Piracy and the PSP

In a lengthy interview with Gamasutra about the state of the Playstation brand in 2009, Sony's senior vice president of marketing, Peter Dille, made some interesting comments about how piracy has affected their popular portable console, the PSP. He said, "we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," a platform that was slow to start anyway due to the lack of early interest from game developers. Dille mentions that while they can fight piracy with hardware upgrades in new versions, that doesn't do anything to help the roughly 50 million PSPs already out there. He goes on to address other aspects of the PlayStation line, including complaints about the pricing and exclusivity.

Comments

Emulation

[numbware]

I rarely use my PSP to actually play PSP games anymore. I usually end up playing SNES or Gameboy games through emulation. That or watching porn (at least I'm honest).

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of pirating PSP games, you pirate SNES and Gameboy games? Unless you're one of the few who has a console copier and legally dumps all of your own ROMs.

Re:Emulation

[BikeHelmet]

I download all my ROMs, but I actually own the games.

Close enough. ;)

Re:Emulation

[cizoozic]

PSP Game Library: You know it's bad when your console has rampant piracy... but only of other manufacturers' games!

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone should clue Sony in to the fact that all the games they have "released" for the PSP fell into one of three categories:

#1 - Crappy "rpg" games that can't be played for anything less than a 2-hour stretch (Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Monster Hunter, Wild Arms XF aka Wild Arms Tactics, etc).

#2 - Re-releases of games people already owned a copy of for original Playstation.

#3 - UTTER CRAP (lookin' at you, Lumines, you cheapass soulless Columns-alike).

If there'd been some truly impressive, unique, and compelling games for the PSP, it would have driven sales. If they'd made the thing to function correctly, it would have driven sales.

Instead, compare PSP vs DS to Sega Nomad vs Game Boy. What do we have in each generation? Nintendo's had a lesser screen, less processing power, less cute/pretty visuals, but more battery life and kick-ass, fun to play games. Thus, Nintendo won.

Piracy, like communism, is just a red herring Sony is using to try to distract people from the fact that they're a bunch of half-wits who would no longer know a good game if someone shoved it up their whiny asses.

Re:Emulation

[reddburn]

Very fitting -- especially on this, the 20th Anniversary of the Game Boy.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend bought a PSP via ebay and it was shipped with some pr0n on the mem card.

Messaged the seller to thank him for the "bonus material". Received a message back that he was happy the "extras" were appreciated and that a DS he sold in a similar condition was not as well received... ;)

PSP... Portable Source for Pr0n.

Re:Emulation

[Moryath]

Too true.

"Piracy" may screw with game sales, but will still have a number of the units sold (you can't play the game if you don't have the console).

PSP, on the other hand, sells like shit because there are no good games for it, UMD's suck battery life like no tomorrow (if I load a game image to the memstick I get 25% or more battery life ), and the very idea of buying a UMD movie instead of just encoding the DVD down for my memstick is fucking stupid.

I've had multiple friends ask me whether they should buy a DS or a PSP in the last year. Without hesitation, I pointed them to the DS. My PSP hasn't even been charged in the last six months, for chrissake.

Re:Emulation

[LordLimecat]

legally dumps all of your own ROMs.

has that been upheld as fair use in a court of law?

Re:Emulation

[arth1]

Monster Hunter is a bad example. You get max 50 minutes to finish any quest -- if you don't finish it by then, you fail it. some quests are shorter, and the "training school" quests are just a few minutes.

The main failing as I see it is the lack of interesting games.
Most of the games are just jap-ports, and while the nipponophile fanbois are dedicated and vociferous, there aren't that many of them. What's left after that can be summarized in two letters: EA. And if you're not into American sports or urban driving in the dark, there's pretty much nothing left.

The device itself has power for a handheld, and it shouldn't be hard to make good games for it. Consider that Jurassic Park was modeled and rendered on SGI Indigo workstations with a MIPS R4000 CPU running at 90 MHz, and that the PSP has two MIPS R4000 CPUs, each running at up to 333 MHz...

Re:Emulation

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

There's a cost barrier on UMD movies where it eventually makes sense.

Unfortunately for Sony that barrier is at about 5 bucks.

Re:Emulation

[smash]

Consider that Jurassic Park was modeled and rendered on SGI Indigo workstations with a MIPS R4000 CPU running at 90 MHz, and that the PSP has two MIPS R4000 CPUs, each running at up to 333 MHz...

Jurassic Park was not rendered in *real time*. It could have been rendered on a 286 running at 8mhz if you were to wait long enough...

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

I do the same thing. Even in the protective caddies, the disks get damaged.

What is up with disk manufacture recently? I recently paid full price for one of the few remaining copies of Windows XP at my local computer store. (I'm a Linux guy myself but my kids need their PC games). The price was insanely expensive. I tried installing it and kept getting disk failures. I thought it might be my CD/DVD drive but it wouldn't work on another box, either. You'd think Microsoft would have some quality control on their disks, especially for the huge price I was paying.

So instead, I downloaded an, ahem, shared copy on the Internet. Worked like a charm when I burned it to my own disk. I don't feel guilty because I bought the damn thing, full price, but I was surprised because the last time I bought an OS on a disk was back in the Windows 98 days and that CD was rock solid and thick. Same thing with my Win 2K OEM disk - it was thick and solid, although it scratched eaily. But this XP disk was flimsy and you could just about see through it.

C'mon, Mickeysoft! If you're gonna charge $300 for an OS, at least have it printed on a solid CD.

I know this is off-topic, but actually, not really. Crappy products and service by companies will always lead to their customers looking for another way.

Re:Emulation

[Goldberg's Pants]

Kudos for the "Clue" reference.

I was considering buying a PSP actually. The piracy aspect entered into the equation. Then I looked at the games available and realised it wasn't worth it.

Yes, Sony, I wouldn't even PIRATE your games.

About the only game I'd like is Football Manager. I like the idea of a portable version of that. But it's not worth shelling out $200 on a console for just for one title. And I literally found no other game across the entire race that I was interested in.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend bought a PSP via ebay and it was shipped with some pr0n on the mem card.

Messaged the seller to thank him for the "bonus material". Received a message back that he was happy the "extras" were appreciated and that a DS he sold in a similar condition was not as well received... ;)

PSP... Portable Source for Pr0n.

He's lucky that eBay allowed the sale. They've been known to kill DS sales with flashcarts, especially those that list large numbers of "bonuses" (the nature of which will be confirmed through out-of-band communications, Arrrrrr). As well they should. You should download your pirate games and pr0n yourself, or get them with your flashcart from your local Captain Eyepatch VAP (value-added-plunderer) who can ensure you've got the latest firmware and will save you the trouble of getting your machine raped and pillaged by all the exploit code on dodgy pirate sites out there.

Geeks know how to keep safe on line, for the most part, and can wander the seedier districts relatively safely. Mums and dads who mostly use the net for email and banking should stay the hell away from the dodgier parts, for their own safety. I wouldn't trust the pop-up ads on download sites to *always* be safe, and there's no way in hell I'd start seeding or downloading that stuff P2P because it's only a matter of time before the Big N starts tracking that kind of thing like the music industry does.

Re:Emulation

[thesolo]

Everything the parent said is 100% true. It's a slick piece of hardware, but after nearly 8 months of not using it, I finally just sold mine to a friend for his kids to use.

I used my PSP while riding the train to & from work every day, about 35 minutes in each direction. As a result, I wound up playing Lumines more than anything else because every other game I tried was a complete joke, or, in the case of GTA, too convoluted & involved for easy pick-up & put-down gameplay. If I can't turn the game off at my stop without losing all of my progress, then it's not worth playing.

And yeah, UMD movies, why on earth would I want them!? So I can rewatch half of my DVD collection in "teeny weeny eyestrain-o-vision"? (Thanks, Yahtzee.) Fuck that.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Sega Nomad as the competitor to the Gameboy? The Nomad was a straight-up portable Genesis. It came late in the life of the Genesis and was never much of anything, let alone a serious competitor to the Gameboy.

You're probably thinking of the Game Gear. That was Sega's 8-bit competitor to the Gameboy. It was actually the Sega Master System hardware in a portable form, and could play those games too with a cheap connector.

Sega had some other weird portables, like the CDX. It was a Genesis with a Sega CD in a single unit, and no screen. It was designed to be convenient for hauling around to different televisions or for use in cars.

Re:Emulation

[Hadlock]

PSP, on the other hand, sells like shit because there are no good games for it

This, and the hardware is just unappealing. I'm definitely in their core market, the 21-30 bachelor with tons of cash to burn, but

a) I already own a nintendo DS and

b) who gives a flip about a silly single (non-touch) screen gaming device these days?
 
I remember watching an episode of good eats at quakecon when they first came out (06?), for the novelty of it, but even then the speakers weren't loud enough for the three of us to hear over the din. The PSP is just a black slab of video game console, and like you said, theres nothing really eye opening about the PSP that would make you pick it over the DS except maybe, you already own a DS and feel the need to own both? I think that's really the market sony is after at this point. I honestly hadn't even thought about the PSP in probably 18 months until this article hit slashdot. My 3 year old DS Lite works just fine, thanks.

Re:Emulation

[Hadlock]

How much ram can a 286 address? That's an 8 bit processor, right? from wikipedia:

Having a 24-bit address bus, the 286 was able to address up to 16 MB of RAM...As well, there was a performance penalty involved in accessing extended memory from real mode, as noted below.

How many square inches of T-Rex skin do you think 16mb is? Not including the wire frame mesh, or course :)

Re:Emulation

[blahplusplus]

The real reason is that the game industry is over produced, and past games compete with new products. How many games are released each year? Who can keep up with them all? We can't buy every game that is released. Then there's the fact that most of them aren't worth the $60 pricetag let alone the fact you can rent them for a fraction of the price or buy them used and get the same enjoyment out of them.

Truth be told the game market is suffering from over production.

Re:Emulation

[Narpak]

Pirates are like totally the foam of the earth! The only solution to computer piracy is that everyone get sentenced to one week as an indentured servant for each day they have had a pirated sony game/app. That way a wave of thousands upon thousands of indentured servants will fuel Sony's game mill and thus provide their dozens of legitimate customers with decent low price games

Re:Emulation

[arth1]

Thus the words "modeled and".

Anyhow, it was just putting the power of the PSP into perspective. If you want another perspective, a typical SGI Indy was capable of running web, proxy, mail and DNS servers in the background while playing Doom 3 in the foreground.

For a handheld, the hardware just rocks, and isn't what holds the device back. The lack of support from Sony North America (SCEA) is the big problem -- they have been extraordinary recalcitrant and not supported games developers, but wanted a small slice of a guaranteed income while doing nothing, instead of a bigger slice which would require some active work. Leeching off the Japanese work and investments is only going to go so far, because the typical Western gamer just won't dosh out $50 for the latest jap-rpg port or old converted PS1 game.
Western games designed specifically for the PSP are few and far between, and that's where Sony should look for the real reason, instead of blaming piracy.

Re:Emulation

[Opportunist]

Tile it.

Re:Emulation

[Joce640k]

Textures can be disk-resident for software rendering. With caching it won't make much difference to rendering time (scan-line rendering rendering has very coherent memory access patterns - not random access).

Re:Emulation

[Draek]

So, to which category do God of War: Chains of Olympus and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops belong?

Yes, the PSP has its fair share of shitty games, but so does the DS and every other console in existence, portable or not. And when it comes to fun games, both have plenty of good ones, despite what the fanboys of either may say. The problem is tackling Nintendo in the portable arena is much like going against WoW in the MMORPG arena: inertia's a bitch, specially if you're a new player in the market.

Re:Emulation

[AlamedaStone]

legally dumps all of your own ROMs.

has that been upheld as fair use in a court of law?

I think more meaningful questions would be,

has this been challenged as fair use in a court of law?

or

could this be challenged under the DMCA's circumvention clause?

If I can make a copy of a videotape, or copy my CD onto my cassette, then there's no fair use obstacle (of which I know) to dumping a cartridge ROM.

I'm not familiar enough with ROM dumping to know whether the process would qualify as "circumvention", but I feel moderately comfortable saying that the claim is plausible enough to be heard in court.

(IANAL, etc.)

Re:Emulation

[pmarini]

I'll remind you of that next time you try to thaw a cube of monsanto ice...
(kind of joking here, but there are countries who allow format-shifting, you know...)

Re:Emulation

[Truekaiser]

the psp like the ds has a 'suspend' feature. just push the power switch for a split second up and release and the system goes into suspend and will start up again right where you left off once you do it again. Works in every game no need to get to a save point.

Re:Emulation

[KDR_11k]

From what I see the hardware sells pretty well though of course not on the same level as the DS. The PSP's problem is in its low software sales. On the other hand handheld systems tend to have much lower tie-in ratios than home consoles in general and the PSP is marketed as a multimedia device so quite a few purchases can probably be attributed to people buying the thing as a movie or music player that also happens to play games (or they find out that home console games are designed in a way not suitable for portable play and the PSP gets mostly home console games...). The DS isn't exactly free from piracy either and we don't see Nintendo complain about that thing.

Re:Emulation

[SharpFang]

I thought it could address 16MB or RAM, not of diskspace?
Or does rendering a T-Rex have to be an atomic operation?

Re:Emulation

[smash]

There's these things called "disks" and "files" that can store a lot more than RAM. Yes, retrieving data from them constantly is slow. It doesn't mean its not possible.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

"If there'd been some truly impressive, unique, and compelling games for the PSP, it would have driven sales. If they'd made the thing to function correctly, it would have driven sales."

And your not going to get those games due to piracy. No developer wants to invest huge sums of money, just to see the parasites downloading their game from Bittorrent.

Which came first, the piracy or the lack of good games? Chicken and egg ideed.

Piracy is killing the PSP, and its why the number of great games dried up. Hopefully digital distribution will fix that, i'm looking forward to PixelJunk monsters on PSP, one of my first PSP must have purchases for a while, but there are plenty of others. I skimmed the store last night, and there were a couple of potential purchases already. Sony need to market PSN as a decent iPhone App Store, now that consumers get what it's all about...

Re:Emulation

[RegularFry]

> How much ram can a 286 address? That's an 8 bit processor, right?

No, 16-bit. Not that it makes your argument any less wrong :-)

Re:Emulation

[smash]

Oh don't get me wrong, the hardware does rock, that's why i bought one. Just the example didn't really depend on processing power that much.

