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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.
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).
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
Piracy is rampant on the DS too, and there's tons of money being made there.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
And here I had been thinking that it was because there are no games, the controls suck and the load times are outrageous.
The
... 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.
... 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!
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)
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.
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).
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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...
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:
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
with their nintendo DS wich is absolutely undefeated in terms of piracy.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
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.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
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.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Wasn't piracy the claimed reason for studios ditching the PC? Now they are whinging about consoles too? This is just getting old.
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.
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?
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Down to crappy rescaled graphics. ;-) I find FFTA on GBA Micro much more fun though.
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
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 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.
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
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yeah, the only case of that I've heard about was pirates stealing a freighter full of DSs.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Do they feel the DS, which is just as afflicted by rampant piracy, is worth developing for?
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!
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)
.. 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.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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?
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 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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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).
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.
Lot's of people are convinced of lot's of things, big deal. Lets see some good studies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.