Slashdot Mirror
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.
.. all games in the future will be either:
1) on a console where they are locked up tighter than a stereotypical tight-ass' asshole.
2) playable on the internet only
3) costing $0.5-5 as a new release and with production values thereby.
it's just a toy for tards: it'll never make someone better.
Smile, don't click...
I don't own a PSP, or any similar gaming system.
If the PSP UMD sticks are rewritable and cost more than a few bucks, why wouldn't most people store all their games, movies, etc. on their hard drives, and just keep a few UMD sticks around for whatever they are going to play?
If they are more than $10 each, I certainly wont waste them on a movie I may watch a couple times and then not be interested in. Same for games. I would probably buy a total of maybe 5-10 sticks total, and rewrite them as needed. I'm sure some people are cheaper than me and maybe buy just one or two sticks and deal with the pain of not having the exact game or movie they want on a trip.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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?
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.
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
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.
Maybe my kids' PSP-3000s and legit UMD games will have added resale value because of this move on Sony's part.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
...and it was poorly written, disjointed mess containing no actual information.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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 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.
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?
I only buy consoles that already come cracked open from the shop. With warranty and everything else. It's legal in my country.
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.
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.