As you say, the hardware is certainly not a problem. Its got all the ingredients there - plenty of flash storage capacity, cheap optical media for content, wifi, impressive colour display, good audio, HEAPS of processing power, etc - and good enough battery life (6hrs straight is plenty of time to be playing a portable on a single battery)... its the software that is holding it back.

Re:Emulation

[smash]

So, that's two games that I can play on my PS2 anyway (yes, they're "special" versions. same basic gameplay)?

I own a PSP - i don't want the same content I have already played on PS2/other console.

Take a leaf out of nintendo's book and offer a half decent platformer, vertical shooter, puzzle games, etc.

I don't *want* some drawn out epic while I have 5 minutes to an hour to kill while I'm on the bus/plane, etc.

Sure, I'll buy a couple of that sort of game, but every time I go looking for something to buy for my PSP, there's nothing I actually want because I haven't played 15 different variants of the same game on various other platforms.

Re:Emulation

[somersault]

Yep I've mainly used my PSP as an MP3 player and portable TV (watching TV in bed, streamed from PlayTV on my PS3). Games and even UMDs can be bought v cheap these days, but I'm not often in a situation where I can make good use of mobile gaming capabilities.. the most I'm sitting down for outside of my house is maybe 10 minutes waiting for takeaway.. only usually enough for one full mission/race in your average game.

Re:Emulation

[KDR_11k]

Modeling apps don't exactly do high framerates, often scenes have to be simplified in the editing mode so you can actually get them rendered somewhat fast and even then single-digit framerates are acceptable. If you don't mind untextured scenes at single-digit framerates (often with reduced complexity on the models, replacing stuff with its bounding primitives and whatnot), sure, you can get Jurassic Park on the PSP...

Plus I wonder what the power usage on an SGI workstation is, I doubt it'd run on a 2000 mAh battery for long.

I don't think the PSP's niche is "fans of Japanese games" because the DS has way more of those games (especially the big ones, you know, the Nintendo titles).

Re:Emulation

[KDR_11k]

WoW didn't become #1 out of sheer inertia (how?), it became #1 by doing MMORPGing better and in a way that the average joe could appreciate. That's why it didn't simply convert the EQ and UO players or whatever was on the MMO market before WoW, it converted non-MMO players (which may not actually have been playing any games before) into MMO players.

Same for the Game Boy and DS, they became #1 by doing portable gaming better than the competition and by increasing the appeal of gaming (Game Boy: Tetris, DS: Nintendogs, Brain Age), bringing new non-gamers into the portable gaming market instead of attempting to convert home console users into portable gamers. The PSP didn't do that, it tried to expand Sony's home console monopoly (a monopoly is not completely unopposed, just without effective opposition) into the portable realm by offering the same things as the home console (a big advertised game was the GT4 PS2-PSP connectivity), forgetting that the home console market already has a better gaming system at home and its games were designed for playing at home, leaving the PSP with few unique selling points. From what I hear from Americans over there portable gaming isn't very big anyway because public transportation is pretty bad and you can't play a game on the commute when you're steering a car. The DS, even when played at home, still offers a unique experience with unique games that the hiome consoles don't even approach.

Re:Emulation

[KDR_11k]

Nintendo seems to care mostly about hardware, not software. They attack flashcarts, counterfeit games, etc but not the actual ROMs on the net (they probably do a bit but not nearly as much as they do against the sellers of physical goods). Not sure why but I'd guess either because it's just much more feasible to stop the distribution of things that must be manufactured in a factory (usually outside of the countries in which the largest console markets exist which means they have to be shipped as well) than simply copied on any computer connected to the internet or they just figure that emulation and such on a home computer isn't a big threat since it's always going to be a step behind compared to home consoles and lacks the portability of a portable system. Plus with the DS the control system, which is a major selling point for many of the bigger games on the system, can't be replicated easily and especially not on most portable systems (I don't think touchscreen controls can be done on the PSP).

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone should clue Sony in to the fact that all the games they have "released" for the PSP fell into one of three categories:

#1 - Crappy "rpg" games that can't be played for anything less than a 2-hour stretch (Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Monster Hunter, Wild Arms XF aka Wild Arms Tactics, etc).

#2 - Re-releases of games people already owned a copy of for original Playstation.

#3 - UTTER CRAP (lookin' at you, Lumines, you cheapass soulless Columns-alike).

If there'd been some truly impressive, unique, and compelling games for the PSP, it would have driven sales. If they'd made the thing to function correctly, it would have driven sales.

Instead, compare PSP vs DS to Sega Nomad vs Game Boy. What do we have in each generation? Nintendo's had a lesser screen, less processing power, less cute/pretty visuals, but more battery life and kick-ass, fun to play games. Thus, Nintendo won.

Piracy, like communism, is just a red herring Sony is using to try to distract people from the fact that they're a bunch of half-wits who would no longer know a good game if someone shoved it up their whiny asses.

Game Boy's primary competition through life was the Game Gear... which I owned That thing mowed down a battery garden like a finely-tuned weed whacker in early morning dew. The screen resolution sucked and I was too young to figure out that they had already invented portable tv's... so I got suckered into buying one. I even bought the stupid magnifying glass hoping it would make it suck less.... it didn't.

Even Mortal Kombat II sucked on that thing... it only had six characters.

Re:Emulation

[Nursie]

"who gives a flip about a silly single (non-touch) screen gaming device these days?"

Lots of folks. The DS screens are too small IMHO, and I don't care at all about using some dinky stylus when I can have a PSP that operates pretty similarly to any other playstation game controller.

Not only that, but the ability to hook it up to a TV is also good.

There aren't many great games for it (there are some) but the form factor and hardware IMHO have some advantages over the DS. IMHO because by the tone of your post you seem to disagree, which is fine.

Re:Emulation

[Spatial]

PSP, on the other hand, sells like shit

Not really. 45 million sales is almost as much as the Wii, or the combined sales of the PS3 and 360. Only the DS leads it by a significant amount: 55 million more.

Re:Emulation

[MemoryDragon]

There are some unique games, Papaton for instance, but if you count the number of really playable games on that platform you probably come down to 5-8 games... around 6 of them being released within the first year!

Most people after a while being bored simply hack the platform open to play emulated games due to drought of really interesting games.
The last psp game I bought was Gods of War and Papaton since then nothing remotely interesting has been released...
(Btw. the same goes for the DS I am sort of sick to look for gems under 10.000 tons of pony games...)

Re:Emulation

[aliquis]

#1 - Crappy "rpg" games that can't be played for anything less than a 2-hour stretch (Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Monster Hunter, Wild Arms XF aka Wild Arms Tactics, etc).

#2 - Re-releases of games people already owned a copy of for original Playstation.

This may be because the goal of the PSP has always been to deliver console like games in a portable form factor. If that's not what you want don't buy it.

Personally I have a DS, which I don't use, and a Gamecube, which I don't use much either, the games there may be easier to pick up but that is a hell of a lot of simple crap there to, so it all depends on what you want, as a Playstation 2 replacement the DS probably don't do well.

Re:Emulation

[SendBot]

net services aren't very resource intensive, unless they're serving a significant load, and yes indy's were nice for doing those things.

Doom3 however, having been released a decade after the indy was discontinued, would probably not run so well. Iknow,Iknow, you probably meant doom2.

I got a sansa mp3 player some time ago that plays doom pretty well on its mips proc!

Re:Emulation

[aliquis]

b) who gives a flip about a silly single (non-touch) screen gaming device these days?

While the posibilites of the touchscreen on the DS is nice I'd prefer the PSPs screen over the DS. The issue may be protecting it but that's probably solvable. Higher res instead of "silly useless dual-screen" yes thanks.

Re:Emulation

[geminidomino]

I finally got one when I found out about Dark Alex's firmware and popsloader. I don't even HAVE to pirate PSX games to play them on my PSP; I have two binders full of them. Before the PSP, I was waiting breathlessly for the PSX emu on the GP2X to come to fruition (don't think it ever did. :( )

Playing Legacy of Kain and SotN at work overnight alone made it worth it for me. YMMV.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want another perspective, a typical SGI Indy was capable of running web, proxy, mail and DNS servers in the background while playing Doom 3 in the foreground.

The SGI Indy was a lowend MIPS workstation that came out in 1993. If that antique can run Doom 3 I may finally be able to understand the UNIX workstation snob.

That easily tops Doom3 on an SLI Voodoo2 setup. :)

Re:Emulation

[aliquis]

The DS isn't exactly free from piracy either and we don't see Nintendo complain about that thing.

Yeah... exactly.

Re:Emulation

[MistrBlank]

I think you meant Sega Game Gear.

The Nomad was a portable Genesis.

Oh, and you forgot the Atari Lynx.

Re:Emulation

[bigstrat2003]

b) who gives a flip about a silly single (non-touch) screen gaming device these days?

Anyone who's paid attention, and realized that almost no one does anything noteworthy with the touch screen on the DS. I love my DS, but I don't kid myself that the touch screen makes it any better than my PSP. If games actually used it well, it might be cool. As it is, it's just there.

Re:Emulation

[bigstrat2003]

I own a PSP - i don't want the same content I have already played on PS2/other console.

Sequels/prequels are not "the same content".

Re:Emulation

[MikeBabcock]

I've been using suspend to play Daxter over the last several months in various situations.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Patapon and Puzzle Quest as well. My wife beat both the latter games before I did even, spending hours certain that she must be almost done.

To be honest, I quite like that Sony allows re-releases of older games (don't we usually complain that game companies do nothing with their old IP?), and creative games with no real interference (Flow, Flower, Calling all Cars, etc.)

Sony doesn't require that every game be a mega-seller, and if you want to create a cool little art project game for a few thousand people, they're a good choice of who to deal with.

Re:Emulation

[Om]

Nothing like looking at 4" tits in glorious 480x272 ress.

Re:Emulation

[drinkypoo]

The Indy has more I/O bandwidth than the PSP. The PSP almost certainly has more memory bandwidth. One of these things is not like the other... Wait, there's only two things here, I guess they must be different in spite of using the same core (hint: one 4400 is not necessarily much like another 4400. Where is the secondary cache located, and how much is there, for example... This was true for Indys, too. I have an Indy with a R4400SC module, it's the fastest Indy CPU ever. (There was an R5k but the 5k is slower at most operations.)

Re:Emulation

[CronoCloud]

Take a leaf out of nintendo's book and offer a half decent platformer, vertical shooter, puzzle games, etc.

They do. It's just you haven't noticed.

Re:Emulation

[evilkasper]

You know I bought my PSP the day it came out. I was traveling a lot at the time and had high hopes for it. The release games weren't very engaging to say the least. Then it seemed like there was a period where they only released movies for it. So I stopped using it. I would wager that I'm not the only person who did this. Sony seems to have really gone off the deep end in the past few years, bad marketing, not properly supporting the PSP, horrible price schemes .. is it just me or do they keep making more expensive versions of the PS3? So the clais of piracy ate my profit seem far fetched to me.

Re:Emulation

[Megane]

For me, PSP games just aren't worth the effort to download. The games that I actually play are few enough, and usually discounted, so I have the originals. And it's not just battery life that makes CFW+rips better than UMD, it's also the "jukebox mode", where all the games are just there on the stick, and I can change games without having to carry a bag full of other crap.

But I haven't been playing either the PSP or the DS in months, simply because I've currently been playing an MMO.

Also, UMD movies are stupid. I actually have one, but I got it for a dollar on clearance from a used book store. I'd say the plastic case is worth the dollar. And it's still shrink wrapped.

Re:Emulation

[LWATCDR]

I suggest that you look up virtual memory on Wikipedia next.

Re:Emulation

[Megane]

#3 - UTTER CRAP (lookin' at you, Lumines, you cheapass soulless Columns-alike).

Hey, Lumines isn't total crap. It unlocked thousands of PSPs before people discovered the battery hack.

Re:Emulation

[astrokid]

It's godly for music games.

Ouendan - Elite Beat Agents - Rhythm Heaven > Same genre games on the PSP

Re:Emulation

[cbreaker]

Ohh don't be such a twit.

I mean, what the hell do you mean "Nintendo Won"?

It wasn't a death-match. Sony has sold a lot of PSP's and made a bundle of cash on them. 50 million units is nothing to sneeze at.

Just because someone is more successful than you, it doesn't mean THEY WON and YOU LOST.

Get over yourself.

Re:Emulation

[grumbel]

So, to which category do God of War: Chains of Olympus and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops belong?

The problem of the PSP isn't good games, its unique games. The games you mentioned there are downsized versions of big console titles, I just don't care to play them when I could just as well play the big version instead. It is the "been there, done that" factor that the PSP just can't escape, getting downscaled versions of games that I already played last year just isn't very appealing, even if the story is a bit different, graphics and controls are just to much alike and also worse then on a real console.

The DS of course has plenty of shit and not all that much good stuff either, but at least its good stuff is unique and provides an experience that I just can't get on any of the big consoles.

Its really kind of a shame, the PSP hardware is great and you could make some awesome 2D platformers on that device, to bad everybody tries to turn it into a small PS2 instead.

Re:Emulation

[Moryath]

Which came first, the piracy or the lack of good games?

Piracy - e.g. the ability to copy a UMD game - didn't happen until long after the PSP was out. Remember, it was released in March 2005 (shit, has it really been 4 years???). It wasn't until a year and a half later that ISO loading was a reality.

The lack of good games has been a reality for the life of the console.

Re:Emulation

[Ceiynt]

SCEA seems to think that everything they make now has to appeal to everybody by doing everything. This will = fail in more ways then one.
The DS, with all it's touch glory, has yet to have a break away PDA like software, because that's not what it was really meant to do. It was made to play games, and that's what it does, very well.

Re:Emulation

[scribblej]

They belong in the 'crap' pile.

I liked GoW on the PS2, I did not like it at all on the PSP. To be fair, though, any game with a 'Press X now to not die" mechanic loses points for me.

I /loved/ all the prior Metal Gears from the very first one I played on the NES. You could say I'm a fan of the series. I couldn't play it on the PSP at all, the camera controls killed it for me pretty much out of the box. You can't see WTF you're doing.

Not to mention even with the 3rd party 'grips' they sell for the PSP, it's a total bitch to try to use it if you do not have the hands of a child.

So unrelated to what you said, but very related to the topic, I hacked a PSP for a friend, and he would go to the local video game store and ask to demo a game on his PSP, and walk around the store while it was copying to his stick.

I don't condone this behavior. But I do find it very, very funny.

