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PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon
Busshy writes "Since the release of the PSVita, sales for the portable console have struggled, particularly in Japan. There, the PSP was selling more units until this week, with the release of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F, which has seen PSVita sales quadruple. For the rest of the world, sales are still slow thanks to a dull selection of games. This could soon change, as Yifan Lu, coder of the Kindle Hack and PSX Xperia, has revealed he is now working on a native loader for the PSVita. Basically, it's a Userland Vita Loader for loading unsigned executables on your Vita — in other words, a Homebrew Loader for the PSVita. To calm Sony fears, he claims it is physically impossible to run 'backups' with the exploit. The exploit cannot decrypt or load retail games. At this time, the exploit is unreleased; naturally, he doesnt want Sony to fix it."
Well, whoop-dee-doo. I'm sooooo excited that the homebrew community will port a couple emulators to the Vita, call it a day, and we'll never hear about Vita homebrew development again. Just like every other fucking homebrew hack in the history of video gaming (beyond the founding of Activision OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO).
No, seriously. Someone show me some major homebrew developments that aren't just crap ports from elsewhere (oh boy oh boy! I can play FreeCiv using a control scheme quite horribly ill-suited for the job!), are clever new games supposedly "held back" by draconian licensing, and are AFTER the Atari 2600, just to shut up the smartasses who will note that's how Activision and the entire concept of a third-party developer started. Maybe then I'll give a shit.
Sony didn't sue dark Alex. Or the guys who did the HBL. just geohotz. Because he's a grand standing prick
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Couldn't agree more with you. Not surprised he is some stoner kid with a holier than thou attitude. He stunk of it a mile away.
Besides, this is a homebrew hack. If it remains that, it might increase sales. That is a good thing for Sony. They'd probably want that.
It is only until it gets full-on hacked will it become a problem.
I sometimes wonder why companies don't do this on purpose to increase their own sales, actually.
Homebrew is a big seller for quite a lot of people.
Stealth release a homebrew app, don't explain how it works, "fix it", but then release another one a month later or something. (meanwhile make huge sales of games at the same time and watch people come in droves)
Scummy? Pfft, its business. Companies have done far worse. I'd do it if I owned hardware that wasn't selling very quickly.
I'm still waiting for my 1ghz pandora to turn up but my vita isn't doing much which is a shame, the hardware on it is quite simply amazing, now to have that running homebrew... I could see this being the best thing to happen to the Vita
[quote] If you want to help, just fork the code and send me a pull request when you’re done. [/quote] Sony should leave it alone
At he's not one of those laying down pricks.
Despite Sony's protestations they knew very well that piracy was a big mover of hardware. I think a lot of people over-estimate the draw of homebrew though. While a few certainly use it, I think it's more of a geek's wet dream that hundreds of thousands are clamouring for a PSVita simply to run homebrew. The homebrew hack however, will likely lead to piracy at some point down the road. You will probably see a large upswing in sales at that time.
Does anyone actually think they would sell FEWER of these devices if they opened them up to the developer community?
I'm wondering how they can expect any return on their investment in obscurity, given how they get hacked every time. They don't seem to be very successful at keeping out the prying eyes, if anything they end up with more of their technology revealed.
Whoever at Sony is giving the financial green light to this strategy is MESSED UP. It's costing them fortunes all around with no discernable return on investment.
Conventional wisdom is that console makers make a lot more profit margin from professionally developed games than from consoles themselves. So the console makers want to shut out amateur games, on which they make no money, in favor of professional games, on which they do make money. In addition, it was hard to sort the good games from the bad on the Atari 2600, which led directly to a recession in the North American video game market in 1983-1984, and people weren't buying consoles or games because they had realized the implications of Sturgeon's Revelation: 90 percent of everything is crap.
Well what they do is take a loss on the hardware and try to make up for it with software sales. So the game companies do not want competition from homebrew developers.
Of course I'd rather have the option to pay full price for the hardware with full ability to reflash the firmware to anything I want.
What is the point? The only people who may take advantage of this hack are the pirates.
Any serious homebrewer may want to use the Playstation Mobile SDK. Not only you will be able to publish your games and apps on the Vita(and future devices), but any other PS certified devices, including nonsony devices(ASUS and HTC are some of the partners). And of top of that you will be able to potentially make money through the PSN and your product will have far more exposure than uploading it to some obscure homebrew community site.
Developers are already scared of the Vita due to the low sales and sony's bad marketing strategy. At this point of time, this will only worsen the problem, to the point it may even kill the product. So even the pirates won't have any games to pirate as a result. So seriously, what is the point?
Vitas a great system by the way and there are tons of games on PSN if you take into account the PSP and PS1 games it also runs, Just for the record though I have over ten Vita only titles and they are all good games.
I'll just fire up Eclipse and work on something for Android and be done with it as at least on there if I come up with something good it's little trouble to put it on the Play Store for sale. Obviously some people don't see it that way.
Possibly because the video game designs that they have prototyped on a PC need a gamepad. Touch screens have trouble emulating a gamepad, and not enough people who might be interested in a game own an Xperia Play phone or something like an iControlPad or iCade product.
they sued graf_chokolo one of the guys thar worked hard to bring us otheros++ (linux/BSD) on the ps3slim... =X
I own a Vita and a PS3. The reason I bought the Vita was sony said youwe would be able to stream using remote play ANY PS3 game to it. As of today with firmware 1.8 you still can't. Many other people did the same... I refuse to spend a cent more on anything sony until they live up to the market promises they made.
There is woeful depth of reasonably priced content for the Vita.
To be very frank I am the end of my patience with Sony. They have such a great platform with so much potential and it is so utterly screwed over by poor vision and market control paranoia. Not that I'm a fan of Apple, but at least their kit just works as you would expect and is easy to use. The latest with Sony and me is that I can't even enter my CC details into the playstation store, the store says my CC details are invalid, whereas every other online store I use, apple, amazon, ebay, all accept the same credit card.
I AM OVER IT.
The original PSP was the most capable portable device, so it was widely owned and hacking it actually meant something. With the proliferation of capable IOS and Android devices PSP's seem far less important.
I guess when I think homebrew I'm thinking something primarily for my own use
If someone is developing an original video game in an original universe with no way to recover the cost of time and materials, there's a limit to how much detail he's willing to put into the game. That's why ports of simple block puzzle games have tended to dominate the homebrew scenes. I've gathered that going beyond that level of detail requires quitting one's day job. But self-publishing isn't viable if your design is in a genre associated with gamepads, which in turn are associated with Sony and Nintendo platforms. So that means breaking into The Industry(tm) somehow. This leads a programmer to carefully consider how each of his projects will fit into his portfolio and make him look good to HR.
and I would have no problem just requiring an external gamepad.
I guess that depends on whether you want to demonstrate your skill in programming or your skill in both programming and basic marketing. In the former case, you can require whatever peripheral, as long as someone in HR is likely to have the right hardware. In the latter case, you had better target a popular platform and either rely on the peripherals that came with a device or make it dead easy to acquire the needed peripherals. It's too bad the iCade 8-Bitty appears discontinued.
Most game platforms are loss leaders with the profit being made off the licenses for game developed for it as well as any sort of merchandise network that may be in place.
I suspect that the problem with homebrew is that it generates additional sales that have a low probability of purchasing further games or content. This would cause homebrew to be a significant cost with no real benefit to Sony.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork