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Sony To 'Open' Playstation
kaphka writes "Sony will be freely licensing its Playstation 2 platform, as well as opening its architecture, according to this TechWeb article. I guess that's one way to deal with the emulators."
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While I would like to live in a world where this might happen, I don't think it can. Sony as a whole has a lot to fear from the "open" way of doing things.
Sure, they *might* be able to do okay with a genuinely "open" gaming platform (although they'd still need to be able to collect a slice of every game sold).
But Sony as a whole has its fingers in so many pies (film, music, etc...) that the "open" world will be one in which they loose. Ultimately, Sony will be backing encrypted-content hardware to protect theit content business arms.
My feeling about this is that they're nervous about M$ targeting their market (wouldn't you be?), and are taking steps to defend themselves.
Fixing copyright
Anyone else get the impression that the Sony execs read slashdot? ;)
With all this proclaiming of "They lose money on the consoles! Emulators are good! They make all their money on the games!", it wouldn't be a surprise if SOMEONE picked it up.
Of course, maybe suddenly Sony just "got it".
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now. I'm not convinced. They did have a go at allowing clones, but abandoned it when they found that it was just not helping market share at all. http://www.applemuseum.sea star.net/sections/history.html
If I am reading things correctly my guess is this a slap in the face for the X-Box. Microsodt is using commodity components to build a good value console, on the other hand Sony is going to sell the chips such they themselves become commodity items.
The integration of PS2 chips into TVs and the like would be quite groovy, however the problem with all this integration is the problem of upgrades.
Perhaps one of the goals of this strategy is to allow people like Creative Labs and the like to produce PC expansion cards that can handle PS2 games, with appropriate restrictions to ensure the games are read from the DVD/CD-ROM drive to ensure "playster" never becomes a reality.
This will almost definitely be hackable, however with the massive market available, my guess is the card might cost £50 (eventually), and this will almost definitely mean that Emulators (especially considering that most of them are Piss Poor) would be defunct.
Anyway, thats my 2p, what do you think?
I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console. Their reasoning may be that if they have other people making environments that their games will run on, they will sell more cd media (which is cheap to make). I think it's a pretty good business strategy, all they make money off of is the games anyways. The $0.10 profit on a console probably doesn't make anyone at Sony very excited.
They learned their lesson from minidisc. When it first came out, they wouldn't let anyone make minidiscs or minidisc players. Nothing sold. Now pretty much anyone can start manufacturing discs or players... and business is picking up.
I'll stick to my burner, though.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
There are actually a large number of differences between PS2 and 3DO. 3DO was an untested platform that hurt itself irrecoverably by opening up with a $799 price tag. Like all new platforms, 3DO started with the classic chicken-egg problem of, "I won't buy it because there's no games," and "I won't write for it because there's no buyers," and then allowed the problem to manifest itself with a $799 price point. These two factors combined to hurt 3DO very early on, and it's not really a surprise at all that it couldn't recoup even with products like the 3DO Blaster that brought 3DO technology to the PC.
PlayStation2, on the other hand, has a radically different situation. Unlike the 3DO, not only does PlayStation2 already have market acceptance, but they've kept the barrier to entry low with a price tag of $299--less than half that of 3DO, and far more competitive with other systems. $299 might still be high, however, for a new platform when you can purchase a Dreamcast for $199 (I'll bet ~$170 by October) and an N64 for $99, except that PlayStation2 conveniently avoids the chicken-egg problem by supporting out-of-the-box almost the entire PSX library. With these things going for it, PS2 makes for a much more attractive platform for consumers ("hey, I can play my old games on it and get new PS2 games as they come out") and for developers, since people will buy the PS2 for the PSX library. Sony's been very smart here: they've been very careful to lower the entry point as low as they can for both developers and consumers. Quite impressive. So Sony has a much, much better chance to succede where 3DO failed.
And what's interesting is that this is beginning to show us their strategy. They've already got a box with unrivaled graphics power that ships with USB and Fire--I mean i.Link ports, and the US version will ship ready for a harddrive. By licensing the platform to third parties, it's clear that Sony is really trying to go head-to-head with almost everyone simultaneously. And what's incredible is they stand a chance of winning, even against Microsoft. Where else can you get a $299 machine that has workstation-like power and runs Linux?
This is just the beginning of the PlayStation saga. I think things are going to get a lot more interesting in the near future.
Actually they are opening the platform up, check out Gameunit or EETimes.
There once was a man named Maloney
His console competed with Sony
But the box never ships
Couldn't make his own chips
"The PlayStation open? Baloney!"
It has a nice poetry.
Incidentally, I agree. I see a future, though, with two options, similar in form and reason to the way people listen to music at home now. Ordinary Janes will purchase asinine products like the Bose Wave Digital Media Center and other tightly integrated, "easy to use, easy to install" all-in-one mind cleansing machines--while people interested in quality of parts, ease of maintenance and upgrades, distributed reliance on multiple specialized parts and vendors (basically, people who spend more than two seconds to think about it) will have the opportunity to purchase Conformo-Socializer separates.