Re:Emulation

[thesolo]

I know about the feature, only it doesn't work for every game.

If I suspended GTA in the middle of a car chase or something, when I tried to resume the game it would take me back to my last saved point and lose my current progress. Maybe it was a firmware bug or something, but I remember it distinctly, it was utterly infuriating! Lumines worked perfectly though with it, I could suspend a game at any time and resume it later, leading to epic 900,000 point games that spanned several days of gameplay on the train.

Re:Emulation

[morphles]

Lumines IS awesome game. And there are some nice games for psp. But anyway i just wanted to say that imho lumines is very good and unique game. I guess you just didin't give enough time, or it just doesn't suit you. It's nowhere near crap.

Re:Emulation

[Aphoxema]

My friend gave me his cracked PSP about a year ago. The only game I play on it is Disgaea. I have free grabs at roms I can download within hours and stll the only game I play is Disgaea.

Re:Emulation

[Moryath]

I'll take your opinion with as much weight as the your skill with the english language - in other words, none.

Lumines, as GPP pointed out, is a pathetic rip-off of a multitude of "puzzle games" over the years, the earliest and easiest to pick out is Columns. There is nothing "good" or "unique", and certainly nothing inventive, about it.

I had more fun playing NES Tetris on my PSP than I did "playing" Lumines.

Oh, and Kaz Hirai called. He says you can stop sucking his cock now. They found another fanboi to take your place.

Re:Emulation

[morphles]

Columns has no depth compared to lumines thats it.

And you acting so high about your english skill just shows your ignorance that not everyone here is native english speaker.

Lumines could be compared to tetris attack however, but thats only one action-puzzle game i know that compares to lumines.

Re:Emulation

[guitarMan666]

I actually don't mind the PSP. What I do mind is that unlike any other computerised platform they won't let me write code for it myself or use code that other people release legally (GPL, regular copyright, whatever). The PSP shouldn't have been marketed as so full-featured if they didn't want people taking advantage of it. It's a wonderful little device, I use mine, unhacked, for just about everything from playing games to listening to music. If they were to stop spewing this crap "oh piracy is killing us" and open up the platform, developers would flock. Of course it could be too little too late.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

But the thing that has to be considered is, and I'm a horrible person for bringing this up, is what dsales/dt is. The DS sold twice as many in the same amount of time and the Wii sold twice as many in half the time. *That* is the important thing.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop making up numbers... PSP does seel like crap. 15million sold, not 45 million and that is horrible compared to the DS at 30+ million and the wii at 50+ million.

and I'll post a reference:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Nintendo-pushes-get-more-game/story.aspx?guid={2FD1E945-54D6-4C4E-B627-A6BA1F341320}

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

all you true geeks will lol @ me but where can I learn more about running emulators on my psp? I dont want to pirate games but playing some old school NES games would be sweet. Thanks

Re:Emulation

[Theoboley]

I bought two flashcarts for the GBA off of ebay. One SD Version, which I soon found out wouldn't play most NES roms because of some bogus 256Kb load limitation, and then the CompactFlash version of the same thing, with a 512MB Flash card. I haven't touched a GBA cartridge since.

Then again, I Might have gotten them from Amazon... They might be a bit more lenient on the Flash Carts.

For the record, You can also find a TON of counterfeit games on Ebay... I had bought a copy of The Legend of Zelda - Minish Cap and it looked fully authentic, until you looked at the actual cartridge. First red flag, was on the back, Licensed by Nintendo was spelled incorrectly, Second, The little gold insignia on the front of GBA carts was suspiciously missing, and third... the friggin label was WHITE rather than RED. Oh and if you look close, there is an imprint of a letter a number on the front of the cart.

I got this cartridge from no other place than Hong Kong...

I have another story about these, but that'll be best held for another time.

Re:Emulation

[viralburn]

I got my PSP a while back, I don't actually play any games on it but I use it a lot, I find bookr is a pretty good ereader and i use it as an mp3 player (sometimes). Mostly for reading though, and it is a lot cheaper than most e readers ... also a bit of fun.

Re:Emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking worldwide, doofus. The DS has over 100 million sales, and the PSP has over 45 million sales. 30 million for the DS? You must be nuts.

Poor excuse

[Hatta]

Piracy is rampant on the DS too, and there's tons of money being made there.

Re:Poor excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy is probably the main reason the PSP hardware sells at all.

Re:Poor excuse

[Chuck Chunder]

I don't know how much a PSP costs to make but I think the days of hardware manufacturers subsidising their consoles must be on the way out.

When there's a significant amount of piracy it means you are not only subsidising the pirates but have to charge your actual game-buying customers more (or pay developers less) to try and recoup that money.

I think Nintendo have a sensible idea in selling reasonable hardware at a reasonable profit.

Re:Poor excuse

[stastuffis]

Piracy is rampant on the DS too, and there's tons of money being made there.

Agreed. Buy a flash cart, a microSD card and you're off to the piracy races for the DS. Much less complicated than PSP modding even though that is relatively simple.

It boils down to a few things: price, game selection and allure of the hardware.

It automatically failed on price. Remember, when its price dropped the PSP received a decent boost in sales. Unfortunately, due to their sparse selection of quality games, I don't think it held much interest.

The launch of the DS was stronger. The DS Lite reinvigorated and popularized the console. Also, it provided an interesting way to play games. Now games could be made that actually interested mom and pop (read: Brain Age). The PSP stuck with hardcore technological advantage and fell on its face. Not to mention the 'nub' joystick is a pain to get used to or the disparity in battery life.

Sony has no one to blame but themselves, but honestly, they've done relatively well in an arena that Nintendo absolutely slaughters.

Re:Poor excuse

[RiotingPacifist]

Funny how the PlayStation was the most pirated console of its time, yet it still beat the n64 which I'd assume was a real pain to pirate for. Now the DS is pirate to hell, and the psp is losing, oh how the tables have turned.

Re:Poor excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

PSP owners tend toward the 18-30 year old male demographic, and many of them are "hardcore" gamers. Piracy is second nature to them.

The DS is overwhelmingly popular with kids and casual gamers, two groups who (generally) wouldn't even know where to start with the piracy.

Of course plenty of DS owners are 18-30 males as well, and piracy IS rampant on the DS, but-- well, I think you see where I'm going with this.

Re:Poor excuse

[Hadlock]

I think the days of bleeding edge CPUs are over for consoles. The cell was an interesting design, but a failure in the marketplace outside of fanbois. The Xbox and Gamecube/Wii are examples that you can throw a PPC (or 3, in microsoft's case) plus whatever the cutting edge GPU technology is at the time at the problem and have a functional console. The rapidly shrinking cost of processors ill probably keep the cost at $300 for the next decade or so. Besides, subsidizing the first 100,000 units isn't a big deal when you plan on ultimately selling 20 million of them over the lifespan of the design. I think even sony is making money on consoles now. Nintendo was able to take half a step back from bleeding edge tech and make a profit immediately.

Re:Poor excuse

[pmarini]

illegal copies of games (or electronic media in general) is fought in the wrong way by the copyright owners and distributors:
instead of making life much harsher for those who legally obtain them (loan from a friend or the local library, purchase and return from different stores in rotation, finding abandoned copies on the underground, ...) they should simply lower the price to an acceptable level.
I know that what I'm going to say "targets" a different "market" but when a single console game costs as much as a family dinner out or a family night out at the cinema, please keep don't buying them, so the industry will feel even more hurt by this digital piracy and put more DRM and bullprice into it.
seriously kids, when was the last time that you read a (non-school) book ?

Re:Poor excuse

[Chuck Chunder]

The PS3 was probably slightly different in that Sony were also using it to win the HD format war so there was more strategic advantage to them (and profit down the road) than merely hoping to sell a lot of games at some point.

That alone is probably enough to mean that the PS3 won't be a failure in an absolute sense.

It's unlikely there'll be such a circumstance for the next generation though.

Re:Poor excuse

[Ikonoclasm]

Homebrew apps are the only reason I bought my PSP. Well, that and the FFT remake since you can't find the original PSX disks any more. The easily available game rips didn't hurt, but they didn't really contribute anything either seeing as the PSP's game library is so anemic. The homebrew community has added waaaaay more value to the PSP than anything the professional development community has added. I think Sony would be wise to reconsider their business model and, instead of selling a closed platform for licensed developers, market it as an open platform for all developers with a subscription service that provides professionally coded versions of all the homebrew apps that run seamlessly with the factory/updated software. Their current business model isn't good (due mainly to there being no games worth buying), so they really need to adapt and figure out a way to monetize their biggest selling point: hardware that is superior to the competition.

Re:Poor excuse

[hansamurai]

Do you have numbers on the PSX being the most pirated console of all time? I'd be surprised if that was true as it required a hardware mod or some other hardware purchase. Xbox could be soft-modded and in the case of the Dreamcast, could just burn any game essentially.

Re:Poor excuse

[crossmr]

When there's a significant amount of piracy it means you are not only subsidising the pirates but have to charge your actual game-buying customers more (or pay developers less) to try and recoup that money.

Apparently you're new to this planet. They'll do both.
They'll raise the hardware cost to sell it at a profit AND they'll raise the game price to make up for the piracy.

Re:Poor excuse

[ausekilis]

Piracy is rampant on the DS too, and there's tons of money being made there.

Look no further than r4ds, snesDS, neoDS. Sure, I could pick up more games for the DS... but I like playing super metroid.

Re:Poor excuse

[RiotingPacifist]

I did say of its time, I meant the "5th generation" of consoles (sega saturn vs ps vs n64). Apart from Wikipedia all I can offer as numbers is the fact that everybody I knew who owned a PS had it chipped (you could get it done for a £10). While I'm sure piracy was possible on the n64 it would require cartridges which are harder to get than cd-rs.

While the xbox (and xbox360) can be soft-modded, this can only be done if you don't want to play online, so I suspect the piracy rates to be much lower than ps1 (again no numbers just anecdotes, i.e nobody else I know bother cracking the xbox (and when I did it, it was just to play with Linux)).

Re:Poor excuse

[Ceiynt]

I would say that yes, the PS3 did help win the next gen HD Optical Disc format. But it's too late. Optical media is quickly being outpaced by SSD and flash devices. Blu-Ray holds something like 40gig. Credit card sized flash devices can hold more. Yes, they'll be a little more expensive to produce, but it will be the media format of the future for physical distribution. No mechanic parts to wear out, unless you use some sort of spring loaded slot, and the cooling fan for the CPU on the reader. Upgrading the resolution quality of the media wouldn't require new readers, just a simple firmware upgrade to the device. No CD rot, no worrying about dings on the disc. Only thing is worrying about losing the things because they are so small. They can even pile on a bunch of old movies, or a whole trilogy on a single flash device, and have it spit it out in 1080p or i whatever they want to spit it out in.

Re:Poor excuse

[Akaihiryuu]

I like my PSP, but you're right...there are not very many good games for it. I have about 6. However, it is very useful to me as an mp3 and video player (encoding stuff to it that is, not buying overpriced UMD movies). I do have to say, however, that the good games (as few as they may be) tend to be really good.

Re:Poor excuse

[hansamurai]

Okay, missed that at it's time, which makes sense then. I actually did have a little thing that plugged into the back of my PSX and then had a spring on my CD drive to hotload games... just didn't know anyone else that did.

Re:Poor excuse

[trytoguess]

No, to pirate on the PSP you need to do some pretty nonlayman modification to your machine. It gets much easier if you know someone who's already done the deed, or if you buy one of those piracy kits online, but even with step by step tutorials online, the whole process not something a layperson would be comfortable doing.

Re:Poor excuse

[Gizzmonic]

No CD rot, no worrying about dings on the disc. Only thing is worrying about losing the things because they are so small.

BluRay has a scratch proof coating and excellent error correction. Also, who is going to pay for all those flash cards? Console developers already don't like paying 10 cents or less per optical disc. The future, if anything, is downloaded games. And a grim future it is-one where you can't resell your games, or bring them to your friend's house.

Re:Poor excuse

[demonlapin]

The Xbox was BORN to be modded. (Soft-modded ones were also fairly easy to keep clean for online play.) If your friends still have their Xboxes, get them together, do the softmod, and put XBMC on them.

Re:Poor excuse

[Ceiynt]

I agree 100% that the future is digital distribution, and would have noted that in my first post, but then I would have been flamed for the obvious fact that not everyone has ditched dial-up, or can't. Maybe in 10 years when the internet in the far reaches of no where can get 1Gbps up/down for pennys a day. But I still see the inbetween as flash media.

Re:Poor excuse

[Hadlock]

Also, who is going to pay for all those flash cards?

I suspect, that in five years' time, 50GB of flash memory will be less costly (or at least under a dollar) in mass quantities. Blu-Ray will probably be The Last Great Optical Media. Whoever writes a song with that title, I want credit in the line notes. Thanks in advance.

Re:Poor excuse

[Theoboley]

I for one wouldn't like to wind up buying a 32GB flash card every time i want a new game. The cost on those things (right now) are ungodly expensive. And that's the closest comparable size to a BD Disc. Go up to 64, and granted you eclipse the size of the BD Disk, but you also pay a mint for the card/SSD.

I see the BD Disc going nowhere fast, until the price of solid state media comes down in price.

and even when that happens, who's to say that there won't be yet another type of optical disk technology?

poor excuse indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

personally, The only reason I even own a PSP is the "piracy" functionality it offers.

people need to get off this whole copyright system in general. Times have changed, they always will change... It is just a matter of coming up with a new "system" that meets "pirates" and copyright holders on a middle ground.

Don't ask me for suggestions, I have no great ideas.... yet

Of course it's piracy's fault

[Dotren]

It can't have anything to do with the quality of the media right?

Granted, I've never been much of a Playstation person, normally I tend to enjoy more of Nintendo's lineups, but I can't recall the last time I read about a PSP game that I had even the slightest interest in.

Putting that aside for a moment, do they actually have data to support this or are they just using piracy as an excuse to explain low sales numbers?

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[Shadow of Eternity]

What probably happened is they picked a number for how much money they wanted to make and when they didn't make it blamed it on piracy.

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

My kid was asking for a DS, and I was hoping to get something that would do video too, so I looked at the PSP. The _only_ game it had to play was Lego Star Wars.
What's that? This $150 handheld has a shitty port of the last version? Hello Nintendo!

