Ladies and gentlemen, the floodgates have opened. Only about a week after hacking team fail0verflow and lone hacker GeoHot gained access to the PlayStation 3's many software and hardware capabilities, a new hack has been released that supposedly allows any user to unlock every trophy on their list.

According to CVG, those who have used this hack claim that the only work needed is firing up a game. No matter how long the game is in the system, it will unlock every trophy and thus 100% completion. In a statement issued to CVG, Sony did not give a timetable as to when the hack might be nixed, but did acknowledge the hack’s existence saying:

"We are aware of this, and are currently looking into it. We will fix the issues through network updates, but because this is a security issue, we are not able to provide you with any more details."

Obviously, the battle for the PS3 is far from over, as GeoHot, real name George Hotz, is now facing legal action after he put the PS3’s root key on the internet. The fail0verflow team has yet to come under as significant an amount of fire, but it is likely only a matter of time before Sony turns its attention towards them as well.

One interesting point this hack brings up is the trivial nature of the trophy and the achievement. Essentially, these signifiers do nothing more than boost one player’s ego and diminish the ego of another. By now being able to instantly unlock any trophy on the PS3, it cheapens the sense of accomplishment and takes away a lot of the inherent competition.

While widely considered a bad thing, perhaps something good can come from this hack: freedom from the tyranny of the achievement/trophy. As someone who, at various points in time, was extremely obsessed with trophies/achievements, it is very disheartening to hear that they are now unlockable by way of a modded PS3 and a hack. But really, it’s almost a bit liberating to think that perhaps, after the hack has been exploited, trophies/achievements will no longer be a deciding factor in gaming.

These days, trophies/achievements sometimes discourage gamers from trying out really fantastic games because of their lack of incentives. There have probably been more than a hundred games that went ignored because they were on a system that didn’t offer an incentive — namely the DS and the Wii. Sure, there are games on these systems that do get played, but there are also some really terrible games that end up getting played on the Xbox 360 or PS3 simply because they have easy achievements.

While it’s only a thought that maybe achievements/trophies will become less influential in gamer circles, it should make more than a few gamers question how they approach games. Sony is hard at work making the hack null and void, so it’s best to just earn your trophies the old fashioned way -- by playing some games.

Do you think that this PlayStation 3 trophy hack might change the way gamers view the trophy? Will there ever come a time when trophies and other game incentives no longer influence gamer habits?

Source: CVG