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Elijah is a freelance news writer at Polygon. He was an associate editor at The A.V. Club and Paste, and has been featured in outlets like Game Informer, Fanbyte, Unwinnable, and more. He loves media in all forms, from fighting games and horror flicks to slow cinema and visual novels. He's from the Greater Boston area.
The 14.20 update comes as homebrewers race to crack the system before Grand Theft Auto 6's release
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The digital arms race between Sony and PlayStation hackers continues. Shortly after the PlayStation 5 homebrew community found a way to jailbreak the console's latest firmware, Sony released a new PS5 update that will likely reset this progress.
The PS5’s 26.07-14.20.00 update, released Wednesday, is 1.2 GB and is currently available for download. The patch note reads, "We’ve improved the messages and usability on some screens.” While this description seems unrelated to security fixes, those in the jailbreaking scene believe more is going on, and that the change is meant to slow homebrew efforts ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6’s release.
What is PS5 jailbreaking and how does it relate to GTA 6?
Jailbreaking the PS5 allows users to download software outside Sony’s closed PlayStation Store ecosystem, potentially enabling them to pirate games. Over the last few months, the PS5 homebrew scene has made major progress, largely because advances in AI code-generation tools have made it much easier to jailbreak hardware. As of Oct. 20, homebrewers posted evidence that they reached the PS5's debug menu on 14.10 firmware, suggesting they had achieved the highest level of security access for the console.
Over the last month, Sony has rapidly released new firmware updates seemingly geared toward addressing security vulnerabilities in the PS5. Sony can make it so that for a player to download the latest update for a game, they need to be on the latest version of PS5 firmware, creating a push-and-pull dynamic where hackers race to find a new exploit for the latest firmware update, only for Sony to release another version that starts the process over.
Many homebrewers have set their sights on jailbreaking the PS5’s latest firmware update in time for Grand Theft Auto 6’s Nov. 19 release date. Beyond being the biggest release of the year, jailbreakers are focused on the PS5 release because Sony and Rockstar have drawn a great deal of ire over their stance on physical game releases. Sony announced it will stop creating physical game discs starting in 2028, while Grand Theft Auto 6 will not be released on disc.
The shift toward digital game releases has become particularly controversial given that Sony is currently trying to prove in court that players don’t legally own the games they purchase digitally. This has led many online to adopt the mentality that “if buying digital games means you don’t own them, then pirating isn’t stealing.” With the new 14.20 firmware update, jailbreakers will once again race to crack the software, as Sony presumably prepares another firmware update to stop it; both parties are almost certainly using AI to do so.