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Comment by l-lousy | Hacker News Reader

Would it really be that costly for Sony to keep whatever NTP-esque server they have running? Sure, shut down the storefront, but an endpoint to check the time must cost peanuts for them to run....

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The problem is it’s a tiny bit of maintenance that has to be justified for an unsupported system.

The better way is to factor out the time check/set and make it independent and identical across all systems - they they can close the older store but the newer one continues to reply correctly.

(Though it’s likely signed by certificates and will die when the PS3 root certs no longer get updates).

The flip side to discontinuing the old systems is regulatory scrutiny as they would essentially be stealing their customers purchases.

> Sure, shut down the storefront

To be honest, I still don't understand why they needed to shut the storefront. They still need to host the games so people can access the titles they've paid for, and I would imagine that makes up the bulk of the cost.

The only reason that makes sense to me is that they have plans to shut the entire thing down, including access to purchased games, x years down the line. It's probably much easier to get away with that if even the newest purchase being removed is however many years old.

Not that that stopped Nintendo, they took everything down for the original Wii, purchases and all.

> To be honest, I still don't understand why they needed to shut the storefront.

I'd guess the cost of maintaining contracts to distribute licenses for games that publishers otherwise don't want to sell anymore.

> Not that that stopped Nintendo, they took everything down for the original Wii, purchases and all.

Yeah, this one was heart-breaking. A lot of my friends started getting real leery of digital purchases after the Wii debacle. At least the X360/PS3/Vita/Wii/WiiU have been cracked wide-open and the modding community can keep them going at this point - we've still got that to hold onto. The PS4, on the other hand...

Yep. There is always plans to shut the whole thing down eventually, for console stores (the exception maybe being Microsoft?)

But you have to do it in phases to manage the negative feedback. If someone purchases a game on Day 1, you definitely don't want to kill download access on Day 2. So the only way to cleanly phase out is to first shut down any new purchases. Then you have a ~4-5 year window for people to play those games and hopefully give an upper bound for when they won't care about them anymore.

Thank God the internet never forgets. Wii games are awesome for small get togethers or rainy weekends. I'd pay a few hundred for a remade wii that has every wii game on it. Last I checked the vast majority of wii games clocks in under a tb, iirc. If I'm right storage wouldn't even be an issue as a 1tb sad is under $100, and the tech specs are equally light. The remaining problem is rights holders strangling the market to sell today's fidget spinner games.

“I’d pay ~$300 minus the cost of hardware in exchange for thousands of games, including timeless masterpieces like Metroid Prime and Mario Galaxy, many of which sold for $50 individually less than a decade ago and cost millions of dollars to develop.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’d buy that too.

But if it happened, I’d be more than a little scared about the viability of game development moving forward, particularly for the artfully-crafted single player experiences I enjoy and care about. More scared than I already am.

Nintendo would much rather port Mario Galaxy to their new hardware and sell it as part of a much smaller bundle. And as far as I’m concerned, that game is great and they have every right to continue charging top-dollar for it.

The storefront was SSL2. It needed major software overhaul that wasn’t justified without being the star revenue source.

Or push a firmware update that removes that check.

The cost of doing that would likely be orders of magnitude more than just keeping an NTP server operating for a couple of decades.

No QA required: worst case is a different colored brick.

You mean commenting out a line of code, bumping the version and building a firmware image would cost a lot?

They should have thought about that and planned for it when designing the software

Does the PS3 work with IPv6? If so, you are probably right.

But what about people who play time-limited PS3 games after their authorized expiration date! Won't someone think of the software companies?

I wonder how far out the expiration dates are? Surely they must all expire within a year or two? Can you get a time-limited game and say you want it for 50 years?

If Sony can't hold up their end of the deal with software license holders, then they need to work out a deal with the software company. It shouldn't involve end users at all.

It could be argued that this would be mandated by a right-to-repair law.

Then you need to keep the update server alive for a long time.

Or make the update available for download to install via usb drive.

Is that something that can be done now, or would that too require a firmware update to introduce that feature?

You can do it now:

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps3/syste...

It’s not the clock that’s the problem, it’s the license checks. I’m guessing here, but I imagine they’re tied to a time for validity, and the clock discrepancy triggers a remote verification.

This was my question too.

I’ve never done it myself, but I’ve heard anecdotally that the Mac OS 9 ntp servers are still running...

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