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Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go"
We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
I'm not sure how UMD-to-flash transfer helps people copy pirated games. I mean, the pirated games are disk images on flash memory. An actual physical UMD isn't involved.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
With hard copy disc based games you can sell them on to friends or a shop once you're done. A bit more difficult with a download - people will just want it for free and what shop will buy a memory stick off you that may or may not work and may or may not have viruses etc embedded on it?
I think you may be confusing the media for the PSP.
UMD = Little bitty optical disc in a protective case. Not writable. I think they can hold 1.4GiB of data.
Memory Stick = Sony's proprietary Flash-type media. I think these go up to 16GiB now.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Excellent, now all the pirates will drop their old pirate friendly PSP and buy a GO. /sarcasm
No, it's not.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Sony can only blame itself for the failure of UMD movies. When the PSP first came out I was looking forward to having portable movies, but they cost significantly more than DVD's even though they were lower quality and could only be viewed on one device (the PSP 1000 had no video out), it was no wonder they didn't sell.
Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time.
With games, they arguably have a fair point.
With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.
People bought CDs of music they already had on vinyl or cassette or what-have-you because they had noticeably better quality (don't give me that vinyl-beats-CD crap, which even if it did hold true on a virgin record, doesn't once a diamond needle has ripped down all those those nice soft grooves). Once you talk about the same quality in 20 different physical formats, however, don't expect people to subsidize you for the rest of eternity rebuying your existing library in incrementally better formats.
Both the Wii and DS are far more piracy ridden, and simpler to mod to allow copied games. I can't think why both of these are the #1 sellers by large margins in consoles and portables... It's certainly not the quality of titles. Just maybe people buy them knowing they have access to a huge library knowing they won't have to buy?
As long as there are modders, hackers, pirates and nerds, people WILL find a way to pirate copyrighted material. And, since theyve made it an all digital format now, simply buying the software off the online store for the PSP Go HAS to save it SOMEWHERE into the device. Otherwise, it's unlikely that you'd have access to the game without some sort of WiFi. Now, being that the data is now in your possession, it's just a matter of cracking into the data files and extracting the game or whatever. Well done Sony, well done.
"Chance favors only the prepared mind." -Archimedes
The biggest problem with the PSP Go is the built-in battery which (unlike PSP 1000, 2000 and 3000) cannot be removed/replaced by the end-user. They will say as a result of the Pandora battery, but that was already taken care of by keeping Datel's Lite Blue Tool battery off the market ( http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/18/psp-3000-finally-inevitably-hacked-by-datels-lite-blue-tool/ ).
For all intents and purposes, the PSP Go should be renamed PSP Disposable, as if you battery has run through its allotment of charge/discharge cycles you might as well buy a new one... but what will that do to all the games you bought?! Right.
Personally, I think all films should be made as puppet shows but with stunning plots. People who do not like puppet shows with stunning plots are uneducated heathens.
Thing is, the Minidisc had a minor but loyal following, and in 2004 got a major upgrade with the Hi-MD format that allowed data and video to be trasnferred on top of music. And the major advantage of the format compared to the newfangled UMD was that it was rewritable.
If they had released the PSP with Minidisc games, videos and whatnot, I'm sure the console's story would have been completely different. Even with the Memory stick slot on the side. Both rewritable formats, and they'd have been SONY so presumably they wouldn't have lost anything. Of course that would have meant trusting the customers with an relatively open media, and that's something they're allergic to.
Instead they created the UMDs, closed and crippled them, and tried to sell them at the same price as full blown DVDs. No wonder it didn't take off. Meh.
There is no need to promote an imitation by big capital.
Boosting for the big capital's imitation-products may be the path to the non-creative market.
Abraham TaddyHatty
4) Just like before because piracy is not that big of a problem and only gets pointed at to tell shareholders "with the right DRM we'll see MASSIVE GROWTH and be rich!"
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It is very simple:
As soon as a hacked PSP with a big memorystick containing all the pirated games that you play has a user experience that is many times better than the official route of bringing a pile of those tiny, easily scratched, slow loading UMD's with your PSP, the choice is easy.
UMD was a completely obsolete platform in a time where flashmemory and downloads had already won the battle and hackers like darkalex forced the PSP to that modern level.
The only choice sony has is to make the user experience for the legit-route beat the pirated route, and UMD is not part of that.
Memory Stick = Sony's proprietary Flash-type media.
How is Memory Stick more proprietary than SD? Both are patented, and both include DRM (that next to nothing actually uses).
