Sony hopes PSP-3000's better screen will help kill off piracy
Sony is convinced that piracy is killing the PSP. That's debatable (and, I think, incredibly wrong) but they've done their damnedest to stamp out home brew since the get go with their incremental firmware updates. Unfortunately for Sony, each of these firmware updates is almost immediately cracked to allow home brew and pirated games again. So how to stop the hacking?
Given the impotence of the firmware developers to stop piracy, It's looking increasingly likely that the newly announced PSP-3000 is probably taking a hardware solution to protecting users from running ISOs or their own code on a PSP. But the new PSP doesn't offer anything new: according to Sony, the PSP is still only about halfway into its lifecycle, so it is fundamentally the same device as its predecessors. It doesn't add any real compelling reason to upgrade: built-in storage, a slimmer form factor or more processing oomph.
So what's the carrot to get people to upgrade and thus curb piracy? Sony's banking on a vastly improved screen: the new PSP-3000 LCD screen has five times the contrast ratio, double the gamut and double the response time. It should completely eliminate ghosting.
The side by side shots certainly look good: that screen is a huge leap forward over the original. But the PSP screen is already plenty beautiful. It's going to take more to get me to give up my hacked PSP (a wonderful portable emulation solution) just for some deeper colors. Luckily, I suspect I won't have to: if Dark Alex has shown anything, it's that a single Russian hacker can easily reduce to ruin Sony's best laid plans to execute the hacked PSP scene over the course of half a bottle of vodka.
PSP-3000 vs PSP-2000 [Slashgear]
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Wait, a company offering an improved product to deter piracy? That's...that's...reasonable.
In behavioral finance this is referred to as the self-serving bias.
[quote]"Sony is convinced that piracy is killing the PSP. That's debatable (and, I think, incredibly wrong)..."[/quote]
What reason do you have for thinking this? I would imagine that Sony, of all people, would have the best idea how many consoles are in circulation, how many games have been sold and (roughly) how many pirated games are in circulation on the big torrent sites.
Obviously it isn't true that one pirated game == one lost sale, but of the three PSP owners I know, only one has ever paid for a game. Between them they must account for a few lost sales. Assuming my friends aren't too atypical, over the millions(?) of consoles in circulation this could be a big effect. (Granted these friends are slightly geeky adults, so their rate of piracy is probably higher than in the general population. That said: what proportion of PSP owners you know have never pirated games?)
This hurts the developers' profits and, if piracy becomes sufficiently common, could discourage developers from making new PSP games. If the release schedule begins to slow, or companies are less willing to invest big money into making games, that could seriously hurt the PSP through lost licensing fees, unit sales and as a brand.
So yes, I can see a case for piracy hurting the PSP's sales. Even if that isn't happening now (I have no data), I can understand why Sony is working to prevent it.
I'm honestly not trying to start a holy war here, I just don't understand your position.
Also: how do you do those cool quote tags? [quote]text[/quote] doesn't work and the pointy-bracket version just gets stripped out. I'm stumped.
You use
Also, I'm fairly certain my friend with a PSP doesn't even use his to play games. He treats it like a clunky iPod with a D-pad. And a controller for his entertainment system. I'm unfamiliar with the system, but it seems like the PSP has more functions than Gaming, so the marketing model (razors and blades, as Zuzu puts it) doesn't seem to make much sense--if your revenue is generated by games, but the machine can do much more, consumers will slip through the cracks.
Oh man. That's ridiculous. greaterthan blockquote lessthan.
Eh, if you have a slimline PSP with updated firmware, hacking it is nigh impossible.
If Sony spent more effort on releasing games and convincing third-parties to allow their out-of-print PSone titles to be ported for PSP, and less time on the anti-hacking crusade and trying to convince people that the PSP is an extension of the PS3, piracy would probably be much less of a problem.
I'm not saying it's morally right to stop consumers from exploiting all the console's capabilities, just that I can understand Sony's desire to do so.
Actually, that raises another interesting question: are PSPs sold with any enforcable EULA? If I buy a PSP do I have to enter an agreement with Sony saying that I won't play homebrew games / emulators etc? If not, surely their practice of using firmware updates to deliberately cripple my machine's capabilities without telling me first is illegal somehow?
I think the biggest determinant to playing non pirated games is the UMD. That thing sucks, they should seriously consider going straight for digital download games and put a hard drive in the PSP rather then that UMD slot. I swear the only use that thing has is as a storage place for spare memory cards.
Software, media, and electronics manufacturers need to get out of this market segment (DVD region controls, anyone?) mindset and adapt to the market landscape instead of rent seeking by trying to shape the market landscape to suit their whims. (When consumers serve producers, instead of the other way around, is when we get into Brave New World territory.)
Particularly for software / games makers, they need to accept that "piracy" will happen no matter what. They can never ever ever ever win that arms race. So don't even try. Figure out a better business model that makes easy copying data irrelevant.
And just sell the damned PSP as a piece of electronics hardware to do whatever with. Don't laden your products with intent, because the market knows best how to use whatever it is -- better than you could ever hope to predict.
People actually play games on the PSP? I see them a lot in airports and on public transit, but I have never seen people actually playing games on them, pirated or otherwise.
Zuzu (@9)
Very true. However, they don't need to stamp it out completely, just make it sufficiently inconvenient that many/most customers will choose not to.For example, morals aside, I'm sure that there's some sort of hack that would let me circumvent the DRM on my Wii* to download and play cracked games. However, the time and effort involved in finding out how, actually doing it (then repeating after each firmware update) then finding a relaible source of pirate games... frankly, that's too much work to put into a toy. I just want to get home exhausted, switch it on and play, not spend my weekends fiddling, debugging and reflashing. I'm happy to pay for a decent game if it'll save the effort.
Has Nintendo stamped out piracy? Of course not. But they have made it inconvenient enough to make me buy the games I play. The same logic applies to all DRM: they don't need to stamp out piracy, simply make it inconvenient enough that the technophobes and lazy people (i.e. me) will pay up. I think that tech people writing on this subject often forget how mystifying a lot of really simple stuff is to people who don't spend their lives immersed in it.
*I know, I know, I should have a grown-up console. But it's fun!
Don't forget dropping the entirely arbitrary 4GB limit on the MS slot.
Double the response time?
Dark Alex is Spanish not Russian.
at least 50% of gamers don't have the money to buy the games. So, they download pirated games. if no pirated games, they won't even bother buy the console...
One can only imagine if I had a PC that I could not build my own applications. The PC would be such a boring thing.
Sony, wake up... you are the one killing the PSP going in the wrong direction.
DS has way more games available to play and it is hackable just like PSP but most want to use the PSP because the hardware is much better than the DS.
What you go after is to do a better locking on UMD to protect copyright on game and applications.
Let people do their own programming and they will keep on buying console and parts for it. The more consoles, the greater the cancels of selling something for PSP and the less chances for the competition.
Don't close the doors for the millions of programmers out there, do for the pirates.
Cheers,
MP