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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.
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.
I've a cracked PSP & can honestly say I've never pirated a single PSP UMD game. I do however have emulators & ROMs on it for every NES, SNES, Gameboy, SMS & Genesis game I've ever owned. As well as all of my PS1 games which run natively after a little tweaking. I also have PSP versions of Tyrian, Quake & a E-Book reader on there.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
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.
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.
Lolwut? The Wii sold almost entirely on stuff like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, neither of which is vulnerable to piracy and both reach out to many people who were not interested in gaming before. IF you're seriously going to argue that the DS has no good games I can only stare in disbelief.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
> 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)?
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!
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.
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.
Many people (including you apparently) don't get the fact that the PSPGo is not meant to be a replacement for the PSP-3000. The UMD-friendly PSP will still be available after the PSPGo's launch, so the comparison with the PS3 is not really relevant
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.
Ooh, a PSP port of Battle for Wesnoth would be awesome!
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Nintendo said, repeatably, the DS was not a replacement for the GBA, they will exist concurrently and continue to have game developed on them. One year later, the GBA was dead. I can see Sony completely killing the "old" PSP model in favor of the 100% Sony controlled PSP Go, even if it is an utter failure. They will take my PSP-2001 from my old dead hands.
You are supposed to read into it. The intention was to point out that Sony's attempt to increase sales by reducing the price of 1 item, correlated with reduced sales of another item. By referring to it as irony, there is an implied causation as well as correlation.
The irony being Sonys efforts had an opposite in meaning effect for them.
That holds up with your definition as well - just have to read backwards from the irony, rather than imply a mistake was made when it isn't spelled out for you.
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.
... 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.