The pirated PlayStation Store that offered more than 1,600 PS5 games for free and unlocked disappeared from availability just days after it appeared, but its closure was short-lived, because within hours copies replicating the same storefront appeared on GitHub, and other similar alternatives boasting more than a thousand PS5 and PS4 games emerged, according to Tom’s Hardware.
The application, named Overdrive, was published on GitHub on October 9, and its popularity exploded when a YouTube video showing how to install it surpassed 7.9 million views. About a day later the store vanished, and user Oliver Darko posted on X that PlayStation’s lawyers “supposedly sent a cease-and-desist letter” to its creators, though according to Tom’s Hardware there are no concrete sources confirming the existence of such a letter, and the company has made no official statement.
The pirated PlayStation Store returned within hours
The shutdown did not stop the phenomenon, because a day later two new repositories appeared on GitHub, one that copies the original store’s code directly and another that replicates it from a different account, in addition to other stores that operate on the same idea, such as Orbit Store, a beta version that gathers more than 1,200 games, of which about 800 are PS5 and 400 are PS4, according to Dot Esports.
For PlayStation, the situation is turning into a cat-and-mouse game, because every time a store disappears, another takes its place almost immediately, something that repeats in the history of console piracy and that becomes harder to control when the code is open and anyone can copy it.
How PlayStation responds to the pirated PlayStation Store
The main tool for PlayStation is system updates, and the company released the firmwares 14.00 and 14.10, which are beyond the reach of Relapse, the jailbreak that works on versions 7.00 to 13.60, and which since late September allowed unlocking the PS5 in minutes. Thus, those who update their console will no longer be able to unlock it with that method, although consoles staying on an older firmware remain exposed.
The problem for those using these stores is real, because the games are downloaded from external servers with no oversight, with the risk of installing modified files or malware, and also an unlocked console loses access to PlayStation servers, while the company historically responds to such cases with bans of accounts and consoles.
The case shows how fast the PS5 jailbreak scene moves, which in a few weeks went from homemade apps to a store offering more than 1,600 games and free DLC, and which now demonstrates that closing one store is not enough to stop those that come after.