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Comments: 261 +- Games: Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go" on Tuesday October 06, @05:42AM
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Soulskill
on Tuesday October 06, @05:42AM
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from the it-was-getting-late-and-the-dog-had-been-inside-all-day dept.
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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.
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UMD transfer the what what? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Either nobody at Sony realized piracy involves desktop computers and the internet, or they're just using this as an excuse to increase their profit margins. Care to take a guess?
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I don't know what they think, but I am not buying a Go until hell freezes. I will stick to UMDs until they run out. By then, if I have to buy another portable, it will be something else for sure. A nintendo DSI maybe.
I read ars review [arstechnica.com] on the psp go and it is simply unbelievable what they have done. They just want to fuck the customer and profit. I didn't pirated any PSP game and will not pay for other people mistakes
Re:UMD transfer the what what? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, even if there are unique serial numbers, and they could make that work, any official mechanism that produces blessed copies of legacy applications would presumably be a logical target for attackers.
And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.
Parent
Re:UMD transfer the what what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably, unless each UMD has a unique serial number, and the hypothetical UMD-to-PSP Go converter phones it home, there would be no way for Sony to keep a given UMD disk from being turned into N copies, all blessed by Sony.
What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??
Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?
And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.
That's more like it.
Sony and Nintendo are quite similar that they pretty much always dismiss their own customers. That's why people are so divided: they either love it or hate it. It feels like their R&Ds live and work in some sort of isolated underground lab where novelties like internet and forums are not available. And all of customer feedback is substituted with directives and memos from upper management. Well, at least Nintendo has the luminary Miyamoto (who is already "upper management") and his games have some loyal fans.
Parent
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That's a way of pirating games, not copying or loading pirated games.
Not much chance of re-selling with a download (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Not much chance of re-selling with a download (Score:5, Informative)
I think you really hit the nail on the head here. There is a pretty big market for reselling used games. With the PSP Go, not only are you restricted from reselling your used games but you are also locked into purchasing them from Sony's download service.
Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] published an excellent review on the PSP Go and why you should just stick with the standard PSP 3000.
Parent
Re:Not much chance of re-selling with a download (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S.
The PSP Go reminds me of another frak-up by an earlier company called Commodore. They had the extremely-popular Amiga 500, then released a 600 that was supposed to be an upgrade, but was actually less functional (no keypad, not backwards-compatible with old games, and not expandable). According to their chief engineer Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be $50-$60 cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500." The Managing Director of Commodore UK, David Pleasance, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up."
I suspect ten years from now we'll see Sony engineers saying the PSP GO started as a good idea, but due to poor management and bad decisions, became a complete and utter screw-up, and about $100 more expensive than it was meant to be.
Parent
Now all the pirates will buy a GO (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Someone call Natalie (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not.
Re:Someone call Natalie (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony memory card pricing hurts them in many ways. It's one of the many reasons I won't buy a Sony camera (no, it's not that I can't pirate pictures or whatever). My favorite shop's prices:
2GB SD card: $8 but I've seen them as low as $6 before.
4GB SD card: $13
8GB SD card: $19
16GB SD card: $33
32GB SD card: $85
2GB MS Duo card: $27
4GB MS Duo card: $35
8GB MS Duo card: $60
16GB MS Duo card: $150
32GB MS Duo card: $250
Parent
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You are paying too much for your SD cards...
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You are paying too much for your SD cards...
No, we're paying too much for MS Duo cards.
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It's one of the many reasons I won't buy a Sony camera
There is only one reason I won't buy a Sony camera -- I was an XCP victim. You would have to be a complete and utter moron to buy anything digital from a company with a history of rooting their own customers' computers.
I can't figure out how Sony is still in business, are there that many stupid people in the world who will buy froma company that has shown nothing but contempt for their customers? No wonder the economy collapsed. If a company like Sony ca
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In fact, it could be ironic - it all depends on the unmentioned intention.
Although, it would be a strange business strategy for Sony to drop the price of the Duo stick and increase their size in order to increase sales of UMD movies.
Like I always say, you just can't be up to them Japanese.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Movie failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Movies??? - pfui - GAMES (Score:2)
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 manufactur
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You sound... uh... odd.
You really bought a backup PS3 just so you could keep playing PS2 games?
How often do you even care about playing a PS2 game?
I know since I got current-gen systems I've barely ever looked back. I think I played StarWars Battlefront once. Besides which, emulation is coming along well in the form of PCSX2. I find it almost unbelievable you would bother to spend all that money on a redundant PS3, or a whole new set of PSPs.
Hell, by the time your current lot start to break noticeably (and
Re:Movies??? - pfui - GAMES (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Movies??? - pfui - GAMES (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Sony has a long track record of shooting themselves in the foot. In the days of mini-disc, it required you to encode the music in the Sony proprietary format onto minidisc. As a result, recording stuff to minidisc took a long time, a 5 minute song took 5 minutes to record. Sony digital cameras force you to use Memory Stick, which is much more expensive than standard SD cards. Oh, and a Sony DVD player will not let you play DVDs from other regions.
Sony cares more about screwing their customers into proprieta
Re:Movie failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, doomed I tell you!
Ignore the millions of units of PSPs, PS3s, cameras, tvs and everything else, they're doomed!
I love this site for this stuff. It's almost as if geeks believe in the legendary "informed consumer" who will act (en-masse in fact) to deny profit to companies that abuse him or her for their own ends. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Sony will continue to do just fine, and the people with technical/ethical problems with what they are doing will be swept under in a wave of apathy and "Oooh, shiny".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The truth is probably somewhere in between. Unless Sony gets its act together, it is destined to exit the hardware business and become a pure media conglomerate. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.
It took the Japanese 30 years to dominate the US Auto industry despite the fact that year in / year out they were delivering significantly better value to the consumer. It happened, but not overnight because big brands have a tremendous amount of momentum. It takes the combination of HUGE management
Seriously, Sony? *Seriously*? GTFO. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Seriously, Sony? *Seriously*? GTFO. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
UMD and Minidisc (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:UMD and Minidisc (Score:5, Insightful)
Minidiscs are still extremely popular here in Japan. I don't really understand why, but virtually everybody I know has a minidisc system. I sometimes think Sony lives in a Japan-centric bubble. They make decisions based on what they can get away with in Japan (quite a lot) and figure it will work for the rest of the world. It really doesn't. Slowly, though, I see things changing. The high school students I teach here are moving away from Sony as far as I can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years Sony collapses based on their inability to see reality.
Parent
Do you even think before writing this tripe? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 m
Sony could've gone the other way (Score:3)
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.
Optical drive didn't make sense (Score:3)
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Now loading time and battery issues, that's another story. :)
Summary: UMD not proprietary enough (Score:2)
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 thi
UMD had to go but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is piracy the only option? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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> 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)?
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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 me
Re:And because of piracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Parent
Re:And because of piracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:And because of piracy... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
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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...
Re:And because of piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] of sorts. To quote Stone, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."
Parent
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Ooh, a PSP port of Battle for Wesnoth would be awesome!
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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.