Choose your poison.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
"no hardware company in their right minds would ever want to be cloned"
Re-phrase that as "no hardware company following traditional models of physical goods manufacture would..." and I can go with it. It is however, wrong to think of computer equipment as a normal physical good. Let's look at a related industry: in cellular phones, everyone is doing closely compatible things based on standards. I think Motorola is not in a possition to complain about the results (they'd love to have more market share, but cell phones would be dead technology if not for the massive penetration that they achived due to the large number of vendors).
Cloning is the way you shove your implimentation down everyone's throat. Then it's a matter of using your first-to-market edge to brand yourself as the leader. You have to maintain your R&D at a high level, but the return is a piece of a much larger market than you would ever have had alone. It looks like Sony might be figuring this out. We'll see.
The Apple clone situation was a half-step, and a bad one that that. They wanted to essentially establish a set of OEMs, which is not a clone market. You get a clone market by standardizing your product and publishing the standards.
What's more, you point out IBM. IBM had two PC technologies that it pushed. One was (intentionally or not) allowed out the gates for cloning. One is still around today and making IBM money even nearly 20 years later... the other is a memory, kept alive by people with too little money to do anything but buy/steal/dumpster-dive it from their companies/schoools/etc.
I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console
There's no "might" about it. They are definitely losing money on each console sold in Japan. This is nothing new, though. This has been the standard practice for the last ~5 years for console makers.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I don't think this is about emulation. its more about training future dame developers. sony and other developers have this huge problem that there are very few programmers out there whit experience of console platforms. The amiga used to be a good place to find them, but the amiga is about as dead as Elvis. who programs assembler on the pc? and who has experience programming custom graphic chips?
Ninitendo lets some people hack the N64, and sony used to have Net yarose. so its noting new.
emulation, and copy protection is of course something to be afraid of. but remember that sony doesn't make a profit form selling units, they do it by selling the license to make commercial games for it, so they would gain on some emulation not loose. The only reason they don't like it is because of bad PR, but still no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come.
I think 3DO did this when their console came out. The licensed the technology so that others could make compatible units.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
PSX2 games won't be bootlegged until broadband becomes broad enough (>T1) to support DVD bootlegging. A 4 minute, 4 MB Vorbis or MPEG clip takes 15 minutes over a V.90 (4 kilobyte per second) connection. Multiply that by about a thousand for a DVD-ROM. That's over ten days!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Those can be purchased (at least for PSX 1.x). They're probably in development for PSX 2.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sony already has this. It's a workstation with a built-in PSX 2 subsystem. Costs $20,000, but its graphics performance will make you drool.
Will I retire or break 10K?
no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come
Then what's Bochs? Emulates IBM PS/2 computers quite nicely, useful for running older CPU-sensitive games.
Oh, you meant Sony's ps2. That's a different story entirely.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now.
More and more in the computer software and hardware industry, open means success. Closed means someone will take a chunk of your market, and there's nothing you can do about it.
On the extreme end of this, I was reading the latest GNOME summary, where I found this tidbit:I found this stunning. Here are three companies that have sprung up from the chaos of open source software developement, but because they are still open to working with other companies, they are litterally able to shift whole projects between them on the fly. This is a radical shift in the evolving landscape of the software business.
Watch this space. I suspect we're going to see some amazing moves that will keep economists and lawyers guessing for decades to come....
[ note to moderators: this is not flamebait or a troll. it's a genuine opinion of a genuinely pissed-off person. so at least read it before you moderate it, ok? ]
i love how this always happens; "x is _way_ too big to download with y speed, therefore nobody will ever pirate it! duh!" - then new technology pops up, and every 14-year-old kid and his brother are sucking gigs and gigs of copyrighted material off usenet/napster/gnutella/freenet/whatever.
people said this about audio cd pirating. now we have mp3. people said this about data cds. now we have dsl and cablemodems capable of tossing a few gigs around with ease. people said this about dvd movies. hey, have you checked usenet out recently? go look at alt.binaries.vcd and count the number of movies ripped from dvd.
and think about it; 2 gigs (compressed from a 4gb game) isn't all that hard to download with dsl or cable. no more difficult than people who download 4 cds worth of final fantasy psx games.
and honestly, the availability of dsl/cable is much more widespread than many people think. i live in tacoma, a mid-sized city, and the first thing i did when i moved was transferred my phone service and order dsl. same goes for many of my geek friends.
so give it a break and get a clue.
--
There's a fair bit of Slashdot-plagiarism going on, though I think adding a separate copyright to each post is a bit of an overcorrection... there is, after all, a copyright notice at the end of each page.
.sig to differentiate yourself from the Slashmob on copyright issues is probably a wise thing...
