Mr. Sensible
Pitch and Putt Duffer
If nothing else, this whole debacle has been a wonderful reminder that the original Vita OLED screen is a marvel of modern engineering. Goddamn that thing looks good
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Rumour that PS3/PSP/Vita store is to permanently close
- Thread starter madhair60
- Start date
I'm not saying you should trust this soulless, stateless, greedy, amoral, mega corp, or that you don't have good reasons not to trust them. But the outrage being new here is again, befuddling to me. Because this is who they've always been for decades (this is who every gaming company has always been) and these issues were part of the faustian bargain we all made when buying into videogame machines to begin with.
And while you laugh at the idea of end of life firmware, I think it's funny that's such a laughable proposition from a company who has a well established reputation of pushing out firmware updates so frequently and prodigiously that it actually makes people upset how often they do it.
That certainly used to be a thing. I doubt it matters much these days? Most PS3 games have already had their online support nixed from the dev-side, so you're not really using the PS3's online functionality for multiplayer gaming. If you have it modded, you're ostensibly doing it so you can install things on your own so you don't need Sony's servers for downloading games/patches. About the only thing I can think of that anyone would miss at this point is legacy trophy support. It's fun to make numbers go up after all, but that's a fairly superficial thing. That and the risk of getting the PSN account you've linked to the console banned as well, losing access to games and whatever you've invested in over the years. And the solution to that is to just delink your PSN account/keep the console from doing online check-ins.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
People are angry because stuff that they bought could potentially disappear at the flick of a switch, including the physical stuff that gamers like to crow about being so much better than digital. And it's all completely unnecessary; as stated before, take the battery out of a Wii or Wii U and all your games, physical and digital remain. Sony's been doing a huge show of being pro consumer, with things like the "used games" video and "4 the players" and it's been revealed as a hollow sham. If you don't understand that then I don't know what to tell you.
Vita's last update was October 2019. It's dead, Jim.
PS3 got one in December last year, but that's because they have to to keep the Blu-ray keys going. Meaningful software development is over.
Same. I actually booted up my DC last night to capture some footage and thought of it saying "Yo, what time is it?" as I set the clock.
Yeah, I think if/when I decide to hack my PS3 is when it will no longer matter if it connects to PSN anyways, so I won't risk it killing my PSN account on other systems.
Is... is this the trade-off? Tying games to systems instead of accounts is what lets them be played in perpetuity?
I'd say it's more of a deliberate architectural issue, with Sony having a more draconian call-home setup as a way to battle piracy and Nintendo, well, being Nintendo and not being used to thinking in "online" terms.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I accept that digital games are dust in the wind and try to avoid them when I can, but it's entirely new to me that physical games wouldn't work anymore. It doesn't sound like information most people would know.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
It looks like Sony might be fixing the server phone home. Hearsay at the moment and it's not clear which consoles, but potentially great news.
Just the trophies? I thought it would mostly be related to PS+ licenses, which are a revenue stream, whereas trophies are just decoration. And speaking of PS+ games...
Yyyyyep, so glad that we're moving to digital-only libraries where we're only purchasing temporary access to software. It's not like we have hundreds of smaller indie games, or a bunch of full-fledged retail ones, on our PS hard drives.
Regulus
Sir Knightbot
I think that's only in the event of a dead CMOS. Unless there's a timeout that I'm not aware of, you should be able to play previously downloaded digital titles without connecting to the PSN.
I wonder how hard it would be for this to be reverse engineered? The same way you can play Demon's Souls or Metal Gear Online by connecting to a special DNS, even though the official matchmaking servers for both games have long been disabled.
I wonder how hard it would be for this to be reverse engineered? The same way you can play Demon's Souls or Metal Gear Online by connecting to a special DNS, even though the official matchmaking servers for both games have long been disabled.
These kinds of DRM are the very first thing modders strip out of gaming machines when custom firmware is installed. It blows my mind that some people here are losing their mind at this simply being a possibility despite abundant evidence that Sony caves to public pressure all the time, while also saying that installing your own replacement parts when things break like BD lasers is NBD, but *also* not realizing that loading a few files on a flash drive for easy CFW installation to circumvent this issue is probably one of the easiest/cheapest things a game preservationist can do.
Doing softmod cfw is usually just a matter of following a series of predescribed steps. It might seem daunting at first because the instructions are usually pretty technical, but they're also things the modding community refines and perfects over the course of a console's life cycle into something fairly fool proof with tons of newbie-friendly guides available. The only obstacles to success are not having a bare minimum level of reading comprehension and the ability to follow instructions. Something most people can probably manage if they managed to get out of high school. Replacing physical components on a console is a completely different task though that very often requires dexterity, special tools, and hand-eye coordination that doesn't just come default to many human beans. I consider myself halfway decent with my hands and when taking apart my launch PS3 for maintenance I nearly bricked my system simply because the ribbons connecting the flash card reader assembly is extremely delicate and prone to popping out. And without that hooked up properly, the PS3 won't even boot. It took hours of meticulous trial and error trying to get the data ribbon just perfectly back in place in the chassis so that the PS3 was happy and would boot again. My BD drive broke on that PS3 years ago, and in order to replace it, I'd need to take that ribbon apart again, and I decided it would just be easier (and cheaper!) to just buy a whole new PS3 instead. That seems like orders of magnitude more complicated and onerous than loading some CFW, which I've done to a good couple dozen different systems over the years with pretty much zero complications or headaches.
