Sony has declared war on PSP users who have hacked them to run games and programs that Sony did not intend to be ran on the units. They have a new update ready that is going to escalate that battle as they do not want people reverting back to older versions and will be shutting a loop hole in the firmware.
Does Sony not realize they are selling a lot of these units because people can hack them. My son has been asking for a PSP and as much as I want to get him one I am reluctant to do so seeing what Sony is doing. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t condone hacking something to play games that I have not paid for but why should not people be able to play older games that they own and do cool things with the PSP that Sony did not have enough foresight to implement.
Sony should be welcome the innovations people are creating for the PSP, and stop this ongoing battle. Because guess what Sony in the long run people are just going to get mad and no longer buy your products. Ask me why I don’t buy Vaio’s anymore! [GamersCirlce]
You want to know what the bottom line is I predict the PSP is a loss leader and they make all their money on the games and license fee’s I could be wrong but thats my bet.
I could only agree with you partially. I agree that SONY should give the consumers space to explore with the console. Let them be creative and play around with it. But hacking back to earlier version enable consumers to play pirated games, this is something SONY has to deal with, based on the fact that revenue is not generated by console selling but by softwares. If software companies are upset with all these hacking and pirating actions, they might produce less quality games.
my guess the reason sony is fighting home brew software so hard is that they are selling the psp at a loss, just like thy did with the ps2 at launch, just like they are going to with the ps3. the way they make there money is with software and umd sales. because a hacked psp can run iso images of umd discs from the mem stick, I’m guessing they feel the risk of piracy is too great. that, and of the the 2 greatest reasons i want a psp that will run home brew is for emulation of older hardware. if sony were to allow that to happen nintendo would own 2 next gen consoles and 3 handhelds.
the second reason is so that i wont have to reincode video from mpg, or avi, and the shear convenience of that would cut into UMD video sales.
the only real way sony would ever allow home brew is if they could make a massive profit on the actual sale of the device considering they would never see a dime of consumer money after they sold the hardware.
I’m all for that, i could budget $500 for that.
i might pay more if they scrap the UMD drive, and build in a hard drive a touch screen for data input, give the usb port host function for all sorts of peripheral devices. use the memory stick as a battery efficient memory space so that games and movies don’t have to stream off the hard drive.
sony could then probably have to rethink its strategy and offer the hardware at a loss again if if they ran an itunes store like web site or software suit that could be the gateway for online movie and music distribution, and software sales. this way all those home brew programmers could start up a company, maybe licence an sdk (for cheep)
from sony and make a little money them selves for all their hard labor.
I’m sure if sony doesn’t do any of this microsoft will, it wouldn’t be hard with what they have developed so far in their failing pocket pc platform, just ad a unified 3d/sound chip powerful enough to handle games and hi quality vid. M$ would probably frak it up by having windows media as the only codec its device supported.