However, Slashdot has never been a bastion of copyright protection issues, so I guess, on the other hand, putting individual copyright notices in your
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyone else remember MSX? That was a great idea too, back in the early 80's, and could've been pulled off as a concept... since I was just a teenager back then, I didn't really have any comprehension of why exactly MSX and MSX2 failed as a market... anyone got any tips?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've read numerous comments that have mentioned this is what Sony and all the other console manufacturers should have done from the beginning, but I don't think it's quite that simple. If Sony did licence the PlayStation chipset years ago when it first came out, I don't think the PlayStation market would look nearly the same as it does today. There would be multiple implementation of the PlayStation architecture, all with their own particular advantages and quirks.
One only has to look at the difference between installating Linux x86 and LinuxPPC. My experience has been that the former can potentionally be a real bear, as there are such a wide variety of peripherals, cards, motherboards, CPUs, etc. By contrast, however, LinuxPPC requires virtually zero configuration. It just works.
Now, I realize that many people on slashdot don't really mind configuring hardware and hacking drivers (perhaps actually enjoy it), and I realize that some of these very same people also have a PlayStation and will likely buy a PlayStation2. However, I would bet the farm on the fact that this is not indicative of the majority of Sony's customers.
If you have a bunch of PlayStation2 "distributions" floating around in various forms in consumer electronics, you're eventually going to run into some compatbility issues. This is inevitable. This may be acceptable in the computer world, but it's totally unacceptable in the console world. If a console game doesn't work, people aren't going to go hunting for an update on a web site, they're going to return it to the store.
The whole idea of a console is that you just plug the game in and it runs. The consoles are identical, so that if it works on one PlayStation, it should work on any. Consumers have proven with their wallets that they appreciate this simplicity. It has been provent that there is a place for consoles, and a place for computers, and probably will be for some time. Ignoring this would be a mistake and reduce the level of choice available.
From what I can gather about what Sony is doing, they're actually creating a new computing platform, which may bring with it all the pros and cons of such a move. Maybe there's a way to have the best of both worlds -- somehow simpler devices like DVD players can have multiple vendors and remain completely compatible -- but it remains to be seen if that will hold true for PlayStation2.
Plus, what happens when somebody -- let's say Panasonic-- decides to augment the PlayStation2 chipset with their own 3D hardware, and make that available to developers. You then need that particular version of the PlayStation2 in order to use the game as intended. This is totally contrary to the concept of a console.
Another example is the disaster of the Macintosh clones. As soon as the machines from UMAX, Power Computing and Motorola (the worst by far!) showed up, the Mac OS became much harder to use and configure. Things weren't working because there was all this alien hardware floating around. At the time, this damaged one of the key advantages of the Mac OS -- simplicity.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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I thought it should be pretty evident why Sony's doing this: They want to make it easy to make missile guidance systems out of their Playstations. Did they ever get that Japanese export ban lifted?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
All those mp3s and VCDs are far smaller than the original.
--
Ok, how many times will the phrase 'gets it' appear in the comments?
1-5 > odds 1/35
6-10 > odds 2/5
11-15 > odds 3/7
16+ > odds [whatevers left]
How many times will beowulf clusters be mentioned?
1-5 > odds 1/13
6-10 > odds 3/5
11-15 > odds 1/9
16+ > odds [whatevers left]
Minimum bet $5, accumulators not allowed.
Game consoles are sold at a LOSS, and a big one at that. Sony is opening up the hardware for the clones, big deal, noone cares.
Sony and everyone else sells the hardware at a loss because all the money is in the games.
It you wanted to buy the parts and build it yourself (i.e. clone it), it will cost you a few times more then if you just but it at the local story. You might be able to build a system for 3-4x the cost of the Sony subsidized system.
You wont see the game license fees dropping, or the emulators being allowed ever because that's where the money is.
Once again the Slash-blurb is grossly misleading.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If Sony makes its money on the games, then emulators would be a good thing $-wise, as they provide an additional platform for the games. I don't see DVD-ROM bootlegging as a significant threat (4 GB = 10 days over 56K modem at 4 KB/s); emulators will play games off the DVD, much as Bleem! does today.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Dreamcast is Windows CE compatible, not Windows CE dependant. Some games use the Sega API, others use Windows CE. See here for some details.
Once upon a time (back when I was in college) I had a typewriter, a TI-59 programmable calculator, a video game console (very primative, it played 'pong' type games), and a stereo system. If I wanted to use a computer I had to go to a computer center to use a decwriter or a terminal to access the IBM 3033. Fax machines were also available on campus.
Today I have a Power Mac G3. All those things (and more) in one box.
Far from un-nerving I find it a very welcome improvement.
Now from a hobbiest point of view, part of the fun of 'home theater' is the choosing of and buying components. It's a similar to the difference between buying a computer system or buying the components and assembling it yourself.
For most people (aka consumers) the one box option is what they want. No decisions to make, just plug it in and go. The hobbiests and hackers will always want the ability to tweak the system. Hopefully, we'll continue have that option.
Steve M