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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.
No, really. The've shown that they believe that Wii homebrew == Wii piracy (having attacked generic homebrew almost exclusively, not just piracy tools, and considering that they harassed us when we attempted to notify them of a security issue), and yet it's been over 5 months since the latest security-related update. Somehow I don't get the felling that Nintendo is interested in combating Wii piracy very much (it's not like they've done a whole lot to stop modchips either).
How is $30 for an r4ds flash cart for my dsi TONS of cash? Thats less than the price of one new game, plus i can keep "backups" of all my games on one card. Cheaper and more convenient, not a tough decision for me.
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?
Come on, fixing the Pandora problem was as easy as changing the firmware that listened to the battery.
It is an enormous stretch to think that the PSP Go! doesn't have a removable battery because of the Pandora battery. Wouldn't you think it would be more because non-removable batteries are in vogue in high-line devices like the iPod Touch and Zune HD, both of which the PSP Go! competes with?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There are at least a dozen different ways to make cartridge based games self destruct their data if they're opened. You can't get the ROM off it if a system wipes it any time oxygen is sensed inside the cartridge which has a vacuum in it.
sure you can, I can dump my legitimate games onto cf card using my actual ds.. you do realize that for the cartridge to be usable the system has to be able to read the data... right?
dumping does not involve removing cartridge chips these days (ok.. well... arcade games sometimes) it either involves putting the cartridge into an original system that's running a dumper program, or making something yourself that has a cartridge port that can read it.
I think piracy on the consoles... the Wii and 360... is pretty much negligible. I'd be shocked if it hurt total software sales by 1%.
However, it's MUCH worse on the handhelds. A flash cart for the DS is something like $7, if you look in the right places (Cough*dealextreme*cough)... and games are generally well under 100 mb, so they're quick and easy to download.
And the PSP... cripes, I don't think ANYBODY uses it like Sony intended. I don't blame or begrudge Nintendo or Sony for tightening them down, so long as they don't adopt strategies that interfere with legitimate purchasers.
It's far more likely that Superman and Wonder Woman will actually become real, eliminate the Taliban, deliver Osama Bin Laden to the White House steps, and then top it off with a Sex Tape. Ohhh, and the Wonder Twins get caught doing each other in Central Park.
NONE of the console manufacturers have even a measurable amount of respect for Fair Use. NONE. As far as they are concerned, they own the hardware 100% and should be able to 100% control every single one of your actions with their product as if they are in the room holding your hand. That game you bought gets a little too scratched? That cart get dropped in the pool? Well FUCK YOU. Buy another.
I feel you about what they are going through. It's just wishful thinking they are going to try to find a middle ground. They are just as extreme and inflexible as hard core pirates who will never compensate anyone for any intellectual property whatsoever.
It might as well be religious fundamentalism. Your reasonable position has no place here.
NONE of the console manufacturers have even a measurable amount of respect for Fair Use. NONE. As far as they are concerned, they own the hardware 100% and should be able to 100% control every single one of your actions with their product as if they are in the room holding your hand. That game you bought gets a little too scratched? That cart get dropped in the pool? Well FUCK YOU. Buy another.
I see what you try to do, but your argument is stupid and wrong anyway.
If what you said was true, they would never allow you to download games you buy online as many times as you want. Erased that online game because you need place on your Wii? You can download it back as many times as you want.
The sole reason that they don't allow that on physical properties is because they fear you would get several legitimate copies when you actually paid for one.
Did you even try getting a new copy? Usually, a cart dropped in the pool will still work once dried up. And usually you can phone them and arrange for you to get back a new copy if you send the malfunctioning copy back to them.
Perhaps not in every country, I don't know.
It's just wishful thinking they are going to try to find a middle ground. They are just as extreme and inflexible as hard core pirates who will never compensate anyone for any intellectual property whatsoever.
It might as well be religious fundamentalism. Your reasonable position has no place here.
You just come off to me as someone trying to put them on the same level as hardcore pirates, thus deeming them unworthy of not being pirated. That's just a straw man to me.
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.
...because Sony and Nintendo will just be annoying us homebrew users. Indiscriminately criminalising your customers will not make the "bad guys" go away - they'll just multiply!
The real problem is that the industry - and that's not just Sony and Big N - still keeps ignoring is pricing. Maybe you gotta stop labeling crap the same as diamonds. (and yeah, I know Third Parties don't get a say in this!)
I think a general drop in prices is called for - and maybe the dropping of the belief that "Visuals are Everything".
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
If, instead of putting the "SELECT" and "START" buttons in the little round spot in the mirror-image position of where the thumbstick is on the Go, they had put in another thumbstick and put those two buttons somewhere else, they would have made ports of shooters and other PS2 and PS3 games to the PSP a lot easier. Backward compatibility with old PSP games would be trivial - the old games don't "know" about the second thumbstick, so they'd automatically ignore it.
I like my PSP quite a bit. It has served me well on long flights and on bus trips between Rio and Sao Paulo. I've watched movies and TV eps on it, and I've enjoyed some of the games, especially some of the shooters like the Syphon Filter games, which I think do the best job of working around the problem of having only one joystick, but it would be nicer if all the shooters could have the same controls, which would be the case if there were two thumbsticks plus the direction and "shape" buttons. Y'know... like EVERY console controller. And as I said, it would make ports of console games that much easier, which could greatly expand the number of games available for the PSP.
It's a huge pain in the ass to switch between different shooters on the PSP, because I end up confusing the control schemes between different games. Since the controls are only that different from game to game because the games use different workarounds for the single-joystick problem, the solution is obvious... to everyone but the geniuses at Sony.
The PSP hardware has gone through three updates in the last few years, and the most obvious change to strengthen the platform has not been part of any of them. Instead, they've focused on making it smaller and lighter, which I don't want at all. In fact, I have a case and leave the PSP in it at all times because the whole thing feels sturdier in my hands. One of the reasons I chose the PSP over the DS was because the DS felt flimsy and easy-to-break to me. So of course, when Sony updated their hardware three times, it was to make it lighter and smaller, but not to, y'know, do the one thing that would really improve the platform as a whole.
I will give them credit for the video out that they added on the 2000, though. That's the one feature of the newer models I really wish I had. Battery life is a decent one, but I just bought an extra battery (with a larger capacity than the original Sony one) and make sure both are charged before I leave on a trip. I also use the power cord when I can (in airports or bus stations, at home, etc.). I've never had to quit playing because of lack of battery power.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
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.