PlayStation Vita hacks are made to give gamers the opportunity to use the portable Vita system in ways never intended by its developers at Sony. Of course, some hacks allow players to pirate certain Sony games for free. But not all hacks (or jail-breaks, as they are commonly called) were made to pirate games. Some just offer a quality of life improvement for Vita owners. But Sony has routinely prevented jail-breaking with routine firmware updates, even up to this week.
This is a bit strange considering Vita is mostly a dead gaming system. Time and time again, Sony has proved they do not want gamers to use the Vita outside of what it was originally designed for. The latest instance came with firmware update 3.72, which seems explicitly designed to fix an exploit found by Andy Nguyen. The update was released on Tuesday.
The firmware update comes in the wake of Nguyen releasing a hack called h-encore2 that would allow PS Vita users to exploit a bug in the firmware to unlock the system for whatever they needed. The hack came out on Monday.
Less than 24 hours later, Sony released its latest firmware update. Sony cited the reason for the new update as “system improvement,” but it explicitly blocks the h-encore2 hack created by Nguyen.
Nguyen has been known in the past for creating the Trinity Exploit, which uses a PSP game to exploit the gaming system. Unlike the previous Trinity Exploit, h-encore2 was a so-called “native exploit,” which is able to be used on the PS Vita without any the need for any PSP games. Additionally, h-encore2 was designed to work across a range of updates for the console.
Nguyen remained undeterred by Sony’s efforts to prevent users from exploiting the portable gaming console. The hacker vowed to create another exploit in the future to use against 3.72 and later firmware updates.
Most of the exploits for the PS Vita are not designed for pirating gaming systems. Many exploits simply allow users to overclock the gaming system, use the Vita as an emulator for earlier games, and use the internal memory to save games rather than buying the expensive memory cards sold by Sony.
Sony’s constant attempts to keep players from hacking the PS Vita are a bit odd in context. The Vita is an old system. Sony no longer sells PlayStation Plus games for the console and no longer produces new game cartridges. Still, Sony does not want any players to misuse the retired gaming system.