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

The DS can play video too, though not natively (not sure of the new DSi's capabilities).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_storage_devices

Also has an added bonus of being able to pirate NDS games :)

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[reddburn]

What's really funny (I was thinking about this above), is that I get better gameplay from an old Game Boy (Happy 20th Anniversary) than I ever have from a PSP...

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[brkello]

Why does this get modded up? Seriously, if you wrote software, wouldn't you be at least slightly irritated that people were pirating your work? My friend's husband just wrote a game for the iPhone. Within hours of its release there were already 4 different pirate copies on the web. But piracy isn't a problem, right? Are you guys all 12 year olds downloading MP3s? Why are discussions on piracy here always so immature?

Re:Of course it's piracy's fault

[demonlapin]

Are you guys all 12 year olds downloading MP3s? Why are discussions on piracy here always so immature?

Er, I think you answered your own question.

Oh, and they're downloading porn, too. Not just MP3s.

That explains everything!

[mikfire]

And here I had been thinking that it was because there are no games, the controls suck and the load times are outrageous.

Re:That explains everything!

[gokwyjibo]

And don't forget it's horrible battery life. I use mine infrequently and every time I go to play something that battery's dead and needs to be recharged. Unlike my NDS, that thing's battery keeps going like the Energizer Bunny.
I think I'm gonna get rid of my PSP just because there's nothing good for it. There was good slew of games when the thing first launched but nothing as of late.

Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[joocemann]

... as if that won't also get cracked. lmfao.

I call it the "Nerd Cold War". Company X is getting products pirated and hires nerds to come up with countermeasures... Piracy scene nerds then whack away at it for a little longer, maybe even a whole month, and then crack it and everything is back to where it was... Company X adds new stupid idea, Piracy Nerds step up and destroy it.... AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

30 Million Cannabis users and the US thinks they are doing something about it by making it illegal. Man will do what he f****** wants.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and how does this all fit in with the PlayStation 3 STILL uncracked after two years on the market?

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[The End Of Days]

Man will do what he f****** wants.

You can say "fucking" here. Fake cursing is pretty silly in a forum that doesn't censor.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[joocemann]

Whats to crack? The PS3 comes with a generally open hardware platform, allows you to upgrade the HDD without voiding the warranty, and you can install alternate OSs without a modchip.

Sony made it so people don't even care to because pretty much everything people do with modded consoles is made available.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[joocemann]

Do it for the kids. :)

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do it to the kids. :)

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's what Profanity Blacklist is for.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not really. You can upgrade the HDD; but the alternate OS install function is mostly a farce. Without access to the GPU, and stuck under a hypervisor, PS3 "otheros" is a cheap way to play with linux on cell, and nothing else.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Xtravar]

Sony made it so people don't even care to because pretty much everything people do with modded consoles is made available.

Except pirate games... and now play PS2 games.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[syousef]

Perhaps his employer censors and he'd like to keep his job.

By the way if you don't think slashdot censors try writing a medium length post full of obscenity. The tolerance is pretty high but the filter is there (or at least was last time I checked which admittedly was some time ago). If you're not an angry foul mouthed fool, and you're not quoting one and adding your own obscenities you'll probably never encounter the filter.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[orgelspieler]

I had just assumed it was irony, given the context of his post.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[sqrt(2)]

It's not worth the effort. With the exception of just a few exclusives, all the games worth playing on the PS3 are also on the 360 or PC.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[sa1lnr]

"You can say "fucking" here. Fake cursing is pretty silly in a forum that doesn't censor."

Yep, no problem saying it on here, actually doing it is a totally different matter. ;)

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Kirth]

I don't see your problem with cursing; as it happens, there are also europeans here who don't share that specific american brain-damage (scissors-in-the-head) regarding curse- and cuss-words.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is not informative. Parent is too informative.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[petermgreen]

Whats to crack?
As I see it there are two obvious uses of a crack

1: running an alternate OS without it being cripped by the hypervisor
2: playing copied games (and possiblly in future imported region locked games though I don't think any current PS3 games are actually locked)

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Red Flayer]

That's what Profanity Blacklist is for.

Just be forewarned... this will bork your views of plenty of other posters, not just people who have posted profanity.

Any foe of any of your friends will be hard for you to see... like many slashdotters, I have friends whose foes are people whose posts I do not wish to have a negative "moderation" applied.

Profanity Blacklist breaks the utility of the friend/foe system for other purposes.

Not that anyone who uses Profanity Blacklist will ever read this post, since on occasion I use profanity.

Fuckers.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Just be forewarned... this will bork your views of plenty of other posters, not just people who have posted profanity.

That is true of any filter. For example:

Not that anyone who uses Profanity Blacklist will ever read this post, since on occasion I use profanity.

Yet your post would be totally appropriate for children without the "fuckers" at the end.

I'd rather see kids exposed to the occasional F-word than miss out on valuable education. After all, if they're on Slashdot (and not 4chan), the truly disturbing posts will be slammed to -1 before they have a chance to see them anyway.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Red Flayer]

It's not just about the filter catching false-positives...

It's also about the fact that using this filter borks *other* functionality of the slashcode. That's my biggest problem with it.

A filter should only select for the intended filtering criteria. In this case, we have a filter which selects on a superset of the intended filtering criteria. Very bad.

There's gotta be a Firefox add-on that censors profanity from text... that would be a far better option than a poorly implemented blacklist.

OK, so I looked briefly for such an add-on, and the only one I saw had poor reviews (uneditable blacklist of words, plus the words would display for a couple seconds before being replaced by ***).

I wonder if anyone is aware of such an add-on...

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[SanityInAnarchy]

OK, so I looked briefly for such an add-on, and the only one I saw had poor reviews (uneditable blacklist of words, plus the words would display for a couple seconds before being replaced by ***).

It should be trivial to create a Greasemonkey script, but it would have the same limitations.

I don't really care, though.

Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely kids old enough to read Slashdot will have encountered swearing in the playground at school. In any case the words themselves won't cause harm to children.

Read this on Kotaku earlier...

[wilgibson]

... and it actually reminded me of the fact I had a PSP. Sad but true. The remake of Final Fantasy Tactics was about the only reason I got one (that and I didn't have to pay for it). Had a few decent games I actually wanted came out I might have bought more than the 4 or 5 games I had at one point for the system.

Piracy is only one problem the system has, lack of a decent library is the other. Seriously, if a few more decent games had come out on the system I might not have forgotten I had one!

Re:Read this on Kotaku earlier...

[rob1980]

I'm in that boat too. The only other games I played on the PSP that weren't remakes of Final Fantasy games I beat to death years ago in high school were Crisis Core and Jeanne d'Arc. My PSP has been collecting dust for some time now and it's sad because it's not a bad piece of hardware as far as handheld consoles go.

Scapegoat

[Dyinobal]

I really hate it when people use piracy as a scapegoat. If what you make is good you ~will~ make money. Seriously, to take a product that's not great and say 'it's piracys fault!!!11' is just deluding yourself so you're bound to make the same mistakes as last time, only with more DRM if/when you take another stab at the market.

Re:Scapegoat

[Microlith]

If what you make is good you ~will~ make money.

Not if a large enough percentage of your user base pirates already. There simply won't be enough people that -do- buy.

If anything, the growing attitude of "don't buy it, get this firwmare patch and download it here instead!" will hasten the death of systems like the PSP. It'll take a while, but eventually even good games will fail.

Re:Scapegoat

[Lulfas]

They've sold over 50 million units. They've made plenty of money on the system. As much as I dislike it, he's probably right. I only own a PSP for the piracy stuff on it (and the emulation, which is technically piracy of someone else's stuff).

Re:Scapegoat

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Not if a large enough percentage of your user base pirates already.

You're right. If 50 million people suddenly start using piracy solely as a way of not spending money on the PSP, they won't make money.

If anything, the growing attitude of "don't buy it, get this firwmare patch and download it here instead!" will hasten the death of systems like the PSP. It'll take a while, but eventually even good games will fail.

When PC gaming dies and Nintendo no longer sells ROMs on the Wii, I'll be happy to entertain this thought. Right now, niether history nor reality are backing this assumption up.

Re:Scapegoat

[Grave]

Define "large enough percentage".

The PSP is failing not because of piracy, but because there are very, very few games coming out for it. There are hundreds of games made for the DS every year, and maybe a couple dozen for the PSP.

Re:Scapegoat

[smash]

Disclaimer: I own a psp with a library of legal games (about 6 or 7). No bootlegs of *PSP* games on it.

Problem i see with the PSP is the shortage of actual software I want for the platform.

I recently hacked mine for the following purposes:

• homebrew
• MAME / emulators
• running my collection of old (original) PSX games via the converter

If they provide software i'm interested in for mobile gaming, I will (and have) purchased it. But more often than not, I walk out of a shop empty handed or with a game for another platform.

The PSP hardware is great. Good battery, awesome screen, decent audio, etc. As a portable video player, its great. As a console (in my opinion) it is lacking appropriate games. Mobile versions of the same stuff i have on PS2/PC/etc is not really what I'm after.

Re:Scapegoat

[SanityInAnarchy]

The way you head off that attitude is to, at the very least, provide as compelling an experience as the pirates.

For example: Until very recently, I pirated games, not because I didn't want to spend the money, but because I didn't have the time. Piracy simply gave me a better experience, even when you completely ignore the price.

And yes, once piracy is entrenched -- once you've made it easy to not feel bad about piracy, and actively driven large numbers of people to piracy (Spore was widely boycotted, yet was one of the most pirated games ever), there's a lot of those people it'll be difficult to get back.

But adding more DRM only vindicates the pirates (or their rationalization). It certainly isn't going to get you any paying customers back -- if it's "successful", many of them will simply switch to games which are more easily pirated. That's not more money for you, that's less free advertising.

This is one place you have to use the carrot, not the stick. Provide things that make people want to buy your product. I've seen it happen -- Steam, for example. We used to just set sv_lan 1 at LAN parties, thus allowing everyone to install Counter-Strike and play it in "offline mode" on the local server. But gradually, we started to shift towards pressuring people to just buy the game -- it's only $20, and that way, everyone has a proper steam ID, we can admin the server much more easily, we can hook it up to the Internet and allow random Internet gamers to join our LAN game...

Then we go home, and (finally!) the Friends List works, so I can just IM someone and invite them into a game. Add to that autoupdates, and as many installs as we want (just re-download the game)... factor in that most of the games are multiplayer, and most of their servers do hook into Steam to authenticate players, and it starts to make a lot of sense for people to just drop the $20 or so to buy a game.

Re:Scapegoat

[smash]

Give me a frickin' manual worth shit!

Give me an on-line account/multiplayer/community!

DON'T make my life harder for having purchased the game. As stated many times on here (by myself previously, too), all DRM does is fuck over your PAYING customers. History has shown that no protection scheme is invulnerable. Spend the money on online/printed content instead, and I'll gladly pay for it.

Re:Scapegoat

[shentino]

Forcing game companies to compete with pirates who are effectively free to break all sorts of laws is a bad idea.

Also, lots of times pirates are free to distribute trojans, since their victims aren't likely to incriminate themselves for copyright infringement.

In fact, warez have been a proven vector for malware.

I think that game companies should go hard after pirates, provided of course they have a damn lot better aim than the slipshod steamroller that is the RIAA.

Having said that, I concurrently believe that

1. The legal system should be loser pays to discourage slipshod lawsuits.

        Seriously, this would completely ICE the RIAA's campaign. Once people could start getting refunds for legal expenses they never should have been forced to incur or settle to avoid, then they will start fighting back, and as the money never gets spent permanently, the EFF and others could have a legal defense fund that doesn't exhaust itself.

Re:Scapegoat

[cliffski]

I'm a game dev. The consensus among people I know who make games for hand-helds is that the PSP isn't worth developing for because of piracy.

So whatever the people here think, one thing is true. Piracy is killing the PSP. Nobody makes games for a platform when they know the vast majority of the buyers will pay zero.

I know slashdot readers like to stomp and flame and complain about this, but the people you need to whine at are the people hacking PSP games, not game developers who have bills to pay just like everyone else.

Re:Scapegoat

[KDR_11k]

The point is that you always get piracy no matter what you do but many people still make big money with good products. There's a large number of people that will buy a game legally if it appeals to them and as long as these exist you're going to make money. It doesn't matter how many people pirate your product, the only number that matters for your bottom line is how many pay for it.

Re:Scapegoat

[Anonymous Coward]

So whatever the people here think, one thing is true. Piracy is killing the PSP. Nobody makes games for a platform when they know the vast majority of the buyers will pay zero.

[citation needed]

Piracy doesn't matter when the games aren't even worth pirating.

Oh, and just for the record, I own a PS1 and a PS2, and neither of them have a modchip. I buy all my games. I've even considered a PSP. The hardware is is nice, but... What would I use it for? Without games, it's pretty useless. If it was more open, homebrew could be interesting, but that would just be another customer "lost to piracy" in your numbers, right? Because if someone doesn't buy any games, piracy must be the reason. It could never be because there are no games worth buying - or even worth pirating.

Re:Scapegoat

[tepples]

We used to just set sv_lan 1 at LAN parties

What do you do if you want to host a gaming party, but most of the invitees don't have a PC that they can bring because they aren't out of high school yet?

Re:Scapegoat

[Spatial]

Too bad. The thing about the PSP is that it's not actually that great without the custom firmware. Load times are slow, the framerate can be sub-par, and you need to fiddle around with UMDs, there's no emulation and you'd have to re-buy the PS1 games you already own to play them. CFW fixes all that but also makes pirating easy. Seems like they're in a bad situation either way. Maybe they'd do better at this stage to open up the hardware and sell it as a platform? I bought it for playing emulated games really; although I haven't pirated any PSP games I've only bought five of them.

Re:Scapegoat

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh really? Is that why at least 25 PSP games have or are coming out in just April alone? Also, the sales of the latest MonHan certainly don't look like "the vast majority of the buyers [paying] zero".

Got some actual, I don't know, evidence?

Re:Scapegoat

[cyber-vandal]

Do they feel the DS, which is just as afflicted by rampant piracy, is worth developing for?

Re:Scapegoat

[SendBot]

As others have pointed out here, piracy is easier and perhaps more rampant with the DS, yet they're making plenty of money and have a loyal and happy fanbase.

I think sony's idiocy in pushing a proprietary optical format for a portable system is way more to blame here for making people not want the system in the first place, or to make the effort to circumvent having to use the batter-sucker at all. If you're going to do all that piracy work to make your system work more effectively, it's not going to motivate you to spend money after having to do all that.

