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Sony and Nintendo Step Up Anti-Piracy Efforts
Edge reports that Sony and Nintendo are both expanding their anti-piracy operations in an effort to reduce piracy rates on the PSP and the DS respectively. Nintendo has hired Neil Boyd, who handled anti-piracy operations for Warner Brothers, to help them demonstrate their "willingness to take action against criminals who are making money out of the infringement of games developers' copyright." Sony has taken a more direct approach, choosing to alter the hardware used in the PSP Go so that things like the Pandora battery can no longer be used to alter the firmware.
I know like 7 or 8 people (friends, friends of friends, etc) with the Nintendo DS and NONE, I repeat, NONE of them, has a single original game. Why so? Because using downloaded games for NDS is ridiculous easy, that even the girls who don't even know to burn a CD, know copy&paste, and that's pretty much it to play "pirated" games on the NDS...
ps: Here, NDS flash cartridges are even sold at the groceries...
in every way.......
Sony produced the PSP Go for a very specific market, whether they understood it or not. People buying that are not interested in stupid fucking "snackables". Dear God, they make it sound like something a 2nd grader would eat at lunch.
The PSP Go is for people that *already* understand how to take existing UMD's in their collection and convert them and play them on the PSP. The attraction of the Go model is more memory, less power consumption (UMDless), and a smaller form factor, and possibly longer battery life.
Their attempt to cripple the unit so that you cannot play UMD backups, while being blatantly offensive towards supporters of Fair Use, just totally destroyed their *real* market for the product.
I am actually interested in the PSP Go. ONLY IF I CAN PLAY MY UMD BACKUPS. If not, then STFU Sony and you don't get my money.
Total Morons.
P.S - Yes... it can be used for pirated ISOs as well as Fair Use ISOs, but that does not make my point any less valid about their market does it?
I wont say this will kill the DS but, when the Dreamcast was around and after a few people figured out how to run debug mode the Dreamcast began its down fall. It was so easy to pirate a game, all you needed was the Dreamcast boot disk which was found everywhere online, and a BIN file for the game which could be downloaded easily, the worst part was if you were on dial-up or not cause this was 1999/2000 and broadband wasn't readily available.
Hell, eventually they managed to make all pirated game self-loading and because the Dreamcast used a proprietary disk format that could hold more then 750mb, some people managed to remove content from the game to fit it on a regular CD. Thus making the GD-Rom's piracy measure of going past the 750mb useless.
I read a post-mortem article from one of the leads at SEGA after support was dropped. They took a gamble with the Dreamcast and knew they had to reach a certain number of units sold both in games and in systems to be able to compete with the Playstation 2. They never officially blamed piracy but they said it definitely hurt them, especially in the last six months before the PS2 arrived.
In my opinion the arrival of the PS2 didn't kill the Dreamcast, piracy did.
How come the arrival of super-easy piracy for the PS2 (Available shortly after V2 arrived on the market, so a matter of months) didn't kill it?
Or the fact that pirating a game for the XBOX (also available mere months after XBOX's existence in the market) meant faster load times and easier game selection?
And how come the Gamecube lagged behind both, despite that "quality" piracy wasn't available until several years after its launch?
Or the PS3 lagging behind, despite no widespread piracy? Or the XBOX 360 surpassing it despite simple-as-a-flash piracy? Or the Wii also surpassing it with also rather simple pirate mods?
Your argument is backwards. Pirateable consoles have always been the winners. Look at the NES, they didn't just make 1,000,000-in-1 carts and do away with the lockout chip, they pirated the ENTIRE SYSTEM!
Dreamcast died because of a lack of marketing and availability. I never even saw one in my entire life, and I own almost all consoles from most all generations. It's the 3D0 of the modern world.
You do NOT need to take those risks just to run homebrew, and running homebrew is pretty much completely safe these days (there are always some theoretical risks risks, of course, but the practical incidence of issues is just about zero). If you disagree, please point me to a single report of someone having bricked their console by using our official installer (people who have previously applied warez hacks need not apply). Again, you're confusing the tools you need to just run applications (that is, Bannerbomb at a minimum, and then The Homebrew Channel if you want convenience) with the tools used to pirate games: not just the loaders - those are safe - but the system software (IOS) hacks and the extremely nasty exploits used to install them (because the people who write these things aren't real reverse engineers and don't know any better).
Piracy tools are extremely dangerous for two reasons: 1) you need to fundamentally patch the Wii software to run pirate games (so it'll read game data from another source), and 2) the people behind them are often highly incompetent. As a result, you get things like cIOScorp, which replaces every single version of IOS with a single patched version. That's the equivalent of taking a whole bunch of shared object sonames for a single library (each with different ABI quirks) and replacing them all with a single, patched version. Where this shared object is as critical as the C library.
Besides the actual insane hacks they use, their installers are almost universally crappy. They don't check return codes, so often they'll uninstall some critical piece of system software, then fail to install it again. Running any piracy tools while your internal storage is near full is almost a guaranteed recipe for a permanent brick. I also know this because I make a device to help repair issues generally caused by using out-of-region games and people often ask me if they can use it to repair their consoles after one of these accidents (the answer, invariably, is to send the Wii to Nintendo and pay their normal repair fee). I've had dozens and dozens of people tell me personally about having bricked their Wiis with piracy software, and none at all who have had any issues installing homebrew using our installer.
You don't need nasty hacks to play imports. Playing imports with homebrew is perfectly safe, since it only involves a replacement game loader that doesn't check for the region (it's something optional, not enforced by the IOS security software). This is totally safe (and useless to warez games). The critical difference is that warez game loaders need to patch IOS so it can at game runtime continue to load data from whatever media the game is stored on. Region-free loaders are just disc loaders, you can write one in a couple hundred lines of code using the stock Wii software and without the need for any hacks beyond running PowerPC code. You don't even need to touch a single file on NAND - you could run a region-free disc loader from Bannerbomb, which is basically provably safe because it doesn't touch persistent storage. This is completely different from piracy tools, all of which need to permanently alter system software one way or another.
To debunk your specific claims:
The Homebrew Channel is an _installable_ application that makes _zero_ changes to your firmware. It installs itself exactly as a WiiWare channel would. Its installer perfor