I think these go up to 16GiB now.
In practice, 16 GB stick holds 16 GB of data. About 7% of the sectors (which happens to equal the difference between a GB and a GiB) are reserved as spares to replace sectors that are defective at manufacturing or have been erased too much.
Maybe my kids' PSP-3000s and legit UMD games will have added resale value because of this move on Sony's part.
> on a console where they are locked up tighter than a stereotypical tight-ass' asshole.
"tighter than ..."? What console's DRM hasn't been broken, except for maybe the PS3 (IBM did the security there, I think)?
This makes no sense. Think about it. Seriously, two-second consideration here. First, this is a platform based solely on downloadable games. If they have problems with piracy, especially rampant piracy cutting into game sales, it makes no sense to develop this platform. So either they have means to prevent it, or it doesn't matter because it applies to everything else on the platform. Second, since it either exists or doesn't matter, it can't be that particularly difficult to have someone insert a UMD into their old PSP, verify a signature, then provide a downloadable version with whatever anti-piracy measures are in place.
Really this almost certainly comes down to licensing and legal issues, who's allowed to distribute and how. Tracking down and getting agreements from every single publisher for all titles would definitely be a bit of a legal and technical issue.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
So the PSP was such a good product that people where jailbreaking it and using it for all sorts of things (like playing movies), not just gaming. They were getting their games from independent sources and even playing PS1 games on it. They were playing movies directly from the memory stick without paying for Sony's overpriced movies.
Sony was selling the PSP at a loss and trying to make it up from overpriced games and overpriced movies. Since people were not buying as many games and movies from Sony as expected this wasn't working.
The old Sony (from 15 years ago) would've done the following:
- Open up the console themselves so that people wouldn't need to jailbreak it
- Pitch it as an open, portable multimedia + gaming device. Sell it for more money because people were buying it for the extra features.
The new Sony did the following:
- Tried to patch the holes that allowed for the jailbreaking. These could only be patch with a new version of the console and new holes were discovered within a week of the old ones being patched. Consoles already out before the patch still had the old holes.
- Came up with a completely new PSP with stronger DRM, such as having the firmware version tied to the games so that new games would force firmware upgrades thus closing existing holes in consoles with older firmware. The new PSP is NOT backwards compatible with the old one, adds no value for consumers (it actually reduces value) and costs more money.
Yet another situation where Sony shows how they went from a company that "was proud to do the best quality products and could sell them at a premium" to a Sony that "trades the quality-value that their brand name acquired in the past for pushing to consumers inferior products designed to have Sony get paid extra when users actually use their products".
This is why I stopped buying Sony altogether years ago (I distrust their products and expect them to, by design, force me to pay Sony extra money when use them) and never looked back.
Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3. As DRM goes, I've seen a lot worse that what goes on at the Playstation Store, and I've rarely seen something better. Hopefully, Microsoft will see that this method works and will down their current policies in the next generation of consoles.
That said, Sony has a bad policy with regard to the encryption of data stored on the PS3. Let me put it this way; Backup your saves often.
May the Maths Be with you!
I have never bought a UMD movie, nor am I interested in watching a movie on a small screen. One of the kids bought one at a pawnshop once, and his comment on the viewing experience was "lame."
My entire concern here is that my family has a large number of games on the format (we have five people, and five PSPs -- many games we have 2 or more copies of so we can play machine to machine -- Tekken, race games, etc.), and the new machine won't play them. At all. As in we supported Sony and the game manufacturers, and they, in turn, have said "So what?" clearly and without any doubt WRT the new machine.
Consequently, we won't be buying the new machine.
It isn't even a matter of "voting with our wallets"; I mean, Sony didn't even give us a reason to buy the new machine. None. Zilch. Nada. Why in the *world* would we obsolete our PSP game library?
What we will probably do is pick up a full replacement set of the UMD-playing model so that our investment in games -- which is far more than our investment in the machines -- doesn't suddenly turn into nothing.
The same thing happened with the PS3s; we have PS3's with PS2 emulation hardware in them. Why would we buy PS3's without and obsolete all those PS2 games? We purchased backup machines with PS2 capability to protect the software investment and simply ignore the new, crippled machines.
Sony comes up with some fabulous products from time to time; but I think they make next-gen product decisions with a "lucky 8-ball" or something similar. The new PSP... complete non-starter around here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
He never mentioned SD so your failed attempt at a rhetorical question while trolling is enough reason for me to mark you.
Nonsense.
