An unofficial store with over 1,600 free game downloads for jailbroken PS5s was taken down this week, but – please, pretend to be shocked – it’s already been reinstated by someone else, with Pandora’s box well and truly open.
The store, known as Overdrive, went viral a few days ago – it arrived following a new PS5 jailbreak, which, as reported by Tom’s Hardware, was compatible with all consoles except those that’d been very recently updated.
Obviously, Sony was never going to be happy about users being able to access hundreds of PS4 and PS5 games without spending a penny, so when Overdrive abruptly disappeared from GitHub shortly after its release, there was an assumption that the PlayStation owner had taken legal action to strike it down, but those claims remain unsubstantiated. Some have claimed that the creator of Overdrive actually just decided to quit of their own accord, but – you guessed it – there’s no evidence to back that up, either.
One thing is for sure, though, regardless of how or why Overdrive was killed (visiting the original page results in a 404 error), it’s already risen from the dead. While we’re not going to link to it here for obvious reasons, one user on GitHub has allegedly rebuilt the app using a decompilation of the previous build, and now it apparently boasts 1,800 games to boot, adding more salt to the wound for Sony.
This development is hardly surprising. In 2024, Nintendo took legal action against Switch emulator Yuzu, but it took barely 12 hours for replacements to start appearing online. A couple of months later, the company hit a whopping 8,535 clones with a DMCA takedown. You can understand why folks compare this sort of thing to cutting off a Hydra’s head and seeing two more sprout in its place.
Even if it wasn’t Sony behind the initial removal of Overdrive’s GitHub page, I can’t imagine that the company isn’t aware of the situation and preparing to take action against further clones. Separately, the recent jailbreak has also seen a new development that lets users play Steam games on their PS5. The GitHub page is seemingly still active for that one – between that and the Overdrive store, it looks like Sony is going to have a serious game of whack-a-mole on its hands.
PS5 emulator updates have 6 games “fully playable at 60 FPS,” and Demon’s Souls isn’t far behind.
