When the disc presses stop, what you paid for should not stop with them.

The Erosion of Ownership

For decades, the agreement between hardware makers and buyers was simple. When you paid for software or media on a physical disc, you owned an independent artifact. It did not need a corporate server's permission to boot. It could not be delisted, remotely revoked, or made useless because a licensing agreement expired ten years later.

That agreement is being taken apart. Having already ended recordable Blu-ray media and Blu-ray recorders, Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced the end of physical disc production for new PlayStation games beginning in January 2028. When all future software lives in a closed, single-storefront digital ecosystem, ownership becomes a revocable, temporary license. When the servers eventually go dark, the hardware becomes e-waste and the software disappears.

Interoperability is Not Piracy

This platform is built by people who pay for their software and respect the work of engineers and creators. We reject software piracy entirely.

We equally reject the idea that legally purchased software should die when proprietary hardware fails or authentication servers shut down. Because the PlayStation 5 is built on standard x86-64 PC architecture running a modified FreeBSD operating system, clean-room compatibility layers, which translate system calls to standard OS interfaces and graphics calls to Vulkan, are the only long-term path to preservation. Just as WINE and Proton keep PC software running across operating systems, open-source translation layers keep software history from being locked inside a deprecated black box. Clean-room reverse engineering for interoperability is recognized in law, from Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix (9th Cir. 2000) to section 30.61 of the Canadian Copyright Act.

Our Strictly Limited Mission

Kaishaku is a factual, public-interest registry with two pillars and nothing more.

• The Anti-Scam & Verification Registry. We separate legitimate, auditable, open-source projects from fraudulent malware distribution sites. If a project has no public, verifiable source code, we treat it as a threat.
• Factual Compatibility Telemetry. We track the engineering progress of verified open-source translation layers such as KytyPS5, SharpEmu, RPCSX, AnyPS5 and shadPS4 with commit-level evidence: what boots, what renders, and what runs on standard PC hardware.

What You Will Never Find Here

We do not host, link to, or tolerate pirated software, copyrighted game dumps, proprietary system firmware, BIOS files, cryptographic keys, exploit payloads, or DRM circumvention tools. There are no download guides, no forums and no accounts. Kaishaku is an independent software engineering observatory and consumer protection index. Developers deserve to be paid for their work, and buyers deserve for that work to endure.