Piracy is rampant and easy on the PSP at present, but not everyone does it.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick. I hate having to carry the UMDs around, loading times improve and the battery life is better. I also have a genesis emulator on their and some ROMS of games I used to own as a kid. That may or may not be considered piracy I guess.
But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Personally, I think all films should be made as muppet shows but with stunning plots. People who do not like muppet shows with stunning plots are uneducated heathens.
TFTFY
Putting an optical drive on a portable device didn't make sense, and Sony did the right thing to get rid of it (though a little too late). Load times for games are slow, discs can easily be scratched and (most importantly for a portable device) it kills the battery.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
So Sony released the PSP along with their UMD, repeating the same mistake Sony's made since BetaMax. UMDs only work on PSPs, therefore Sony will have the monopoly on the platform. Now it turns out that nobody likes UMDs, and they can be defeated by hacking the firmware and using another proprietary Sony format, MemoryStick, onto which people can load videos that they own.
So Sony decides to enclose completely the PSP. Hell, I'd be surprised if you even own the hardware.
The only "victory" Sony had using this technique is Blu-Ray, and that's been flying off the shelves, hasn't it?
SDA has at least opened some specs like the simplified host controller spec, they are available without an NDA. It's true that this happened after open source implementations were done via reverse engineering, but it's still better than what Sony does AFAIK.
Does SD have open patent licensing, does Memmory stick?
What I mean, is SD like MP3 where there is a set price and anyone can do it, while Sony reserves the right to block you entirely?
And what does DRM have to do with open vs proprietary?
These are actual questions too, I don't really know. I assume that the wider adoption of SD has to do with greater ease of implementing it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.
Yeah, that's exactly what Sony, Universal, EMI, Warner, Columbia, Paramount, Walt Disney, NewsCorp, Viacom, Microsoft, Nintendo, and every other single digital media distributor / producer believes.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I wish people didn't use the word ironic when they truly mean something akin to poetic justice. Irony is when a phrase has an opposite meaning than it's literal meaning or intended meaning.
What the author here is trying to convey is that it is cynically funny (funny to those who believe in human selfishness) that the two are correlated. Of course that does not equal causation, but now I'm just getting off topic (PS: I love the lemon graph at the top, I toss it in slide shows randomly to see if anyone is awake.)
Personally, I think all films should be made as puppet shows but with stunning plots.
The South Park guys tried that, although I don't know if you'd call their plot "stunning" ;) It did teach us one thing though: 99% of the human race can be lumped into one of three categories: dicks, assholes and pussies. The remaining 1% is actually made up of cockroaches from outer space.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
flash doesn't have sectors, you tool
and memory stick is more proprietary in that ONLY SONY USE IT
"Here you've put me in a tough situation: I can't honestly decide whether to say, 'Duh,' uh, 'Doy,' or a very sarcastic, 'Oh, really?'" Regardless of who cooks up the new device/format, is this the first time since the "digital revolution" someone has tried to dupe consumers into thinking they were paying for the physical and/or digital media format itself, rather than what I guess you would call Intellectual Property usage rights? No. And it's definitely not the first time a significant enough number of people savvied up and refused to play their rigged game. The piracy thing, IMHO, has been, and will continue to be a back-burner issue that they're more than eager to substitute for the fair use question. At least Sony didn't try to make a mountain range out of that molehill, but just moved on.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
Well, it's not quite a mop, not quite a puppet, but man..... So, to answer you question, I don't know.
The old Sony (from 15 years ago) would've done the following:
- Open up the console themselves so that people wouldn't need to jailbreak it
- Pitch it as an open, portable multimedia + gaming device. Sell it for more money because people were buying it for the extra features.
Although I've been around since betamax, I've never heard of the "old Sony" or any other major competitor that would be suicidal enough to open up their console as you suggest. The friendly koreans from GamePark attempted it, but they won't be around for much longer.
Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3.
It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even /. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Well, no. It's people who would prefer watching bad movies with excellent special effects to good movies made with puppets in someone's garage who are uneducated heathens.
On the other hand, the trouble with the gaming industry is that there are only maybe 8 or 9 different engine types that you need to make every kind of game already devised. Open source has made several good shooter engines, those really don't need any improvement. RTS is coming along, turn-based strategy is trivial, and RPG can use any of the three depending on what you want to do.
In my experience, most of the value in games comes from user-generated content anyway, so I certainly see PC gaming moving away from the industry to FOSS, as the modding community starts to discover they don't need proprietary games (especially when the studios are so often seen actively inhibiting the modding community.)