I think the lack of games and resentment toward their audio cd rootkit didn't help either.

I checked out your games site. Those look pretty neat and I may buy some!

Re:Scapegoat

[geminidomino]

We used to just set sv_lan 1 at LAN parties

What do you do if you want to host a gaming party, but most of the invitees don't have a PC that they can bring because they aren't out of high school yet?

You rethink your invitation list (which you should be doing anyway if most of your invitees are still in HS)

Re:Scapegoat

[MikeBabcock]

What matters is fear of piracy. Its a huge financial commitment for a game dev to actually put the game out, market it, etc. and the high risk of having it pirated instead is a major issue.

Re:Scapegoat

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony is killing the PSP. They have failed to provide a better platform than the pirates. It's easy to blame the pirates, but the majority of users will migrate to the superior platform for their needs regardless of whether Sony or a 3rd party is providing it. By failing to capitalise on it's potential and let others create a working PS1 emulator, enable faster loading times, longer battery life etc. while working on more useless countermeasures instead they have brought this on themselves.

Re:Scapegoat

[SanityInAnarchy]

Forcing game companies to compete with pirates who are effectively free to break all sorts of laws is a bad idea.

Unfortunately, it's inevitable. Piracy is pretty well unstoppable -- DRM does not work, legislation doesn't work, litigation doesn't work, and Internet filtering doesn't work. If any of these got to the point where they did work, the collateral damage would be unacceptable.

Fortunately, it's possible to compete with piracy -- as I explained, Valve does, pretty effectively.

I think that game companies should go hard after pirates, provided of course they have a damn lot better aim than the slipshod steamroller that is the RIAA.

I think that this would actually be just as counterproductive as DRM.

One of the reasons this is so harmful to the RIAA is that the biggest pirates are also the biggest music fans. If you can entice them into spending money, they'll spend a lot of it. If you instead piss them off by suing them into oblivion, you've probably lost them as a customer forever.

And note: It's completely irrelevant, at that point, whether or not it's accurate. The damage of suing your own customers is still the same.

Re:Scapegoat

[SanityInAnarchy]

Even in high school, most could bring a PC. Remember, we are talking about gamers.

However, as gamers with money tend to buy new computers, and as it tends to be difficult to upgrade a machine rather than buying a new one (when you consider that the RAM and CPU socket will have changed by then, you WILL want a new video card, the only thing you won't care about is the hard disk, and there will be much bigger, cheaper onesn...)

So, we'd always have one or two older, but still serviceable machines. Maybe they'd have ebayed for some small amount, but it was nice having them around.

Re:Scapegoat

[CronoCloud]

As a console (in my opinion) it is lacking appropriate games. Mobile versions of the same stuff i have on PS2/PC/etc is not really what I'm after.

But mobile versions of the same stuff I had on the PS1 and PS2 is exactly what I'm after. Games don't have to be cut down so much for portable play, thanks to the PSP. Remember how the GBC Tomb Raider was a 2D sidescroller?

Re:Scapegoat

[Anonymous Coward]

From someone who *BUYS* many games (up in the thousands now). I can tell you I own maybe 10 or so PSP titles. I bought the thing when it launched. I didnt root the box and put emu stuff on there or pirate any games (still using the 32meg card that came with it so I do not have the room anyway).

There just isnt 'omg you MUST buy this game' for that console. The only one for me was castlevania x. Even that was a remake. The emphasis of movies at the launch of the console really hurt it. The 'dead pixel' at the launch (i have 3 dead ones) and the 'its supposed to be like that' hurt it. There is a lot of half hearted titles for that console. The shoveling of older titles at it hurts it, as many have already played that game and are done with it. The fact that is semi bulky hurts it.

These days I use it to surf the web in a pinch when I do not feel like getting out my laptop.

Its like what I tell people about ALL sony stuff. They make rocking hardware. They then wiff the software part (especially at first). The REAL reason people buy the hardware. To use the software.

It could have been an awesome platform it is more 'meh' though once you get past that awesome screen they put on there.

Re:Scapegoat

[petermgreen]

One issue is that on the PSP pirating gives a BETTER experiance than buying because you don't have all the issues of a spinning optical drive in a portable.

I've always believed that making legit copies worse than pirate copies is a suicidal strategy.

Re:Scapegoat

[Duradin]

And some of us didn't have a PS1 back in the day so getting a PSP to play the re-release of old PS1 games was a much more convenient and eventually cheaper option than tracking down the original PS1 discs (like Valkyrie Profile, FFT).

Re:Scapegoat

[geekoid]

"Piracy is killing the PSP. "

Based on your limited unscientific and biased study.

Nice~

"...hen they know the vast majority of the buyers will pay zero."
Completely counter to the evidence.

Every system has piracy. Yet Games still thrive, music still thrives.
PSP had a botched launch, poor selection and now people are using 'piracy' as a cover for the complete PSP screw up, or in you case, an excuse.

Re:Scapegoat

[Jumperalex]

Well now that is an interesting point. But I have to ask you this:

Is it really "because of piracy"? or is it "because you can't make money?"

If it is the former my answer is: get over it, stop whining and worry about the latter because THAT is more important.

If your answer is the latter then that changes the conversation to the correct topic. Then you have to start asking questions like WHY can't you make money? Sure, there are lost sales from piracy, but that is a red herring. The real question is what is it about the platform that is not drawing large enough numbers of paying customers. All platforms have some form of piracy going on, yet they make money. So what is different? Or let me put it this way, would you develope for a mythical platform that had ZERO piracy yet still did not generate revenue? Of course not.

None of this changes that developers like you make the final determination that developing for PSP is not worth your time; but please, stop calling it piracy (one possible FACTOR) and call it what it is, lack of revenue (the real determining factor). The blame, in fact, sits with Sony who could/would not provide their customers with a product that they wanted and fostered a robust ecosystem. A few other posters have, IMO, hit it right on the head when they spoke of proprietary media, lack of homebrew, lock-in, etc.

Re:Scapegoat

[Audiophyle]

Blaming bad sales on piracy seems like a cop-out to me. I own a PSP and I only download demos and movies to my memory stick. I don't pirate anything, and I have purchased several games over the years that I've owned it. I really enjoy using the system now more for playing PS1 games remotely from the PS3 than anything else. That's because PSP games generally aren't very good. I have several of the "big name" titles like Metal Gear Solid Portable, Crisis Core, Vice City Stories, SOCOM, and so on. All of these are scaled-down versions of what the genres were intended to be, although Vice City Stories bares the closest resemblance to its big brother. I thought Crisis Core would finally be the RPG fix I had been waiting for on the PSP, but sadly that void still has yet to be filled as far as I'm concerned.

Why can't we get a Chrono Cross or a Baldur's Gate type of game on the PSP? Cheap knock-offs don't sell well anymore, and Sony must have some expectation here since Nintendo gets away with it many times.

It's kind of ironic that although the DS has inferior hardware, it has better and more substantial games.

Flash beats UMD

[lamadude]

The fact that pirated PSP games run faster and use less battery probably didn't help either. (since they run from flash memory rather than the clumsy UMD discs)

Re:Flash beats UMD

[bazald]

Also, you don't have to pay exorbitant shipping fees to get games that they never bothered to release in your country, despite having localized it for your language. (Or do Americans generally have difficulty understanding the Queen's English?)

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Kaboom13]

Don't forget you can carry around a bunch of games with 1 memory stick, plus media and music, emulators, etc. The real value in the psp was it could do a lot more then just games. Sony's retarded restrictions to try to promote their formats, media and agenda make a non-hacked psp look like a worthless pile of crap next to a hacked one, even if you never intend to pirate a game. If they wanted to make the psp a runaway success, they should have allowed homebrew from the start, and sold games online to be downloaded to a (dirt-cheap) standard sd card. Instead they tried to push the abortion that is umd (tiny optical disks in a portable player? really?) and the memory stick format. Nevermind you can buy an sd card with 4x the capacity for the same price, from a reputable company (thus avoiding the dirt-slow counterfeit problem Memory Sticks have) Sony has to push their dead on arrival proprietary format. The iPhone store pretty much proves if you combine bored users with wifi access and a store offering inexpensive games and apps they can have right away, its pretty much a license to print money. It's hard to make an argument for why you should buy instead of pirate when even ignoring the monetary component, the piracy experience is better in every possible way.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

not in the, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU IN MY BAG?!" benchmark. Otherwise, pretty true. The only problem is that the cost of stamping a UMD is still marginally cheaper than shipping out spare memory cards and online sales have the problem of, "oh shit, my memory card/hard drive/etc just ate itself, what now?" factor. WiiWare, XBLA and PSN have proven that online sales can work on consoles, there are still other hurdles to jump through.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[pecosdave]

No, but a great deal of American's do have difficulty speaking coherent English of any type.

(well, now that I think of it, so do many of the British)

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Queen's English? That fact that you still have a queen speaks volumes about joining the modern age. More to the point, yeah, English is different on this side of the Atlantic. Don't like it? Too bad, should have sent more Redcoats.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[pecosdave]

Just an FYI:

Pecos is a Navajo word. Most Americans can't agree on how to pronounce it because the Navajo use vowel sounds that don't exist in English.

My user name is Pecosdave because like Pecos Bill (well, he was a Texas immigrant, but never mind that) I'm from the Pecos Valley, in Texas. My ancestors fought and died so anonymous coward asshats like you don't call us British anymore.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Drakkenmensch]

Ungodly load times is what drove me slowly away from my PSP, like a vodka bender slowly being unraveled making last night's "beautiful girl" looking a lot less attractive and leaving you looking for ways to escape and leave a fake phone number.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[drinkypoo]

The fact that Sony didn't understand this when it was true of Microsoft's game console (hack it and you can copy games to the hard disk where they load about an order of magnitude quicker than from the janky DVD) meant that they had to repeat history with the PSP. Four years is a pretty fucking pathetic length of time to forget such an important lesson. Unfortunately, Sony is incapable of learning from its OWN mistakes; Developers hated trying to make the Saturn work right, and the PS won the battle. Developers hated wringing the power out of the PS2, and the Xbox might as well have won that battle given how it was expected to come out; Microsoft established itself as a major force in console gaming. So what does Sony do? Make another console that's super-hard to make games run fast on, while Microsoft goes the SMP route. If Sony makes another retarded console you might as well kiss them goodbye.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Megane]

No, but a great deal of American's do have difficulty speaking coherent English of any type.

Or even writing it.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Jim Hall]

not in the, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU IN MY BAG?!" benchmark. Otherwise, pretty true. The only problem is that the cost of stamping a UMD is still marginally cheaper than shipping out spare memory cards and online sales have the problem of, "oh shit, my memory card/hard drive/etc just ate itself, what now?" factor. WiiWare, XBLA and PSN have proven that online sales can work on consoles, there are still other hurdles to jump through.

Sony has already leaked (announced?) that the next PSP will not use UMD, and will only support mem-stick games.

I'm a big fan of this decision. I have a PSP 1001, and can't remember the last time I actually bought a UMD for it. Pretty much all the games I have now are download-only. I buy them on PSN (using my PS3) then move them to the PSP. It's not that hard.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[demonlapin]

So true. The unhacked Xbox was a nice console aside from being noisy, huge, and HEAVY. And not having a flat top. (Seriously, companies: we stack things. Make the top flat.)

The hacked Xbox was a dream: XBMC + big hard drive = negligible load times and incredible flexibility.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Sony hasn't leaked a damn thing.

This would mean that a vast majority of the PSP's game library would be unplayable since most of the games for the psp are on UMDs.

I've seen news stories of Dave Perry making claims that Sony's going in that direction, but, it would be horribly stupid.

Horribly. Horribly. Stupid.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[Jim Hall]

This would mean that a vast majority of the PSP's game library would be unplayable since most of the games for the psp are on UMDs. I've seen news stories of Dave Perry making claims that Sony's going in that direction, but, it would be horribly stupid.

And yet PSN continues to re-release the best-selling PSP games as digital downloads. Yesterday they released Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters as a downloadable PSP game.

I'm looking for Sony to co-release PSP games as downloadable (PSN) and UMD. If they can do that (starting soon!) then it won't be such a big deal if the next-gen PSP drops UMD support.

Re:Flash beats UMD

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Patapon 2 is currently going digital only.

I'm not against the idea of emphasizing the digital downloads but the PSP might deemphasize the UMD, which is fine, i can still play all my old UMD based games. The problem is, right now, if my PSP craps out, it's far outside of warranty, and I don't want to get a used PSP. Period. A new UMDless PSP would *suck* for me at that point.

Still few games

[Mishotaki]

The console sells great, but there is still very few good games... Too many people got PSPs gathering dust, it's not the early interest that is lacking, but the current interest. I don't play my game console because i have no games to play onit... even if i can pirate games, it won'T matter because there is no games to pirate...

Nah, it's the games

[realmolo]

The PSP was/is *truly* a "portable Playstation". Which is neat, technically, but the games just don't lend themselves to a portable gaming system.

The DS is probably the single greatest portable gaming hardware so far. The touch screen is just the perfect input devices for the kind of goofy, simple, easy-to-play games that most people want on a system that they'll likely only play for 20 minutes at a time. Basically, the DS has lots of games that appeal to the casual player. Much like the Wii.

You have to almost feel bad for Sony. If the PSP had come out at the same time as the Gameboy Advance, it probably would've done a lot better. Maybe even dominated the market. But then Nintendo came and changed the rules with the DS, and the PSP just seems like more of the same. Again, reminds me of the Wii.

Keep in mind that I'm no Nintendo fanboy (in fact, I don't even own a Wii or DS, though I have played both quite a bit). You simply can't deny that Nintendo has really hit the market perfectly these last few years.

Re:Nah, it's the games

[pecosdave]

I have a PSP and a DS. For exactly the same reasons I prefer my PSP.

I don't like futzing with a touch screen. Granted most of the games I play don't require it. The New Super Mario Brothers on uses it for reserved power ups and changing worlds (as far as I'm concerned) so I accept that, the rest of the games I use such as the Final Fantasy games allow me to just use the cross pad as I always have. I actively avoid games that require me to use the stylus.

The PSP on the other hand is a Solid Old Skool design. I love it. No touch screen to think about, a huge beautiful display, and the perfect control layout to play my old SNES games on.

Not to mention Crush is the coolest puzzle game ever.

