Retail consoles only run code signed by Sony. When you become a licensed developer you get special consoles called devkits that can (among other things) run unsigned code.
Which is interesting because we are at the point where console generations may be about to disappear. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all seem interested in making it so their future consoles can run the games from their current generation without modification or custom emulation.
In other words… They're about to become a PC gaming has had for 30 years.
And that makes them LESS likely to switch to a new chip instruction set.
Games consoles don't release OS updates which delete a chunk of old APIs and break your game -- once you've released for a console, you can generally assume the game will work on that console forever.
Games, and especially console games targeting immutable hardware, are a different world. On a console you control the environment 100% and it simply doesn't matter what you do behind the scenes as long if it works.
This is very enlightening, pretty sad that the NDA regarding console dev kit precludes upstreaming their changes to stdlib. This is a pretty regressive attitude from console makers.
Their official stance is that they can not release the code for consoles because of NDAs. You won't find any open source engine with console support because of that. They are hoping that consoles loosen up and open source their SDK.
The retail versions of modern consoles enforce cryptographic signatures on everything, so nothing will run on them without going though MS/Sony/Nintendo first.
Officially licenced developers have special devkit systems with more lax security.
You can actually run unsigned code on a retail Xbox One console officially. There are ports of RetroArch to it and all.
I suspect this permissiveness was a major reason it was never hacked throughout its full 8 year lifespan - homebrewers didn't need to enable piracy to do what they wanted.
it's highly unlikely there will be a clear general EOL for software on this generation of consoles... at all. A unified x64 target across all platforms is just too convenient for developers to give up. Xbox or Sony diverging from that would be a massive hit in revenue for them and any developers who would like to publish there. Nintendo Switch, while selling the hardware in massive amounts, still has poor library parity with x64 consoles, and it will remain like this, not just because of lower specs, but because porting is actual effort there.
Consoles give 6-8 years of guaranteed compatibility for a single console life cycle, and often extend that compatibility for another 6-8 years for the next version of the console. Is there any game that does not run on the console hardware that was current at the time the game was shipped that now doesn't because of OS updates?
You actually can run unsigned code on the Xbox. It's a bit of a hassle to get the developer account working, but completely possible. It's how Retroarch made a native Xbox app.
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