The PS3 hasn't been broken because people had no reason to. You can easily install alternative operating systems on the thing. It's even mentioned in the manual. I think things will change though since they removed that option in the new PS3s. But maybe not as you can always find an old PS3 if you want to do homebrew.
Mada mada dane.
Ooh, a PSP port of Battle for Wesnoth would be awesome!
There is a war going on for your mind.
flash doesn't have sectors
Then what are the "erase blocks" that this document about JFFS2 mentions?
They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
...Yeah right. When the UMD was first released Sony expected people to re-buy their movies on UMD discs. And now people are surprised the hear that Sony expects them to re-buy games?
I'd say the only technical issue they ran into was not being able to find a way to charge for the service of transferring your UMD disc to your Go's flash.
He never mentioned SD
He did specifically mention that Memory Stick is proprietary, implying that something else isn't proprietary. Which removable flash memory format were you thinking of that is less proprietary than both?
Really folks please lets only use abbreviations after telling us what it is.
It's madness no such device exists since without it (or a robust universal exchange program) Sony has just pissed off millions of potential customers. Who exactly is going to pay more money for a device that is essentially crippled? The only other way I can see a UMD-less working in the short term is if it were packed with phone functionality (and camera) and its cost was then subsidized by the phone networks.
Does SD have open patent licensing, does Memmory stick?
It costs a few thousand dollars to license Memory Stick, much like for SD.
And what does DRM have to do with open vs proprietary?
It was an aside.
If going towards more user-accessibility is so bad, why are more open routers and media devices appearing on the market (Netgear's new OSS router, Neuros OSD...hell, dd-wrt & tomato), and why has the Redmond gang changed their tune? Why is Apple feeling the burn for being draconian with their recent restrictions and user-unfriendliness? Your counterargument fails as badly as your knowledge of current tech sector news.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
I don't know how much I buy that. Game engines and other such plumbing works well enough but even fan generated content for most games relies hugely on resources supplied by the base game. I've been watching attempts to replace the base wads and paks that are supplied with even super old stuff like Doom and Quake. The goal of those projects is a complete replacement that would allow among other things existing fan generated content to run. None have been complete enough to do this. There is an awful lot of artistic scutwork that has to go into making large games work these days and FOSS communities only seem to go so far in producing it.
I can see small original even innovate things being done on PCs but big productions that contain DVDs worth on content are only going to come out on the platforms the majors want to support. I'd love to be proven wrong on this but .....
I assume you're referring to "Team America: World Police", which was quite disappointing if you ask me... But the plot of the average South Park episode is WAY more stunning than what most people would expect from a construction paper cartoon that makes a lot of poop jokes...
Not to start this same argument all over again, but the diamond needle only rips down all those those nice soft grooves if you have a cheap turntable with a 25 gram weight on that stylus. Earlier turntables and records were even worse; the old shellack platters wore out quickly. But I have decades-old LPs you would think were virgin, played on a 1/2 gram pressure.
If the title originally came out in analog, the LP will sound better than the CD (again, given a good enough turntable. One of digital's advantages is except for speakers, more money doesn't buy better sound). If it was originally mastered digitally, the CD will sound better than the LP.
Any time you mix analog with digital you get the worst of both worlds, with the advantages of neither. Many titles that originally were LP will have the CD sound better than the LP, because the LP was digitally mastered. Don't bother buying the LP version of any new music, because the new music will have been mastered digitally.
Free Martian Whores!
Notice, if you will, that the only Memory Stick, Memory Stick Micro, Memory Stick Pro, and Memory Stick Pro Duos you see bear the company name Sony or that of one of the few strictly sublicensed partner company brand names. Sandisk/Lexar are two examples of such companies, with Sandisk being a direct partner with Sony for the Memory Stick spec. You will find SD cards from Sandisk, Lexar, Crucial, Kingston and numerous other companies. I hope that answers your question about which format is more open and prevalent. There are several companies offering hardware adapters to allow SD cards to be compatible with Memory Stick slots. The SD spec is easily (and more cheaply) licensed for use in all kinds of devices - industrial, commercial, and consumer, from what I've determined.