Re:Nah, it's the games

[KDR_11k]

Touchscreen + dpad is painful (though bearable in short bursts like when the dpad is only used as a trigger/shift key instead of movement input) and the touchscreen often fails when shoehorned into something that wasn't designed for it but there are also many games that benefit from it, especially the pure touchscreen ones. Games like Professor Layton wouldn't feel right without the touchscreen (or a mouse but those don't fit on portable systems) and many games that were designed to use the thing obviously work pretty well. Something like Chou Soujuu Mecha MG would be pointless with button controls.

Re:Nah, it's the games

[pecosdave]

I am being just a bit unfair on the touchscreen. I really don't want to jump back and forth.

I find the idea of playing the new version of Broken Sword on the DS tempting, especially since it has new/expanded levels. But since I originally played the game on Gameboy Advanced (no longer have thank you Hurricane Ike) and I now have it on PSX, even though it's expanded I'm not sure I want to buy it again for a little expansion. If they were to port/update Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers on the other hand...

Point and click adventures, fine, the touch screen isn't so bad, maybe even good. Action games/platformers etc.. I really don't want to do the touch bit. The little bit New Super Mario Brothers uses it is about all I can tolerate. There's no way I'm going to play a 3D shooter/Metroid with a touch interface, those are best left to a mouse and keyboard, or at second best dual analog joysticks.

The whole action game via stylus just isn't appealing. That's why there's only certain types of games I'll put on my iPhone.

(Mech games on the other hand are best left to dual analog joysticks, full size - how I wish I had a full arcade T-Mech)

Physical media, too

[SanityInAnarchy]

Spinning optical discs + portable player = disaster.

Does anyone know if there's a way, beyond piracy, to play a PSP game off a flash card of some sort?

Re:Physical media, too

[smash]

Why is it a disaster?

I get decent battery life (6 hrs), which is pretty impressive considering the screen, 3d hardware, etc. Better than some laptops, with a battery WAY smaller.

I'll gladly take 6 hr battery life and a decent amount of cheap optical storage for media over ROM based storage and an hour or two more battery life any day.

The PSP has a "UMD cache" feature that you can turn on that will reduce the disc access.

Re:Physical media, too

[arth1]

The PSP has a "UMD cache" feature that you can turn on that will reduce the disc access.

Unless, of course, you're running homebrew to run pirated games, in which case the extra installed stuff has already eaten up the RAM that would have been used for caching...

Re:Physical media, too

[Spatial]

With homebrew firmware you can rip your games over USB and then put them on a memory stick. I have all of mine on an 8GB one. (and no I didn't pirate any games) It also cuts loading times down to pretty much nothing.

Re:Physical media, too

[Jaysyn]

You'd have to mod it. Google "pandora battery" & "magic memory stick" for more info.

Re:Physical media, too

[CronoCloud]

There's this thing called PSN, the Playstation Network Store, that sells PSP games that you download to the memory stick.

Re:Physical media, too

[Megane]

...in which case your "UMD cache" is now the .iso file on your 4GB or larger Memory Stick. You can't reduce your disc access below zero.

yeah, those lucky bastards at nintendo

[Punto]

with their nintendo DS wich is absolutely undefeated in terms of piracy.

Many things are hurting the PSP...

[tlhIngan]

First, it's the frigging number of games it has - barely any. Take a look at the shelf space the PSP has, and it's very little compared to its competiror, the DS. Heck, I've seen more shelf space dedicated to PSP hardware and PSP accessories, than PSP games.

Secondly, the lack of releases - you can almost count the number of games the PSP will have coming out in the year ahead on fingers and toes. New release lists on the PSP are remarkably skimpy. Heck, I'm sure there are more games for the PSP released every month for the first few years than a year nowadays. Retail space for the PSP has been shrinking - even the PS2 gets more shelf space!

Third, the pirates offered a better product. Games load quickly off memory stick, and save battery life as well. And heck, you can dump your games yourself easily nowadays (insert UMD into PSP, enable USB on the UMD drive, and a little .iso file is ready for you to copy off - you don't see the contents of the disk, just the ISO file).

The competition, the Nintendo DS, is far easier to pirate for (a memory cart is direct-mapped for 128MB, without bankswitching... thus most games are under 128MB in size, while PSP games can be 1.8GB or so). But it has a lot of games, tons more released practically daily, and many that sell for years. Enough so that practically everyone can find a set of games they'll like.

Sony basically abandoned the PSP once they released the PS3. They could've released firmware updates that let you dump UMD disks to a memory stick (locked to that console with DRM blah blah blah and requiring the original UMD, a la the Xbox360), but no, we get crap feature updates. About the biggest thing in the firmware update was... Skype.

Re:Many things are hurting the PSP...

[Trintech]

Third, the pirates offered a better product. Games load quickly off memory stick, and save battery life as well. And heck, you can dump your games yourself easily nowadays (insert UMD into PSP, enable USB on the UMD drive, and a little .iso file is ready for you to copy off - you don't see the contents of the disk, just the ISO file).

To be fair, I think Sony does understand this point because they are releasing Patapon 2 only for download from the online store and the PSP2 is rumored not to have a UMD drive.

Re:Many things are hurting the PSP...

[Dwedit]

DS cards are not direct mapped, you read them sequentially, and store the data into main RAM. The GBA was directly mapped and executed off the cartridge.

Re:Many things are hurting the PSP...

[MemoryDragon]

Well you basically can say the same regarding Nintendo, they basically abandoned the DS with good releases when the Wii came out, the DS is fed mostly with shovelware nowadays with a few good titles from third party publishers...

As for the PSP I dont think piracy really was the doom of the platform, the lack of releases was more an issue, after a strong first year suddenly the release numbers went down the drain. Good releases like Gods of War sell well on the platform despite heavy piracy (which also is there on the DS) but fact is, that about 1 buyable release per year is not enough to keep potential buyers aware of the platform...

(The ds has at least 4-5 good games per year which are buyable not that much either besides 200 pony games but they are there)

Re:Many things are hurting the PSP...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, GBA carts were direct mapped (max 32MB without bankswitching), DS carts are not. DS carts are addressed as block devices, similar to say a SD card or USB flash drive. I believe the limit on carts is actually 4096MB (due to using 32-bit addressing), but at this point the largest cart has been 256MB (probably due to cost reasons, bigger chips cost more, meaning less profit per game, since you can only charge so much per game). The nitty gritty details can be found in gbatek (extensive hardware documentation written by the author of the best GBA & NDS emulators)

Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[cadeon]

If anything, the piracy has HELPED PSP sales. The reason there's 50m units is because they can be opened to do what you want.

I bought mine mostly to use it as essentially a 'portable dvd player' for my daughter. Handbrake your Disney DVDs, put them on a big Memory Stick, hit play, lock the keys, and she's happy for the car ride.

The fact that it came with that much openness got me to buy the device. Soon after I was using it to talk to my PS3 at home. Later I was on the PSN with it. And then Disgaea came out for it and I bought that, and a few other games. Now they are all on the aforementioned Memory Stick, because they run better from there.

If piracy is hurting Sony, then they need to charge more for the hardware. If piracy is hurting the developers, they need to learn to make games worth buying, and make them cheaper.

People still buy good music.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[cliffski]

Its funny how pirates always claim all the games they have cracked are not worth buying.

Its easy to assign something as worthless when you took it for free isn't it?

Nobody is making psp games because people with an overblown sense of self-entitlement are pirating them as a matter of routine.
Why would any sane dev just make a game that nobody would buy? do you work for free too?

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[Shrike82]

If anything, the piracy has HELPED PSP sales. The reason there's 50m units is because they can be opened to do what you want.

Perhaps, but if they make a loss on each piece of hardware and recoup the loss through software sales, then they're losing more money through selling PSP's that people don't buy games for.

If piracy is hurting Sony, then they need to charge more for the hardware.

Easy to say, but how much would you be willing to pay for a games hardware? If an Xbox 360 had cost £500 at launch I sure as hell wouldn't have bought one.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[tepples]

but how much would you be willing to pay for a games hardware?

Multiplayer games like Starcraft and Counter-Strike require a PC per player. So it appears some families are willing to spend $2,400 for four PCs.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[bit01]

Fanatics like you really need to stop seeing the world as black and white. If you were being honest:

It's funny how some pirates sometimes claim some of the games they have cracked are not worth buying.

It's easy to assign something as of lesser value when you got a copy for for minimal cost isn't it?

Less people are making psp games because some people [emotional nonsense] pirate.
Why would any sensible dev make a game that not as many people would buy? Do you work for less too?

---

Copyrights and patents are privileges, not rights.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[cyber-vandal]

Then why hasn't the DS failed since piracy is ridiculously easy on it? I have no idea why people are not making PSP games but I can't see how piracy, which has singularly failed to stop the wealth of DS games being released, being primarily to blame.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[Shrike82]

A PC and a games console are a bit different though, I think you'l have to agree. A games console, even with half-hearted attempts to turn it into a movie rental platform (looking at you 360), are basically just gaming machines. People will spend more on PCs because they can do other stuff. And if I'm honest, PC games are often far better than their console versions.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[Nazlfrag]

It's funny how the GP never claimed to have ever pirated a single game. Format shifted some movies and games perhaps, but not pirated them.

Did you miss the entire rest of his post where he talked about the openness that drew him to the platform? While sony markets it as a multimedia tool he needs a 3rd party hack to make that work for him. He copies the games he bought to the memory stick because it works better. If the pirates can consistently and easily make their device work better, that is Sonys fault for not keeping up with what some basement dwelling nerds hack together in their spare time.

Piracy is not the motivation for many to unlock their PSP, it's merely to have the machine the PSP could have been if Sony pulled their finger out.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[Spatial]

God you're vitriolic. Did you miss the part where he said he bought all of his games?

Nobody is making psp games because people with an overblown sense of self-entitlement are pirating them as a matter of routine.

What do you have to back this up with besides word of mouth? I haven't pirated any PSP games, but I've still only got six because I just don't see anything I want.

There's 45 million PSPs out there, I find it difficult to believe that more than a quarter of them have custom firmware installed given people's general level of technical retardation. Hell, even if 100% of CFW users are pirates and 50% of people have CFW installed it's still a potential audience of 22 million.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[geekoid]

"Its funny how pirates always claim all the games they have cracked are not worth buying."

Funny how that's a false statement.

"Why would any sane dev just make a game that nobody would buy? do you work for free too?"

heh, that same arguments(and many like it) was made about music 10 years ago; yet Apple sells Billions of songs, ans people are still trying to make money with music.

Piracy isn't used as often as you seem to imply. In fact all good studies show piracy helps sales.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you got a hand-me-down car from someone would you treat it as nicely as a car you've just paid $30,000 for? Of course you wouldn't, your hard-earned money went towards something that you'll value in the long run by treating it nicely, opposed to a free car, you've lost nothing if you beat it daily.

What about music? Do you listen to music any less if it's free? What about artists trying to get their name out there, distributing their music legitimately through torrents? What about the radio? Or what about any freely distributable goods, like FOSS, Gmail or Wikipedia?

In a situation like video games, a person pirating a game isn't going to get any more 'worth' out of a game by buying it. They might play it more, and they might play it again a few times after completing it, but it won't change their perception on the game itself. I own and pirate PSP games (usually if they don't come out in the states or if I don't want the UMD drive gobbling my battery life, I pirate.) With games I know turn a great review, I buy.

I think the problem was grazed in your second point. You're going to get less quality/variety of a developer making games, simply because they can't fit the bill if it doesn't sell. What Sony needs to do, is make PSP games similar with how they did their PSOne (for PSP) games. Make them online distributable. Sell them, without boxes and manuals (I know...the poor used game market), and sell them for cheaper. They had the right idea with Echochrome, sell a smaller version of a game for cheap. I pirated Echochrome until it came to the states, in which I bought when it got here. When you have someone who has a game already pirated, and enjoying, and you've made them buy the game after they've already played through it...that's when you know you're doing something right.

Re:Piracy Helps, someday they will notice that.

[cadeon]

It still costs too much for me. Still haven't bought one.

I do have a PS3, though. I guess hardware is more valuable to me if I can do things like change the hard drive and install linux without being called a hacker or it being assumed that I'm only trying to get free stuff.

Restrictions reduce its value to consumers

[robot_love]

I own one, and I would use it more if I pirated games. As it is, I put movies on it (which I rip) for long trips, and the wife plays Puzzle Quest while breast-feeding the baby.

It's a great little device. I'd use it a lot more if I could use SCUMM or other emulation. (I know I can, but I can't be bothered to get the things set up). The restrictions around the PSP make me use it less.

Re:Restrictions reduce its value to consumers

[Corporate Troll]

It's a great little device. I'd use it a lot more if I could use SCUMM or other emulation. (I know I can, but I can't be bothered to get the things set up).

Exactly... I never bothered setting it up for piracy/emulation purposes either. I have 7 or 8 games, legally bought... Played them for hours.

Alas, my PSP was involved in an accident with a liquid and doesn't work anymore. I still haven't replaced it, and hope it will be one day < 100€ so that I can play the games I have again. For the moment, I just wait....

real problem

[scott666]

The problem with the PSP is the huge lack of software available at any given time. If you walk in to best buy there's a section for NDS games as big as the PS2 or Wii sections but the PSP games are all in one little 4 foot area. I own a DS and love it (along with my R4). I'd like a PSP for the media features, but there's so little software worth owning for it I can't justify the cost.

Re:real problem

[CronoCloud]

Hmmph, Wal-Mart has a bigger PSP section than best buy or the game stores do, whats up with that. There are games being released but the stores don't devote much space, probably because space is finite and they'd rather fill that space with a bunch of mediocre puzzle games and "pet" games all those casual gamer DS owners will eat up.

My PSP is hacked.

[pecosdave]

I have a 16GB Pro Duo in it. I have a bunch of PS1 and PSP games on that memory stick, I'm using compression but there's plenty of room left.

I own every PSP and PS1 game on there. Seriously, I have the disk or UMD for every game on there. Why did I hack my PSP? Because I don't want to carry the fucking UMD's around! I tried that at first, UMD's don't take abuse nearly as well as Game Boy Cartridges did. My Street Fighter Alpha 3 UMD has the clear window separated from the rest of the UMD casing. (that particular game has its own smaller Pro Duo - it gets confused by large ones) I can snap it back out and use it, I'm considering a drop of super glue but the memory stick is sort of nullifying my desire to do that.

I guess you can call me "an honest pirate" since I'm not actually pirating anything, but I use all the pirate utils.

