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 After all, lots of games are completely unpublished today, making $0 in sales, but they’re just as zealous about stopping you from accessing or playing those ones too.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.

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.

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.

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.