As for the DRM question: Sony only uses non-compatible proprietary DRM formats for everything, as a rule. Usually Windows-locked by default in any implementation. For the Memory Stick cards, it is optional to use, and is called MagicGate, a software/hardware duality. See: ATRAC. See also: MagicGate [1]. This is not to say enterprising individuals haven't taken care of this issue, it's just a fact of their track record as a company. The SD card DRM [2](CPRM 1|2) scheme on the other hand, is able to be licensed and used in Open Sauce (for a fee), for whatever reason one might choose to do so, and is rarely if ever enforced even when it is present, and is software mostly reliant on software, with the DRM itself only fully working if a CPRM capable device is present for key negotiation. It's been bypassed for years by programs like DVDShrink, etc.
For an example: Sandisk SD cards that contain media/programs/etc of whatever type on the card at retail. You can copy the stuff straight to your hard drive without any trouble, or format the card, again, without any trouble, and proceed to use them. The data isn't locked, even though the DRM is present. Try this with the content that comes on those special MSD cards once for an unhappy experience. Try to erase the data off the card, and you are prevented, so you are stuck with a partially full card from the get-go. Ditto attempting to copy the data.
[1] Note: I apologize for using a Wikipedia link, but I couldn't find any direct information on MagicGate from the Sony website, other than their support section saying that Memory Stick cards or devices without MagicGate can't use ATRAC-based files (it seems the spec page for MagicGate no longer exists or was removed); also listed on the Sony site were several pages on which devices contain it and which do not.
[2] Note: Two best links I found dealing with CPRM.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
South Park is computer generated. Some of the shorts they made (and maybe the pilot episode?) were done on construction paper but every episode since has been generated on computers.
And yeah, South Park rocks. I love when they do political commentary. They even spawned a movement of sorts. To quote Stone, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This may have been true in the 80s, when converters weren't that great and record companies would do brain-dead things like take a tape with the RIAA curve applied to it for mastering to LP and master that to CD.
These days, converters sound really good and high-end converters like the Apogee have circuitry that does the type of soft compression people are used to hearing from an analog master.
I wonder if this isn't just a test to see how a device will do without physical media for the user. PS4 maybe 100% digital downloads? Sell one time use usb device to upload games to the device, then it shorts itself out, never to be used again? It will kill the second hand market for sure, but how will Wal-mart react?
The removed the ability to install another OS with the latest software release.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
It's not Alpha Centauri but I happen to really like it myself.
Therefore, in my opinion, your opinion sucks.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Not if you own a PSP made in the last two years it isn't.
I'm more than happy to be proven wrong but so far no-one has managed to get CFW loaded onto a TA088v3 board or the PSP3000.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Regarding the "ease" of piracy on the PSP - this isn't true anymore. Recently, games have required higher versions of firmware than is possible to install on hacked PSP's. There are workarounds for this, but they're stop-gaps at best. It certainly isn't nearly as easy as it was a year ago.
You are wrong. Google ChickHEN. Homebrew on the PSP3000.
It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even /. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".
No, that's the distinction. In Sony's (and the *AA's) eyes, you don't purchase content, you buy a license to use it in whatever ways they say you can. Since they lost the Fair Use battle, they are trying to change the game to something that favors them.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.
Actually, they allowed to use content you've purchased on devices you don't own. They also allow you use content you haven't purchased as long as it had been installed on one user account on your machine. I would personally prefer to simply have the game on a portable disc, but in lieu of that, the current system on the PS3 (excepting game saves) is something I can live with.
I'm aware that digital distribution essentially means that we are moving from concrete ownership of games to effectively licensing them. That's something I'd regret to see happening for most titles. However, when it comes to downloadable games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Fat princess, World of Goo or Shadow Complex that could never be released as physical media, I'm willing to accept the licensing model particularly if it is as liberal as the one currently seen on the PS3. The alternatives on other consoles are not altogether as palatable at the present time.
I would ideally like to have a small DS sized cartridge for every downloadable game I own. Something I could carry with me, put into any console and play when, where and how I chose to. That's not going to happen, especially if we also want the convenience and lower cost of downloadable games. What's the alternative? What kind of DRM regime would you like to see for downloadable games? None at all? Then you'd prefer to have no downloadable games; a genre I might add that has been the source of the most original and highest quality games of this generation.
Downloadable games are fun, engaging and frankly, cheap. Depending on your supplier, their licences are more or less agreeable. Sony's current policies are probably the most agreeable of any. Yes, we'd all like to own the content we buy instead of just buying a licence. But that's just not going to happen. If the PSP Go's licensing is as flexible as the PS3s I may even consider buying one and paying for and downloading all the PSP games I've wanted to play, and as long as Sony keeps honouring my account, I'll still be able to play them the same as if I had them on UMD discs. That's an important qualifier, but given Sony's track record on downloadable content so far, I think its safe to say that there is less risk Sony locking down my games than me losing their disks.
