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."

Comments

Sony is unlikely to "get it"

[Peter Eckersley]

However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?

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.

Open....not!

[faichai]

Everyone seems to think Sony are opening the specs, where in fact all they are doing is selling their proprietary chips to third parties (i.e. like Nvidia, mentioned earlier)

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?

Not so much "opening"...

[wowbagger]

This really isn't "opening" the Playstation 2. This is just allowing other companies to buy the chips. There is no mention of whether the specs for the chips will be under NDA ("You can buy the chips from us, and if you do we'll let you have the specs, but you cannot share them"), nor is there any indication that any other company could make video games. Kiosks, embedded displays yes, but how knows about games.

However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?

Important lesson for hardware vendors

[ajs]

If Sony had done this from the start, there would never have been unlicensed emulators. Commercial emulators would have been out there, and neither the open source nor commercial efforts would have been able to gain enough momentum (likely, but then again it could have happened).

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:

RHAD Labs has shifted focus a bit. For a long time we were doing much of the GNOME user environment work, fixing bugs, making packages, and maintaining code. However Helix and Eazel have stepped up with far greater resources and expertise in this area than we have. So we've shifted our efforts to focus on libraries and development tools.

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....

Hello... Mcfly!!!

[Duncan3]

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.