard Leadbetter (0:22)

And of course, hello Oliver McKenzie.

Oliver McKenzie (0:25)

Yes, Rich, I hope the format is self-explanatory by this point because we've done quite a few of them. But if you're not familiar, we take your questions and hopefully provide answers or at least the best we can manage, hopefully.

Richard Leadbetter (0:38)

Absolutely. The questions are sourced from the DF Supporter Program, patreon.com/adigitalfoundry.

So if you want to get involved, that's where you go.

But with that, let's crack on with our first question. Okay, so we're going to kick off with a question by Hobbix. Greetings and salutations to you good gentlemen. Given the breakneck speed of PS5 PC translation layers, do you see the PC port of Gta 6 being expedited lest the PlayStation version is ported to PC and given superior features such as 60 frames per second and who knows what else? Okay, so I'm going to go to you first on this one, Oliver, because it's fair to say that there is a breakneck pace when it comes to PlayStation 5 emulation and translation layers, where basically, instead of actually emulating the whole system, there's kind of like a sort of proton-like translation layer that converts the PlayStation 5's own graphics API into, I assume, Vulkan. So, you know, there have been various videos posted online of games running, games that were running exclusively on PlayStation consoles running on PC. I do think it's fair to say, however, that there's a couple of potential issues with this, but I'm curious to hear your opinion about this.

Oliver McKenzie (1:57)

Yeah, I don't know whether it will be expedited. I'm not sure they're going to move up any particular data as a response to this, because ports take time and presumably they have a certain budget in terms of the time they would expect to actually get this game ported. But I do think that people will attempt to get the game running on PC fairly quickly, whether that's through translation layers or through emulation, I'm not quite sure. Especially when you consider the fact that we have models of increasing capability out there and there may be new frontier models like Astro 6.1 at that point, so I may be able to tackle this problem with much greater efficiency and capability relative to prior models. I don't know exactly how close those tools will be to actually getting a good looking playable version of GTA 6 running at 60 FPS, which sounds like a bit of a tall order, but there's been a lot of progress in these tools over the past few weeks, so I would expect that it's not outside the realm of possibility at all that these tools would have a substantially good looking version of GTA 6 running at that point, especially if new frontier models continue to be deployed. With a problem like this, like if there was a PC version, people wouldn't be talking about emulation or translation layers except as a curiosity, right? Now, there might be separate piracy issues with that PC version, but in general, it would be a different kind of problem for them to address, and a problem that I think companies are pretty used to at this point. Actually pretty used to tackling as a kind of problem to be dealt with, in large part through distribution, just having easy access to the game on a variety of platforms, including obviously Steam.

I think it is a concern, but I wouldn't assume that GTA 6 will be playable in polished form at that point. And I do expect that the vast majority of people who do want to play GTA 6 will just buy it on their console of choice. I think that's inevitably the way this thing kind of will go. And I don't expect Take-Two to move up the release day of GTA 6 substantially in response to these concerns.

I think they probably have a plan for deploying the game on PC that's pretty fixed at this point.

Richard Leadbetter (4:07)

Right. Okay. So from my perspective, there's a couple of things to this. First of all, there's the concept of basically being able to gain access to the code. And you might think the game is coming out in November. So obviously all of the reverse engineering effort is going to happen at that point. I think what we can safely assume is going to happen is that, well first of all, I believe the jailbreak for PlayStation 5 is limited to firmware 13.6 at the moment, which basically means that it's almost a given that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be running on a much later firmware or a later firmware rather. And I'm assuming that the encryption keys used for the data will be switched up. I don't think the existing decryption tools will be able to work with it. Now, if there had been a physical version of the game, that would have been pressed months ago. Maybe that would have been a different story, but it's all digital. So I don't see a route forward at the moment for decrypting the game into something that can be reverse-engineered. Now, maybe I'm woefully misinformed on that, but you can rest assure that certainly from Sony's perspective and from Rockstar's perspective, they're going to be looking to make sure that the game that actually comes out in early November is as cryptographically encrypted as possible in order to stop basically the decryption and then the reverse engineering. So I think that's basically the route forward. And it's an endeavor that won't just be applying to Gta 6, right, because obviously Sony wants to limit the impact of this jailbreak as much as possible. Now, the only thing I think that could possibly change things is if there exists an exploit for a higher firmware that Sony isn't aware of. The way this works is that basically Sony has a bounty system. So when an exploit is discovered, basically hackers disclose it to Sony and they get paid X number of thousand dollars not to share it before Sony has patched it. So I think that's kind of like an issue that Sony has got to make sure is fully covered by the time the game comes out, because I think that's the way to ensure that the data is uncompromisable, so to speak.