Perhaps this is indeed evidence of my "indoctrination". Or perhaps it's simply evidence that I'm someone who knows a fair deal when they see one, and is willing to spend money so they can sit back and play the games they want to with no hassle and in peace. You decide.
May the Maths Be with you!
You can use it on 5 systems simultaneously. That's something you can't do with a physical console game.
Logically, then, once a user has licensed a particular piece of content, that same piece of content should then be available to the user for each succeeding generation of media. Buy a movie on VHS, get the DVD five years later for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the Blu-Ray for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the UberVideoHiRes digital download for only the cost of the bandwidth.
Right?
Content providers should not get to have it both ways.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.
Oddly, I don't care.
I mean, back in, like, 2000 or whatever, when I got my TRGPro, I thought it was dandy to be able to use the same 64MB compact flash card (Retail price at the time: $150) on both the handheld and my digital camera. Even through 2002 or 2003 with the early Tungsten devices, I felt that having the same memory card format on both my Palm and my camera was a very valuable thing, and I would share cards between devices. And for the longest time I thought hardware designs where micro-SD slots or whatever weren't accessible on the machine's exterior were inherently bad.
These days, flash memory is cheap, small USB card readers are cheap... It would be nice to be able to load the memory cards used by my game machines directly into my laptop or desktop PC - but really, it's not the end of the world if I can't. Micro-SD would require an adaptor anyway (micro-SD to SD). So I really don't feel too terribly concerned about the fact that Sony is pushing their own flash memory format on their own platform. Like I said, flash is cheap.
Bow-ties are cool.
Ah. Someone who hasn't been burnt by DRM yet.
I used to be like you, indifferent to DRM. Not any more after being burnt several times.
I watched Team America in the theater twice :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
South Park is computer generated.
Talking about team america, which was BY the southpark guys but was done with puppets.
Oops, I see now a second too late you were talking about the construction paper comment. Good thing I didn't make that comment too "snarky" or I would have looked even more dumb...
Don't worry scrote! There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.
Squirrel!
Which removable flash memory format were you thinking of that is less proprietary than both?
Both? Dunno. But less proprietary than the Sony Memory Stick? How about anything that is usable in the products of at least two companies? Because that's what makes the Memory Stick proprietary, the fact that it is usable in _only_ Sony devices.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Sony will do whatever is best for their bottom line. They have 3 choices:
- Kill the original PSP, sell only the Go units at a higher price, while gaining the control of the software market.
- Kill the Go after a year if it's not profitable, continue the sales of the original PSP and lose money to piracy but make money on hardware.
- Sell both systems and gain money from each of them. As long as both are profitable, they'll keep them going.
Again, whatever scenario is most profitable. Somehow I see the piracy excuse as an easy out for a bad decision in the PSP's design and/or marketing departments. Piracy is rampant on the DS, yet the DSi still offers gameplay via cartridges. Nintendo's trying to get people used to downloading games via their shop (wii and ds) instead of ramming it down their customer's throats.
... No, they removed the ability to install another OS with the latest hardware release. My old 60GB launch PS3 still allows me to install Linux if I so choose. With the PS3 slim, they didn't want to provide linux drivers for the new hardware (which would have added time and testing - and therefore a higher pricetag).
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
I guess you're hoping that the PS3 doesn't have XBox360 like failure rates. I know a few people who would have already lost access to their downloaded content under this scheme. Not to mention that restricting DLC to be played only on PS3s is ridiculous. I buy a movie via the PS Store, and I can only play it on a PS3? That's not buying anything, that's renting some code to be played on some proprietary hardware.
In other words, this scheme is only a fair deal if your use case doesn't happen to fall outside of the boundaries that Sony designed. And that will happen at some point, even to you. I just hope you won't have sunk a lot of money into that scheme.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If it was running in some kind of RAID 0 sure, but my experiences with that device is that its SLOOOOW....
I mean, sure, I am using it now. No way in hell I am paying $150 for an SD card, but you notice a decrease in speed. You could use class 6 micro SDHC cards and it still gives bad performance on games. Sony needs to give up the Duo chip. Sure they were first to market, but there is just no way they can compete with the SD standard. (I wish the 4 bit bus protocol was open, hate using the damn SISO interface for my projects.)
GiB isn't a unit. The hell are you talking about?
The UMD is for all intents and purposes dead, defeated, vanquished, extinct, inanimate, no longer alive.
