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Comment by zerocrates | Hacker News Reader

Why not just sell something like the Portal as open in the first place?

There are no Portal games to worry about protecting. What's the percentage in locking it down?

If they're selling it at cost or at a loss (I don't know if they are) as a value-add to the PS5 then they wouldn't want people buying it just to play emulators.

Notably they still sell retro games on PSN.

As long as retro sales exceed the cost to lock the device down you will see stuff like this. I recall one time paying for FF7 which I played on PS3/PSP. That game alone probably makes it worth it.

Nice. I played they FF7 on my hacked PSP.

Hacked PSP was a great time to be a gamer. Played through all the greats I missed like Harvest Moon, a bunch of Final Fantasy, some mega man. Nostalgia overload thinking about it.

Plus it was cool to be around for a time when the hack to get boot access was as simple as popping the battery pack open and penciling in one line on the PCB.

As I recall Sony just forgot to enable the signature checks on the PSPs 1.00 firmware, and they could be bypassed on 1.50 by giving the executable a malformed filename. Simpler times.

My favorite was the tiff exploit to install virtual CFWs by scrolling through an album of digital chickens. Good times

They still call PlayStation homebrew enablers ‘HEN’ :)

I was in before then, when the jailbreak route was loading a specific save file in Grand Theft Auto, Liberty City Stories. Great game as well.

And the retro games on PSN are very dissapointing.

I would love to have Tekken 3 on the PS 5 just because it is convenient. Instead they only offer Tekken 2, which is only available via the PSN subscription.

I’d modify that to “as long as the IP owner wishes retro sales exceeded the cost to lock the device down.” After all, lots of games are completely unpublished today, making $0 in sales, but they’re just as zealous about stopping you from accessing or playing those ones too.

A reasonable compulsory license fee (all paid to the copyright office, none to the corp) and/or a revocation of copyright and entry to public domain for failure to maintain published access would be good sticks.

The argument usually goes like this, but has zero evidence in real life. Even PS2 which was quite infamous for the amount of unlocks and hacks, sold really well and was very successful. I think business do that not to protect sales or anything but to appease shareholders.

You misspelled appealing to game developers and publishers. Most companies will not invest on a platform that makes it too easy to rip them off.

You mean like gog?

gog is a store, PC/Mac is the platform.

Exactly. Meaning opening system doesn't reduce investments, they foster competition. In theory, people should not consider developing for pcs because they are really easy to rip off, and well, that is not what we see.

Gog was born as a bargain-bin store for products that required zero investment and were already widely pirated, it was only upsides as far as publishers were concerned. I know it's different now, but I doubt their no-drm policy is as iron-clad on new titles ar it was on old ones - it's probably left to publishers to do some traditional checks on their own, rather than using a platform sdk.

The point is that you do not actually want sales that do not compensate for the loss. Imagine the PS5 let you run arbitrary code on the GPU and also happened to be the best value for the money. It would end up in some compute farm, not living rooms, and Sony would pay for the privilege.

Then they should not sell at cost or a loss (is that even legal?). Boom, fixed in a decent way.

Of course selling a console at a loss is legal. If selling products at a loss was illegal this entire Hacker News thing wouldn’t exist.

I wouldn’t call that “fixed in a decent way.” The subsidy of the hardware is a benefit for many consumers who choose game consoles.

If you want a game console company to sell a totally open console, that’s just a willing misunderstanding of the game market on your part.

Even the Steam Deck as the most open commercial console on the market is pretty clever in that it doesn’t stop you from using competing software stores, but you still need to invest significant effort into getting them to work. Getting my free copy of Control on the Epic Games Store to work on the console was something that took me a significant amount of time. I could imagine a less technical person being completely unable to do it, but if you owned the game on Steam you just click a button and play.

In my opinion, if Sony wasn’t being supremely lazy they would have made the Portal with AMD x86 hardware similar to the Steam Deck and designed it to natively play your PS5/PS4 library on the go instead of making it a streaming-only device.

>but you still need to invest significant effort into getting them to work

This is far more related to their lack of Linux support, and forcing launcher usage via Steam for some games (EA, Ubisoft) than Valve making it difficult on purpose. Nothing stopping you from using Desktop Mode to do whatever you want on the device otherwise.

Nothing is also stopping you from putting Windows on the Steam Deck, Valve even provides drivers for you to do it!

My point would be that a very small percentage of users will ever go through that effort, and the Windows experience is so obviously inferior with its lack of tailored UI that it’s not going to be very attractive.

Valve knows that the lowest friction activity is buying a game in Steam Deck OS and clicking play.

> but you still need to invest significant effort into getting them to work.

This isn't true for things that actually run on GNU/Linux. Installing the itch.io launcher is as easy as going to desktop mode, opening discover, navigating to the itch launcher, and clicking install.

My point would be that a large percentage of Steam Deck buyers will never even enter desktop mode or do so by accident and leave immediately.

I wonder if customer support and warranty is part of the calculation. If they sell open platform – they will have to provide support and potential warranty for it.

But I guess that most people are not interested in open platform, only tinkers like us are. And if they make it officially closed platform, they don't have to deal with our complaints, when something does not work, or more likely underperforms.

I mean, it's Sony. How long did it take them to get out of the Memory Stick business. There isn't an open system they haven't tried to compete with with their closed, locked-in alternatives.

Are you going to buy a PS6 if you build up a games collection on Steam?

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