I don't, your forced under the mercy of that they keep supporting. At any time they can render your console usless and force you to upgrade.

Consoles are e-waste in my eyes, perfectly good for other uses but liocked to what the vendor wants to give. Limited by the hardware that's given and then nagged to buy latest model.

Why am I not allowed to turn an old PS4 in to a Linux router? It has a beast of a CPU, USB ports and suports SSD's, what's the issue?

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neilv 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why can't I turn an old PS4 in to a Linux router?

I simply sell my game consoles when I'm done with them.

They would make terrible Linux routers, even if they were unlocked.

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doublerabbit 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, you can do that. However the taste knowing that I will soon be nagged to update with less features working makes it a waste, I paid $$$ for it.

Shouldn't I be allowed to repurpose it for other uses than just a console when it becomes EOL?

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neilv 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Shouldn't I be allowed to repurpose it for other uses than just a console when it becomes EOL?

Yes, once hardware becomes some kind of end-of-use, end-of-support, or end-of-life (exactly what, to-be-determined), the brand should be required to unlock any aspect that hasn't already been unlocked, so that people can reuse the hardware. (And maybe put the unlocks in escrow before then, in case the brand goes out of business.)

There are also situations in which hardware should be unlocked while within use and support. But probably not for a given gaming device, or not in a way that permits that hardware be used as the gaming device while unlocked.

Gaming consoles are a very rare thing that I want locked down, as long as I am sharing whatever pool of online gamers that device accesses. (Because online gaming has way too many people who haven't yet learned to play well with others, and cheating in multiplayer games is a thing that many do.)

And the fact that I have less control and ownership of a gaming device is one of the reasons why I use a dedicated device for gaming, and also isolate it on the guest VLAN.

	▲	doublerabbit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is moot, we both have different views. As someone who really tries hard to fight the environmental waste (I litter pick, I donate, I reuse, I repurpose) it hurts to see to walk by a second hand tech store with stacks of old consoles in the window (excluding retro here) knowing they will just end up in a landfilled polluting the world for the rest of entirety and cannot be used for anything more than a paper weight. This isn't just gaming consoles. My view is that cheating is a developer/studio problem not hardware. If game companies actually enlisted proper moderation this wouldn't be an issue. Where can I report cheaters, How do I report cheaters? That was never a provided option to me. Although maybe now you can, I don't game online as much as I did, but even when you could, not one thing was done about it. I kicked hackers back in the day in my CS:S servers. If they actually hired moderators who actually did their job then this wouldn't be so much of a problem. I don't disagree. Knowing that the device is locked down I cannot ensure that I am not being used for monetary gain. Isolating to a VLAN should be the de-facto but most outside of tech have no idea what that is, so now you have a corporate brickable console prone to monitoring all for the sake of mitigation of hacking and to force you to upgrade for cash grabs. Yes, realistically Nintendo and Sony do somewhat provide a service where you can still play a PS3, as that of a PS2. They want folk to use their consoles but knowing they could just axe it like so, deters me from buying.