Given the "dead" nature of UMD, I'd hoped he'd go for "UMD is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to see its maker. This is a late format. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace..."
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
I know people who have, and in fact have myself, suffered from a PS3 failure in the form of the "Yellow light of Death (YLOD)". While save files are indeed lost to encrypted oblivion, your downloadable content is tied to your PSN account and can be re-downloaded for free from the PSN store when you receive your replacement console. I thus conclude that you either don't know anyone who has lost access or you know a lot of liars.
I stress that Sony's policy with regard to save files leaves a lot to be desired. These indeed are fully encrypted, tied to the console and will be lost forever in the event of failure. However, your purchased content is available for download at any time.
May the Maths Be with you!
I wonder how long before some one emulates the Sony download servers on a PC ? I imagine they have some pretty heavy encryption somewhere along the lines but thats all part of the game.
If they are that worried about pirates transfer games they could just design a simple app that can verify you own the game on your original PSP, and create a token in your account. If you could go the extra mile and uniquely identify the game, it would be even more secure. The worst you have to worry about in this case is some guys sharing games with their friends, something that happens anyway. Of course this requires something unusual; trust in your customers, which leads me to say that I should stop posting stupid ideas.
He's actually spot on mate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
Bingo.
There is a war going on for your mind.
In Sony's (and the *AA's) eyes, you don't purchase content, you buy a license to use it
True. But I think it's worth continuing to point out that the *AA's eyes are the eyes of the delusional, with no legal basis.
Is/was Sony's use of non-SD for expandable storage. MemoryStickPRO has come down considerably in price and its still 2x more expensive than SDHC per gig.
Hi! I just wanted to let you in on a little secret, just might help you out some. You see I am 27 years old and a male, since the NES I have been an avid gamer, and up untill the xbox and ps2 I was also an avid pirate of video games. It started with the good ol ps1 ahh yes great system to mod (only 4 wires to solder!) I must have had nearly 200 ps1 games back then, but I also had nearly every controller, arcade stick, racing wheels, game sharks, I purchased every single Squaresoft game as well, even the shitty ones... same with the Dreamcast bought every piece of hardware I could. You see ps1 and dc were easy to mod and games were very easy to burn, but I promise you I spent more on those 2 systems hardwise than any other system Ive every owned. The replay value of ps1 and dc games are so good I could still play some ff7 or raystorm, chuu chuu rocket or bangai-o typing of the dead powerstone, etc etc
Hopefully you are starting to catch my drift here, but here is more, XBOX and PS2 nearly 1000 pirated games total for those 2 systems... and maybe Halo 1 would get an hr of play time in every 6 months? I cant even think of a decent ps2 game that could hold me down and keep me playing. Don't get me wrong those systems were beautiful with their graphics....
BUT EVERY GAME SINCE 2001 HAS SUCKED THE BIGGEST DICK THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
seriously the game genres are down to 3 you have gta clones, fps clones, and sports....
and you cant figure out why no one buys your shit or piracy is so rampant. MAKE SHIT WE WANT TO PLAY AND BUY and maybe we would not care how locked down your games were, Ive had 3 psp's sold them within a week. I bought one, modded it sold it then repeat 2x times. why?? cause the games suck and why watch a movie on a 2inch screen? I have a tv for that. stop making systems smaller or flashier if you really want to make money give us what we want. Ive seen hot looking trannys that dont make them a woman, and neither will changing the design of your crappy console, its still the same crap under the hood.
Make games with replay value, hell with any kind of value for all the matters but im sick and tired of picking up a game and cant even make it past the first 2 minutes of it.
And before any rants about me having ADD or some shit I played FF11 for 6 years 12+ hours a day, I know dedication.
Visit my Forums?
Sorry I know I shouldn't bother but FOSS does not have to destroy proprietary software. There is room for both. I use both on a daily basis.
The problem is with the zelots on both sides.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I only buy consoles that already come cracked open from the shop. With warranty and everything else. It's legal in my country.
Yeah, what ObsessiveMathsFreak said, and by the way, this is a problem for developers. A lot of kiddies buy a game and share it with 4 other people using shared PSN accounts. People solicit strangers to share games using these accounts, so developers are starting to realize for every copy of a game they sell, they could be selling more if this were not a feature of the PSN. Also, your purchases are associated with your account, so if your PS3 fails, you don't lose access to anything. Furthermore, your saved games can be backed up and are not tied to your hardware so if you do need to replace it you can transfer everything intact to the new system. This is how/why people make saved games available online. Not sure where these people are getting their info, but all you have to do is a Google search to find out how to solve these problems.
