They (the manufacturer) will always loose this race eventually.

Why do they do it ? – well you can only conclude that after you have paid for the hardware they still consider themselves the owner.

Theres a number of completely open hand held consoles even with 3d hardware which makes foe great mame experiences and are great for homebrew

You have to wonder what future there is for closed platforms…

Posted at 3:46 pm on Oct 18th, 2008 by Chris

Chris: I totally agree.

It is up to us if we still want to feed those closed platform manufacturers.

Posted at 3:54 pm on Oct 18th, 2008 by happypinguin

cough, openpandora, cough.

All fake adverts aside, why do they even bother? Just to give the appearance of a locked system to the board running Sony?

Put a damn SD card and let it run any software already Sony. And don’t do the PS3 thing and lock out the video acceleration (in fact, offer money to homebrew game devs already.)

Posted at 5:25 pm on Oct 18th, 2008 by nubie

That’s great and all… It has tons of amazing uses. I want to know why so many choose to use the homebrew scene for on-line cheating. If it wasnt for that aspect, we might see much more co-operation from SCEA.

Posted at 6:32 pm on Oct 18th, 2008 by YoYo-Pete

“well you can only conclude that after you have paid for the hardware they still consider themselves the owner.”

I think the problem is more to do with people hacking their software to run on the hardware. Sure, you own the hardware, but you don’t own the right to use the new firmware software.

Posted at 4:32 am on Oct 19th, 2008 by Mark

I believe it has more to do with appeasing the 3rd party devs. If they never patched the firmware and made it easy, more people would hack and torrent the games. By changing the firmware and forcing new games to be run on the latest it insures that only the more dedicated pirates are going to continue to not pay for games. Not to say that its stopping people from doing it. Even Sony has admitted that the hacked firmware has probably boosted hardware sales.

Posted at 9:00 am on Oct 19th, 2008 by Larawen

@larawen: …which is a problem when you follow the traditional game console market strategy of losing money on hardware to make it up with software. PSP definitely takes a bit software-sales hit from piracy, so they’re selling units at a loss that don’t even have many software sales attached to them. That’s gotta hurt.

Posted at 10:04 am on Oct 20th, 2008 by Coderer

I for one have already reserved openPandora.

http://openpandora.org

Along with a cheap 3G phone with bluetooth, it will supply all my portable needs (surfing, gaming, PMP, PDA and even programming).

Posted at 3:25 pm on Oct 20th, 2008 by DiThi

nice webman

Posted at 11:38 am on Oct 21st, 2008 by jjsjldkf

Sony will never win, they can only loose more slowly. I understand why they are against this, but they would probably make more money from it if they just left it open source.

Think, if they advertised this like the Chumby and allowed people to do whatever they want, people would buy it. Their current unimpressive style is to describe it as an MP3 player with external speakers, a fair sized screen, and the ability to play some games, most of which weren’t that good.

Maybe Sony will realize this by the time a psp-4000 is announced and maybe they might make a little money.

Posted at 4:37 pm on Oct 26th, 2008 by icefox

Sony will never win, they can only loose more slowly,tottaly agree with your point
http://www.appliancemidwest.com
electronic expert in los angeles area

Posted at 2:24 pm on Nov 2nd, 2008 by midwest2

Mark: “I think the problem is more to do with people hacking their software to run on the hardware. Sure, you own the hardware, -but you don’t own the right to use the new firmware software.-”

Don’t own the right? Who “OWNS” the right to deny me anything I live in america I can shit in public if its in my religion and steal rice pattys from little kidsI can take your idea and add 1 thing to it and sell it and you can yell me a theif while I take all the money.
Sony its go down a long road of fail really and they do it shamelessly too!

Posted at 9:14 pm on Dec 9th, 2008 by BLUE

Sony had their share of crap from psp. There will be a revolution with microsoft’s very own handheld console. Lets hope they do create a lineup for portable gaming. That’ll be a day. Its not far from now !

Posted at 3:53 am on Jan 6th, 2009 by Devboy

ACTUALLY psp 4000 is coming out featuring a built in camera, copy and paste tool, fully compatable flash player(for youtube) and SO MUCH MORE!

Posted at 11:36 am on Apr 18th, 2009 by Bryan