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Comment by aatharuv | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of when Sony disabled their officially supported OtherOS support (used to install Linux and other os's dual boot) with an update. Of course without the update, no access to the Sony Store, games that require the latest Sony PS3 stopped working, etc...

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They got sued in a class action lawsuit for that, which got dragged out for ~7 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

And in the end users who had used that feature and lost it got... $10.07

Class actions are more about penalizing the company than making customers whole. I’m pretty sure the legal and settlement costs were enough to make Sony create processes to avoid that happening again.

Yes, they made sure that there would never be a refuge from the walled garden to begin with.

Exactly. It's too risky.

Sony isn't going to change anything for a $3.75M slap on the wrist.

The executive in charge of the business unit probably got an extra $4M bonus for managing to make the costs so low.

Disagree. What was the revenue upside of the openness to start with? Probably less than $3.75m.

$3.75m is tiny to Sony but probably quite large for the group responsible for the loss. I know I've seen serious trouble at Fortune 10 companies over $3m issues, when the 6-person group's annual budget is $500k.

Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance. They averaged almost 12.5M units sold per year, which means a lot of game sales (where the money really comes from). They're the largest video game company in the world, and make about $2B earnings before interest and taxes per year these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...

> Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance.

At least in Germany's nerd circles Sony's behaviour rather lead to "so nie" jokes (explanation of "so nie": when you pronouce "Sony" with the first syllable like you would pronounce a German word, stress the second syllable, and put a little break between the syllables, it sounds like "so nie" [German for "never this way"]), and lots of people used this "little different" prounciation of "Sony" to express their disgust for Sony's behaviour. This "guerilla pronounciation" of "Sony" helped to spread quite some reputational damage of Sony among hackers and tech enthusiasts in Germany.

You also needed onerous levels of proof to get that whopper of a payout. IIRC you needed a photo of you using it or to submit a dump of your MBR showing the OtherOS partition.

I did not get my $10.07.

Sony omitted OtherOS support with the PS3 Slim hardware revision with seemingly no technical justification and later removed it from existing consoles.

Afterwards several researchers investigated how to execute third-party code on the device and succeeded. [1] In response Sony did attempt to prosecute several people under DMCA and similar claims [2] and were more successful with certain defendants in some countries versus others.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...

Exactly what I thought of, too. Was the PS3 the first forced-downgrade?

Nowhere near the same level of "forced", but the earliest similar situation I know of was Microsoft issuing an update to MS-DOS that removed the "DoubleSpace" filesystem compression feature due to losing a patent lawsuit [1]. They later introduced another update with a replacement, "DriveSpace", that did roughly the same thing but with an incompatible on-disk format and a modest performance hit.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-24-fi-26671-...

And I haven't bought anything from them since. May that company go bankrupt.

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