To be honest, i use this feature all the time to share media with my mates.
Your account can be on 5 machines at once (and deactivated at will), so my account, my brother's and a couple of mates have done this with our consoles. Any time i purchase from the online store, they get it too. Sony probably know this thing happens, but yet it's one of the many reasons i happily use their download service, it's pretty damned open as online market places go.
Infact, they've got a lot of purchases because their online store is actually good. I purchase in my local currency (not MS Points), the minimum amount they charge my card at a time is £5 (fair enough, it costs them money to do this), but if the game is more than that, they only charge me that and not in increments of £5. This means i don't have strange quantities of "Points" left over because they sell them in quantities you can't use like MS!
How are they meant to regulate online downloads like this? I think Sony have actually been pretty fair with their policy. I mean, who actually has 5 PS3s they need to have their content on?
UberVideoHiRes... UVHR... I like it. You sir, could be in marketing.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Minidisc is certainly not "extremely popular" in Japan. Just like everywhere else, it has been almost entirely supplanted by MP3 players like the iPod and by music-playing mobile phones.
Because that's what makes the Memory Stick proprietary, the fact that it is usable in _only_ Sony devices.
The reason why MemStick/Duo is "proprietary" isn't because it's only available in Sony devices but because it's a shitty flash product. It isn't as fast, compact, or cheaper to make than SD. I remember first seeing and it was complete garbage compared to CF and SD. Took up more space, less useful devices that used it (more than just Sony ones), and the devices that did use it were more expensive. Much like most of Sony's efforts to push new media into the field (BetaMax, MiniDisc), it failed yet they keep it on life support with their products.
I Google'd what you suggested and the second website listed by Google says that "ChickHEN does NOT... allow the use of Custom Firmware". Perhaps you can provide a direct link to a site that confirms your assertion.
http://www.psp-hacks.com/2009/05/06/chickhen-homebrew-enabler-released/
It doesn't allow you to reflash your PSP with CFW, but it does exploit a vulnerability which lets it temporarily boot a customized version, which does allow you all the benefits you'd normally have. The best part from a warranty standpoint is that there really isn't anything left behind on the PSP itself that could be used as evidence of doing something which voids it. Ie, it doesn't actually reflash the system so without a specially formatted memory stick, it boots up clean.
Not only that, but Sony thought people would pay twice as much for a UMD as they would for a DVD. Oh, and they only had rubbish titles on UMD - none of the great old films that are out on DVD.
You're a little fag.
Haha, just yesterday I told my wife about how cool would be the SouthPark guys mocking The Windows/Mack/Linux offering, imagine this scenario:
- The south park kids enter into the "computer convention" ,NOW!!"
- The first exhibit they see is the "Microsoft Windows" one, with the heading "Now More Secure than ever". There also is Steve Ballmer, with his bully/baldy/sweaty self bullying you to get Windows "buy it, NOW, NOW
- The second exhibit they see is "GNU/Linux", with Richard Stallman, with this dirty/beardy/nerdy self eating his toes' nails.
- The third exhibit they see is the "Apple/Mac" one. Over there they see Steve Jobs talking his way generating his distortion field.
Which one would the guys get??
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hey, does no-one consider you're trading flexibility for the convenience of ordering a movie from your couch delivered (near) instantly right into your frickin lounge room.
You want flexibility, go buy a DVD from the big box store. DeCSS is old news now.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
The world's moved on a little - MS Pro Duo is as fast and compact as SD and their equivalent formats. It's merely a matter of licensing fees, and I presume Sony isn't interested in licensing out or are charging a ludicrous premium. That's their commercial right to do so, though.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
And you're a waste of skin, so what's your point?
And no, that kid actually lives in New York & is a lot younger than me, but thanks for trying Mr. Internet stalker!
There is a war going on for your mind.
1. i dont care really, who cant build a PC for $100 bucks, or run 10 linux's on VMs.
Its not a novelty any more, every desktop can run several linux VMs.
If the Ps3 is your ONLY hardware to run anything... then... your an idiot and could
have built a cheaper pc with a 9600GT nvidia. Besides yellog dog is an ugly crap desktop.
2. Is Sony so poor they cant even afford 6 weeks of testing for a few engineers at $50 /ph ?
Seriously, stop eating those dolphins and you can afford the engineers.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Then I guess you're hoping that Sony never goes bankrupt and turns off the PSN store.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.