My take on Sony - I was criticizing them for ignoring their customers. PSP 1000 people hacked it to do things Sony never intended, so they came out with a 2000 that was (initially) harder to hack. People hacked it, so they came out with a 3000 that's incredibly difficult to hack. The customer spoke up and said "I want my PSP to do these things" and Sony, instead of making it happen, said no.

If the PSP 4000 rumors are correct, it shows Sony is beginning to listen. The 4000 supposedly doesn't have a UMD drive and will be pure on board storage.

That's a step in the right direction, but don't kill physical media just yet.

I like physical media. I have 10GB worth of music on my iPhone - I ripped all 10GB off of CD's that are in display racks in my living room. All of my PSP and PS1 games on my PSP have disk either in my office closet or in a CD binder near my entry (Hurricane Ike killed the original cases/manuals)

Please don't go pure online distribution only. I don't trust it. We've already seen a couple of DRM laden distribution companies go belly up. We don't need you "Pulling a Sony" when you're tired of us.

To be fair, I bought pirate hardware for my Game Boy Advanced - cheap Chinese crap was broke when it arrived so I never actually got to use it. My reasons were the same - not to pirate, but to not carry the carts around. A coworker is doing this with his DS, I think I'm going to do this with my DS also.

I feel more comfortable knowing if my whole backpack gets stolen I lose my PSP and my DS, but when it comes down to it, I only have to replace the systems (and the memory cards) not the systems and every damn game I had for them.

Between two major theft incidents (both inside of locked personal area's) and hurricane Ike I've lost lots of media. I know how much it sucks to replace it all. The less at risk I put my media the happier I am. I like the idea of digital distribution since there's no media or hardware to risk, I just don't trust the providers to offer it to me for the rest of my life any time I want it.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[blahplusplus]

You're not alone, I modchipped my Wii and I bought Mario Galaxy and as well as other games.

Truth be told once you have "open access" to a console you can't really go back to having it locked down.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[Weedhopper]

Let me tell you, you're not alone.

I'm not so concerned about losing my games along with my PSP because I can either just re-rip all of those games and/or I have the game ISOs on my Macbook Pro.

Due to the nature of my job I live nine or ten months out of the year out of a backpack and a duffel bag. For me, space is a premium. I have 40 game UMDs. Another copy of each of those is on my HD or on a memory stick. UMDs and their attendant cases take up a stupid amount of space. I paid for it. I want access, dammit! Lumines is just as good today as it was when it was first released.

Even when I'm in the US/EU/EA, I don't want to have to make a choice in which games I carry. What kind of ridiculous shit is that in 2009?

I have the DS as well, also hacked and with every game on storage and flash. It's incredibly easy to lose these infernal cartidges.

There's a lot of stuff Steam got wrong, but there's stuff it got right, too. I get on any computer and log in with my Steam account, I can play anything in my Steam library. If just copy the game files, I don't have to download it for each machine, either.

Face it, physical media is dead. I don't want that outdated and obsolete shit anymore. Sell me what I want, digital distribution, cloud access and a good sized local cache.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[Vapula]

Well, I modchipped my PS2, this allowed me to use HDLoader+HDD (I know, I could also use Independance Exploit), SMS (to watch DivX on the TV) but I still own more ORIGINAL games than I've time to play with. (for example, I'm still in middle of vol2 of .HACK and already own the 4 vol)

I got a flashed PSP, bought 2 UMD... And it is now taking the dust... because I don't find games that are interresting enough...

I got a Wii, basically for the Wii Fit... I installed the Homebrew Channel and don't plan to upgrade the firmware... I own 4 original Wii games (well, including Wii Play/Wii Sport) but I never played them... Only using Wii Fit...

I like to have the hardware open... It's not a matter of pirating, it's a matter of principle !!!

I found great games on the PS2 (I mean, great games that I didn't find on the PC), Wii has it unique gameplay and WiiFit... But I didn't find anything worth for the PSP... Only things I found of interrest is Midway classics, old arcade games !!!

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[Spatial]

I have 40 game UMDs.

What games do you like the best? Lack of games seems to be the most common issue people have with the PSP, myself included. I guess we're wrong?

I've only got six: Ace Combat X, Syphon Filter Dark Mirror, Disgaea, Killzone, Gradius Collection and Wipeout Pure. I said five in an earlier post because I can't count.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[SpooForBrains]

Avoid superglue, unless you're very skillful with it. The vapours from the glue collect inside the casing and ruin the UMD. Almost all of my discs are in a similar condition to yours due to a poor game case choice.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[Weedhopper]

Yeah man. PSP is hurting for games. I bought a bunch of games about a year ago and quite literally, nothing has been released in the past year that appeals to me.

But to answer your question, I'd say give God of War a try. I never got into other action games but Gurumin kept me entertained. Don't let the cuteness throw you off, the game itself is good.

Disgaea is as good as it gets for PSP RPGs but Jeanne D'Arc is close and FFT:War of the Lions is a much better version of the original FFT if you're in for nostalgia.

Wipeout Pulse is okay if you're tired of Pure but if I had to choose between the two, I'd pick Pure.

The Tekken5DR game was good, if you're into fighters.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should check out Target Toss Pro: Bags from the WiiWare channel. It's bad-ass!

Re:My PSP is hacked.

[rtechie]

Face it, physical media is dead. I don't want that outdated and obsolete shit anymore. Sell me what I want, digital distribution, cloud access and a good sized local cache.

The reason why people are wary of digital distribution w/DRM is that numerous such systems have gone belly up in the past leaving their customers high and dry with useless media. Unless it's DRM-free I don't see this really changing and I don't seen game companies rushing to remove DRM from downloads. DRM on XBOX 360s already causes major headaches for Microsoft tech support.

Physical media has it's own DRM problems as well of course.

Game Starvation!

[Amigori]

As a gamer, I've had my eye on a PSP for a while now, mainly for the piracy/hack factor. Its a nice little system that would be great for emulation and PSP games. But what is killing this system, other than the DS, is the Game Starvation. All one needs to do is compare the review lists at IGN (or your favorite game site). Games come out weekly for the DS, in bulk. Games come out in spurts for the PSP, a few here and there, sometimes months apart.

• DS = Lots of games, great and shovelware, ports, remakes, and originals
• PSP = Few games, mostly PSOne ports or remakes, not much original content outside of LocoRoco and Patapon. It doesn't help that the devs half-ass most of the ports/remakes.

Plus when you go to the store, the PSP section always looks like a clearance section. Few games, broken/off displays, lots of empty spaces signifying "better days," and the same few crap games they had last time you stopped in.

Games sell systems. And "50 million" PSP gamers should be large enough to sell new, quality content to. Lack of games and a great system to do emulation on equals high piracy numbers. And lack of software sales is DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTABLE to available content. Just put together a Virtual Console like Nintendo with legal emulation and see how your software sales do.

Sony, want to turn your PSP software sales around? Then 1) sell the damn thing to developers! Your claimed user base should be more than enough to attract some good shops with interesting ideas and IP. 2) Hire new merchandise reps. Your store displays suck. 3) Keep publishing older games and keep them in stock. To sell more games they have to be available. 4) Stop trying to make every game a port or offshoot of a PS2/PS3 game.

Re:Game Starvation!

[n9uxu8]

You know Loco Roco is what got me to buy my PSP. Great game. The rest of the PSP library... well, I bought Patapon new, but everything else has to hit the $9.99 mark before it's worth the buy... Just, as you say, no compelling titles.

Piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales" I am really surprised they send so many PSP games by sea that piracy is actually a problem for them.

Re:Piracy?

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, the only case of that I've heard about was pirates stealing a freighter full of DSs.

Wait..

[plan10]

Wasn't piracy the claimed reason for studios ditching the PC? Now they are whinging about consoles too? This is just getting old.

Re:Wait..

[geekoid]

Well, when they make consoles and start adapting the same development philosophy as PC development why are they surprised that it trends the same?

Not to say that the piracy argument isn't full of assumptions and fallacy.

HomeBrew!

[strange_tractor]

I bought my PSP in order to have something to do on my daily commute, I thought I'd play games on it, I played through God Of War, and a few others, and started to realise that nothing came close to GoW in terms of fun, so it languished as a portable mp3 and aac player for a while

I ended up sticking hacked firwmare on it just to see what all the fuss was about, and now I can use it to play just about any music and low enough spec video, as an ebook reader and a GPS unit, hasen't seen a game for probably 6 months.

If Sony had this sort of stuff built in, it'd probably sell a bit better.

PSP user

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that custom firmwares actually allow playing legal copies of new games. Back when I bought my PSP (mostly for development and emulators etc.) I decided that I'd buy only a few initial releases (of which Mercury was clearly the best) and no more, as back then it was already obvious that new games started "requiring" newer firmwares (although in most cases this is nothing more than comparing version string in game againist one that PSP reports back). Back then 1.5 was, thanks to its vulnerabilities, the de facto standard for homebrew. If you upgraded, you lost all that, along with ability to downgrade.

Since then came the custom firmwares, and thanks to those, I can still walk to a shop, buy a new game, and play it on my PSP without sacrificing the whole REASON I bought the console in the first place, and since then my original games collection has increased of 3 1.5 compatible games to thirty-something. Guess I'm still a bad guy.

There were also a few comments about digital distribution. Sony is doing also that wrong. On the release day, I could have bought a digital copy of Resistance Retribution from playstation store for 40 euros (probably cheaper from the US store), which lacks plastic case, printed covers and manual, physical discs, transportation cost, and all other costs exclusive to physical copies. It also lacks resale-value (except when sold with the console). Instead of that I bought the UMD "Special Edition" version for 24 euros.ÂCould someone please give a sensible explanation for that price difference?

Remake is almost identical to FFT

[Technomancer]

Down to crappy rescaled graphics.
I actually bought it and it plays just the same as my PS1 FFT which works just fine under emulator on PSP. So there I have paid twice for FFT ;-) I find FFTA on GBA Micro much more fun though.

Now what is cool on PSP is Patapon and Loco Roco.

Also the simple fix for stupid UMD and battery life is to run all the games from MS.

Also, Soul Edge (Sould Blade) is an awesome 15 minutes at a time game. (Again, PS1 game).

Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.

[Chonine]

Piracy is the perfect excuse. Poor sales? Blame piracy, no one gets fired and they keep doing what they've been doing. The PSP is a neat system, which had a botched launch and poor support since. I had it and enjoyed it for a while, but it couldn't hold up to my DS. Why?

Piracy on the DS is much more fun. A flashcart with memory card can be had for under ten bucks. They do everything out the box, getting data on them is a cinch. If it truly is piracy that has killed the PSP, then the DS should have been gone and buried. It is not fun nor easy to play homebrew or emulators on most PSPs, especially the more recent. Yet the DSi has a $10 fix.

Perhaps one day Sony will stop making excuses and make systems and games that I want to buy.

Re:Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.

[Anonymous Coward]

The DS games are crap, that's the trouble. What's the point in having 10,000 titles that would look bad on the Atari VCS? Sony aren't doing so well, simply because they're out of vogue. It's kewl to hate Sony if you're a kid these days. They're still selling pretty well as businesses go, just not as good as Nintento offerings, which clearly got their sales while Nintendo ignore game copy protection.

Re:Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.

[the brown guy]

I used to think the same thing, but i have a lot of little cousins, 6 of which have NDS lites. Initially their parents bought them original games, but when they found out about my R4 I ended up buying 6 of them. I bet a lot of NDS games sales come from ignorant parents buying games for their kids.

Contrast this with the PSP, most PSP users are older, and in my opinion at least are more likely to want to hack their PSP, because of the lower battery consumption, and not being forced to carry a bunch of UMDs around.

I love my NDS, rhythm heaven is a lot of fun, and I have 5 games that I don't mind playing whenever, which is more than I can say for PSP games.

Re:Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.

[trytoguess]

Piracy on the DS may be cheap, but piracy on the PSP is more or less FREE. Well, minus the flash card, but eh.

Re:Piracy on the DS is ten times easier.

[trytoguess]

What pray tell is ignorant about buying games in a legit fashion? On the other hand I think I prefer posts like yours to the self righteous ones who loudly claim since they buy every single game they pirate, therefore piracy is totally moral.

Sony sells these things because they're cracked

[Anonymous Coward]

My first post on Slashdot (long time reader) and I had to chip in about this.

I have original PSP, that was bought for me as a present a couple of years ago. I was given 2 films with it, and two games. Now I'll be honest, I'm a pirate and I pirate everything. My golden rule is - if it was good enough to play/read/watch - then I'd buy it, which is why I saw all of my fave films at the cinema, then bought them on DVD, then ripped them to hard drive. If they're not good enough, I just download them - so I have a lot of downloaded games/content.

My PSP was hacked the moment it could be, so you'd have thought I'd have downloaded every game out there to play on it. Not so - I've downloaded two PSP games to play on it and that's it. The only thing my PSP gets used for now (and it gets used regularly) is surfing the net and playing emulation games.

The reason? The games suck Sony. Yes there are some great ones out there, but mainly they're not good enough to buy. Same for the UMD films - why would I pay double for a film to put it on the PSP when it's less quality on DVD and cheaper?

As for the format games/films are on - why would I want to carry around boxs of disks to play games, when I can put them on a memory stick, the console is meant to be portable, not *it's portable, but to play a few games you'll need a bag as well*.

This is the reason you've got poor sales - the console is an amazing bit of kit (they're purchase them for schools now, to aid with learning), but the format/games/films that come out on it suck.

-AC

PC gaming costs $2,400

[tepples]

When PC gaming dies

It was stillborn. If you have three gamers in the house and one who visits, the hardware costs $2,400 (four PCs with monitor at $600 each) and the games cost $160 each (four copies at $40 each because few games support Starcraft-style spawn installations). I think the lack of PC titles that support the console-style model of a big screen and USB gamepads comes from the fact that since the late 1980s, most monitors with a VGA input have been sized for one person. HDTVs can display PC signals, but those haven't been affordable for long enough to replace the CRT SDTV. And VGA to SDTV converters aren't sold in retail stores.

and Nintendo no longer sells ROMs on the Wii

Let me know when Nintendo resolves the conjectured legal issues holding up release of Mother and Earthbound on the North American Wii Shop Channel, and we'll talk.

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[geminidomino]

PC Party gaming was stillborn. There is more to gaming than just Multiplayer.

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[geekoid]

Stillborn? really? Are you completly clueless about the billion spent on PC gaming? You can argue a drop in market share, sure. Stillborn? it's been alive for well over 20 years.

