Ever since the very first video games in the 70s, people have had a compulsion to tweak both hardware and software for fun or for monetary gain. Be it clever assembler code tweaks on microcomputers like the BBC, Spectrum, Oracle and Commodore to provide you unlimited “lives” on games back in the 1980s, to Nintendo DSi flashcarts enabling you to run a greater range of apps on their Nintendo.
Console producers and games developers have had a tricky relationship with the soldering and hacking crowd. In a sense, modders add worth to the systems and games - for instance chips that have been modified make it convenient for gamers who can play backups on their consoles. Likewise, software hacks adds new purpose “uncompletable” games, and in the modern gaming era it’s even normal for games developers to build in “easter egg” cheats for gamers to seek out.
Then again, software developers opine that this type of chip modding damages their profits, as chipmods can also be applied to short-circuit piracy measures, and bypassing hardware that limits discs to work just in particular geographical locations. These are compelling reasons for console and games developers to forever develop progressive measures to make chipmods more difficult to carry out.
But whatever the causes in opposition to chip modification, modding is now a big industry that isn’t will not go away while the demand is there.