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[brkello]

It was stillborn.

I don't even know what you are talking about. Pretty much everyone has computers these days. It is how business is done and how many people socialize or are entertained. Since you already have a PC, why not play games on it? Saying how much it costs isn't even relevant. Yeah, if your only goal in life is gaming, and you are poor, then console gaming is the way to go. It is a lot simpler to get together with friends at your place and play a game in the same room. But PC gaming is going to always exist. PCs are ubiquitous. The model may shift, but to say it is dead or is still born is just ignoring reality.

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It was stillborn.

Wrong.

If you have three gamers in the house and one who visits, the hardware costs $2,400 (four PCs with monitor at $600 each)

Are you serious? Do you have four DVD players and big screen TVs in your home?

and the games cost $160 each (four copies at $40 each because few games support Starcraft-style spawn installations)

If you were putting forward such a ridiculous requirement for PC gaming, this little snippet right here would have the makings of a decent point.

I think the lack of PC titles that support the console-style model of a big screen and USB gamepads comes from the fact that since the late 1980s, most monitors with a VGA input have been sized for one person.

Network/internet gaming.

HDTVs can display PC signals, but those haven't been affordable for long enough to replace the CRT SDTV. And VGA to SDTV converters aren't sold in retail stores.

Boy, that's true. 10 million people are out there playing World of Warcraft on HDTVs....

Let me know when Nintendo resolves the conjectured legal issues holding up release of Mother and Earthbound on the North American Wii Shop Channel, and we'll talk.

I don't follow. Other than Nintendo annoying you, what does this have to do with what I said?

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[tepples]

Since you already have a PC, why not play games on it?

If PCs are only for single player and online multiplayer, what would the kids I'm babysitting do while waiting their turn?

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[Cornflake917]

If PCs are only for single player and online multiplayer, what would the kids I'm babysitting do while waiting their turn?

Easy. They could watch you play. As a child, I watched my brother play video games for countless hours, and I loved it!

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[brkello]

Play along on the laptop? But seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about. What does that have anything to do with PC gaming being stillborn. You need to present a logical argument otherwise you are only going to make sense to yourself and not learn anything.

Re:PC gaming costs $2,400

[tepples]

Play along on the laptop?

I don't understand. How can they each afford laptops and copies of each game?

What does that have anything to do with PC gaming being stillborn.

"Stillborn" was the wrong word.

DS is SD spelled backwards

[tepples]

DS cards are not direct mapped, you read them sequentially, and store the data into main RAM. The GBA was directly mapped and executed off the cartridge.

Unless tlhIngan was talking about SLOT-2 cards on the DS and DS Lite (e.g. SuperCard) and just got the size wrong. But he's right that seek times on a DS card or an SD card are still a boatload faster than a UMD, even if they are slower than XIP through SLOT-2.

That's what you get...

[zigurat667]

... if you think activating service mode with a battery is a great way to prevent owners of the PSP from unlocking and replacing the firmware.

HandBrake + Windows + CSS?

[tepples]

Handbrake your Disney DVDs

DVDs published by Disney use CSS, and the Windows version of HandBrake doesn't descramble CSS. (The Mac version uses VLC, and the Linux version uses libdvdcss, but the Windows version has nothing.) For users of PCs that run Windows as the primary operating system, what ripper would you recommend running before transcoding the video to PSP format with HandBrake?

Re:HandBrake + Windows + CSS?

[Spatial]

DVDFab Decrypter is great.

Re:HandBrake + Windows + CSS?

[cadeon]

Get a different primary operating system.

Re:HandBrake + Windows + CSS?

[tepples]

Get a different primary operating system.

For the price of a new computer designed to run a different primary operating system, I could buy about five portable DVD players.

As an owner...

[Jaysyn]

.. as an owner I can honestly say that I haven't bought a game for my PSP in months. Most titles seem to be geared towards 14 year olds, but the 14 year olds are all getting DSes. I'd love to see a re-release of FF3 or FF7 or another decent new RPG. Last one I tried was Valhalla Knights II & it's just horrible. I don't even care if they are ports from older systems, just please stop the suckage.

What goes around

[Steauengeglase]

With the DS you have to go out and buy a special cartridge that you can write to while Sony gives you the ease of attaching it to your PC and allowing your to play entire games from that writable location. Hrm, now why would people pirate games for such a system when they could just as easily pay $50 for a proprietary media format that Sony has no intention of supporting for their other systems? Then who wouldn't want to go out and buy a cameras for the new memory sticks, you know the format that we will probably drop in the event of our portable going bust? Finally, who wouldn't want to go out and re-buy all of their media on UMD when they could put their ripped/re-encoded DVDs on it?

Sony has no one to blame but themselves and their own arrogance and stupidity.

Re:What goes around

[pecosdave]

I agree on this one.

Sony should have designed the UMD to fit in a PS2 or PS3 or released DVD players capable of playing UMD format movies. At minimum a USB UMD drive that could plugged into a PS2 or PS3 would have been awesome. If they would have tried hard enough I really think they could design an optical drive that would accept both UMDs and more conventional media.

I also blame Sony for the shear numbers of counterfeit MSPro DUO's out there. If they wouldn't charge so damned much for Magic Gate, if they wouldn't require Magic Gate for so much, or get this, if they would just USE FUCKING SD CARDs LIKE EVERYONE ELSE there would be less reason for pirates to attempt to exploit that market.

Oblivion for PSP - Missed Opportunity

[__aamkky7574]

If they'd brought out Oblivion for the PSP, I almost definitely would have bought one, but sadly, that was not to be (http://kotaku.com/gaming/rumor/oblivion-psp-finally-officially-canceled-320727.php).

P.

The difference between DS and PSP

[Half-pint HAL]

The big difference between the DS and PSP is the target market. The PSP was targetted at gamers. Big mistake. Gamers know about piracy, and are becoming more and more accustomed to it by the minute.

Sony, then, pitched their product at people who were never really going to buy all that much.

Nintendo's product has found it's way into handbags and schoolbags. The kids get legitimate games as birthday presents, and the travelling woman picks up a random brain-trainer or somesuch while stuck in departures waiting for a delayed flight. There's money in that market....

HAL.

Re:The difference between DS and PSP

[geekoid]

Let me fix the previous posters post:
"with their nintendo DS wich is absolutely undefeated in terms of piracy~"

For further clarification, read my sig.

Re:The difference between DS and PSP

[Anonymous Coward]

Your campaign is odd and pointless. No one will use the tilde for sarcasm. They will only use it on El Niño. So suck it, blowhard!

Why I sold my PSP

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the main reasons I bought the PSP was to play Gran Turismo which was used in all the early PSP pre-release promotion, but never released during the couple years I owned it. (Still not released? Or canceled? Well, who cares.)

I found that I spent most of my time on the PSP using it as an ebook reader. I did want to run lots of user made applications, so I had to switch back and forth between different firmware all the time if I wanted to use a certain application, then switch to the native web browser or play a current game. That was a real hassle. I spent much more time trying to keep up with the latest hacks than gaming. Also, the browser was nearly worthless. Many sites wouldn't load or function correctly because of the memory or software limitations.

As for games, I spent much more time playing emulated classics, rather than the occasional rare new game that was actually worth playing.

I had an earlier model without TV-out which is something they really should included in the first place. It seems like a no-brainer which could have been originally added at minimal cost. When they later released a TV-out model, I was glad I had already sold my older model. If my model had a TV-out, I'm sure I would have spent more time and gotten more value out of it as a portable and TV gaming system (and media player).

UMD was also a pointless format. Why release a brand new format that no other hardware can play? Does Sony honestly think I want to buy another copy of each movie I want to see for each device I own? As much as I hate Memory Stick, they should have found a way to build the PSP without UMD and stuck with a combination of Memory Stick (or a more common flash memory), internal memory and online storage access.

Anyway, the PSP was just a Portable Frustration Machine. It had so much potential as an all-in-one entertainment device, but the intentional hardware and software limitations just grew to be more trouble than they were worth.

I sold my PSP and later picked up a completely open Nokia Linux internet tablet for cheap. It was dirt cheap, has a higher resolution than PSP and iPhone and can run just about anything I want, within the hardware limitations. The browser is much more capable than the PSP every was. I can run a terminal and just any command line app I need, on the go without artificial limitations.

So

[geekoid]

Lot's of people are convinced of lot's of things, big deal. Lets see some good studies.

i manage a pawn shop...

[Anonymous Coward]

i go through a lot of game systems at work. the psp is just not very popular. the "piracy is killing our sales" line sounds like a bunch of BS to me. it is just an excuse to explain a bad product, while at the same time heaping another accusation onto a class of people who get little to no symathy from the public. this makes sony look a bit disreputable.

Game Library

[Lockblade]

Granted, there aren't many games for the PSP, but I think a lot of the problem has to do with the fact that there's 50 million PSP owners. That's a ton of people buying games, even if only 1 in 10 people want to buy a game. Since publishers don't expect to sell many copies of a game, they only make a few hundred or thousand copies of a game, contributing to the tiny PSP library. It's more of a quantity problem than a library problem.

yes piracy is rampant . . .but why?

[Satanboy]

I hacked my PSP so I could play Final Fantasy 7.

Had Square released a rip of FF7 on the PSP, I would have gotten it asap.

Also, Sony only lets you download PSX games through your PS3, and I don't want to pay 600 bucks for the privelege.

If they had released a PC client, and FF7, I'd not have had to hack my PSP.

The issue is they don't offer the stuff we users actually want. Since it's possible to rip my old PSX games to my PSP, and the games I want to play (vagrant story, FF7, etc) I was left with the option of buying games I don't want or getting what I wanted for free.

tough decision. . .

I'm probably not their market then...

[Psykechan]

I own a PSP and about 30 games. I'm seriously thinking of hacking mine to play games off of the memory stick. Why?

UMDs are fine with me. I don't mind the inconvenience of carrying them around as I'm only usually playing one game at a time. Plus the simple fact is that I maintain control of the game. They can't take it away.. which is likely why they are so hot to kill physical discs.

The UMD disc and the original PSP 1000 were designed together. Unfortunately with the PSP 2000 and 3000, the UMD slot pushes against the clear plastic instead of the outer white shell and can destroy the disc housing thus rendering the game unusable. I call foul.

So Sony can cry about pirates destroying their business. It obviously has nothing to do with the fact that there are only about 6 original games on the system, or that PS3 remote play is a joke (Seriously, try it if you want to see what OnLive looks like), or that you have to re-buy discs after the machine destroys them because their customer service sucks, or anything like that.

Oh and BTW I won't be purchasing any more games thanks to Patapon 2 being download only. Either announce that UMD is dead or give people their choice of DL or retail.

Just bought a PSP 3000

[obender]

The PSP 3000 comes in a pack with a camera, PSP-300 that was supposed to provide videochat. Except Go Messenger stopped at the end of last month and Skype can't use the camera. I tried to use it in the older PSP 2000 just for microphone in it but PSP 2000 won't recognize the usb cam in spite of being on the same software revision as the new 3000.

OTOH the power button is still in the same place so accidentally switching off the console during game play is a feature that has been preserved in the new version.

Babysitting

[tepples]

You rethink your invitation list (which you should be doing anyway if most of your invitees are still in HS)

I don't set up my invitation list; other members of my family do, and they call it "babysitting". One is in middle school; another is in elementary school. The cost of buying extra computers for people who don't own computers has led us to play more console games, which unfortunately means fewer indie games.

PC multiplayer vs. console multiplayer

[tepples]

Do you have four DVD players and big screen TVs in your home?

Multiple people can watch a DVD at once with one DVD player, one TV, and one copy of the movie. Multiple people can play a console game at once with one console, four controllers, one TV, and one copy of the game. In theory, this would work for PC games too, but next to no publishers of PC games publish games with split-screen (like Mario Kart) or shared-view (like Smash Bros.) multiplayer.

Network/internet gaming.

If the parent is at work, the child is not allowed to be at home unsupervised for Internet gaming. Nor is the child allowed to transport the PC to the babysitter's house and back for LAN gaming. And then each player still needs to buy a separate copy of the game.

Re:PC multiplayer vs. console multiplayer

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I understood all this from your previous post. I just don't understand how it makes PC gaming 'stillborn'. You've picked a minority of circumstances and a sillingly high bar for the PC games to reach in order to be 'successful'.

Re:PC multiplayer vs. console multiplayer

[tepples]

I understood all this from your previous post. I just don't understand how it makes PC gaming 'stillborn'.

Then I must not have meant "stillborn". I'm just miffed that there aren't any moddable party games.

Re:PC multiplayer vs. console multiplayer

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Ah, okay, I getcha now. I gave up on PC gaming yonks ago, for some of the reasons you mentioned actually. I was replying to the extremeness of your post, not the details so much.

Have a good weekend, man.

lolsony

[Anonymous Coward]

I own both a PSP and DS, both piracy capable. I find that the DS has far more shovelware and bad games in general. I will admit that the PSP's lineup is rather weak, but I often find more games worth purchasing on the it.

I to this day only own a CycloDS, NONE of the games are worth buying. My DS collects dust despite my ability to steal its entire library of sub-par games. The only thing I've used it for recently is the homebrew TI-83 emulator.

As far as my PSP, I admit that I use the piracy to find if a game is worth the purchase, some are, others aren't. While not all the games I play I purchased, most of them are. I keep them on my memory stick and enjoy having my collection with me at all times. The homebrew scene has increased my love of the PSP (I rarely used it prior to getting CFW), just due to some of the things people have made that Sony should have. Hold+, POPstates, and Ultimate PSPtube are the things that Sony should have included by now.

I've purchased a microSD -> MS adapter and gotten 16GB of storage for a quarter of the cost of a 16GB MS pro duo, no it's not perfect, but there's no way I'm buying the real deal. I have an LED Pandora battery (phat sized in the slim) which grants me about the same amount of game play time as my DS. The system is much healthier in Japan, and has been for most of it's life. The JPSN has a ton of PS1 games for purchase to use on the PS3 and PSP while the other stores have next to none. I'm forced to resort to piracy or "piracy" in the case where I already owned the game, due to the complete lack of the content any other way.

The real reason the PSP is doing poorly is Sony digging it an early grave. As a dev I wouldn't want to use the platform due to Sony milking every aspect (UMD, MS pro), costs that get passed on to the consumer.

Sorry for the long post

P.S. No remake is worth more than the game cost when it launched, ever. LOOKING AT YOU SQUARE ENIX