One of the big points of CFW is that it disables the console's DRM and lets you run any apps you want on it. Stripping the DRM out of the games you have is just one of the benefits of CFW, making a ban-threat far less meaningful. Getting banned is certainly a possibility, but it's one with increasingly less and less actual consequences. And if you're really that terrified of getting put on Sony's naughty list, you can just not take the machine online either. Since there's practically zero reason to bring your PS3 online anymore to begin with. And in general the threat of a ban becomes less and less likely as any console's maker stops updating its firmware with the latest counter-piracy measures that haven't yet been circumvented by modders.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
You see, I actually checked up and above a certain level of firmware on Slim or on a Super Slim it's completely impossible to install CFW. Whereas it's perfectly possible to do hardware fixes on any PS3. The hardware is designed to be repairable, even if it's tricky. The firmware has been designed to keep people out.
That's the way literally all firmware is designed to be. And no firmware is invincible. It takes time and hacker interest, but they all eventually get cracked. I imagine the lack of a hack for the current firmware has more to do with a lack of interest in modders than anything else. When the hardware is no longer strong enough to do really fun homebrew stuff, there's no more new games coming out for it for the pirates to enjoy, ps3 emulation is picking up steam, etc, the modding scene surrounding it also withers away. I remember it took years for the PS3 to get its first hack, but eventually an intrepid modder made a breakthrough (IIRC they were pissed at Sony) and the rest is history.
If your worst fears come to pass with regards to Sony unceremoniously orphaning its machine without patching out these oversights, that's historically the kinds of things that invigorates and incentivizes modders to double down, get to work, and figure out a fix. Modders and hackers already do all kinds of innovative things for game preservation like spoofing servers too that don't even necessarily require mods of any kind to get around similar kinds of issues, you just trick the PS3 into thinking it's talking to Sony when it isn't.
By all means get riled up about it, because if anything Sony has shown repeatedly in the past that even if it does stupid and tone-deaf stuff, that it still listens to user feedback and will bow to significant outrage/bad press. Sony is a business and like all businesses they'll do whatever makes them the most money, so use that to our advantage. But beyond the performative aspect of it, I just don't personally see the point in actually getting emotionally upset over something that I'd say there's a good 98% chance of being solved one way or another in the end, if you really really care about game preservation. And I say this as someone who hordes games and has historically cared more about game preservation than probably a good 98% of gamers out there.
Then and again and to be fair, I've also kind of just taken up a rather Buddhist perspective on all of this anyways lately.
If your worst fears come to pass with regards to Sony unceremoniously orphaning its machine without patching out these oversights, that's historically the kinds of things that invigorates and incentivizes modders to double down, get to work, and figure out a fix. Modders and hackers already do all kinds of innovative things for game preservation like spoofing servers too that don't even necessarily require mods of any kind to get around similar kinds of issues, you just trick the PS3 into thinking it's talking to Sony when it isn't.
By all means get riled up about it, because if anything Sony has shown repeatedly in the past that even if it does stupid and tone-deaf stuff, that it still listens to user feedback and will bow to significant outrage/bad press. Sony is a business and like all businesses they'll do whatever makes them the most money, so use that to our advantage. But beyond the performative aspect of it, I just don't personally see the point in actually getting emotionally upset over something that I'd say there's a good 98% chance of being solved one way or another in the end, if you really really care about game preservation. And I say this as someone who hordes games and has historically cared more about game preservation than probably a good 98% of gamers out there.
Then and again and to be fair, I've also kind of just taken up a rather Buddhist perspective on all of this anyways lately.
Nothing is permanent, and everything breaks down and decays at some point, so emotional attachments to impermanent objects only really leads to suffering. I've done lots of modding and fixing up of consoles/carts/disks/peripherals over the years in the name of game preservation and retro enthusiasm. But as our gaming hardware gets older and older, there's eventually just going to be no getting around the fact that our shit is going to naturally break and become worthless bricks. I haven't even checked in years, but I assume all my NES carts don't hold their save files any longer. And soldering new batteries onto them just isn't worth my time and headaches anymore. To say nothing of replacing decaying capacitors on the mobo. CDs as a medium were only designed to last 50 years, and we're getting closer and closer to our first gen games and music libraries becoming worthless plastic wafers. I've actually played with the idea of just dumping most of my collection from the 32bit era and before just so that I won't be the one left holding the bag and get some value out of them while they still have any value. I love my games, but I don't really need to have instant access to Saiyuki: Journey West at all times when I haven't played the game since before America waged war on Iraq. And even if I did manage to keep everything in pristine working order, what is the point? At best, this stuff gets stored away, I eventually die, someone else inherits it and they'd likely just chuck the stuff out unceremoniously like I did with my grandmother's stamp collections. These video game machines only have value because people assign value to them through demand, but when the demand dries up, they'll just be voluminous paperweights.
This. In the end, you _shouldn't_ have to hack your systems to keep playing your games, physical or otherwise. Just because you can, you can not fault the people who won't.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
This is my last post on this particular topic because this is a friendly board and I have no interest in upsetting anyone and starting a flame war, but you started out with this line and I pointed out you were utterly wrong and there is currently no way to hack a substantial number of PS3s, including mine. You respond with hypothetical patches from Sony / hackers that are in no way guaranteed to happen. You maintain that there is no reason to be upset and add koans about things breaking. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from this conversation?
"if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill
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The entire uproar in this thread is rooted around hypothetical scenarios that are in no way guaranteed to happen, but people are treating like a foregone conclusion. Taking the psn store offline for old consoles was at no point during any of this a guarantee of taking the download servers offline, or the servers that let the cmos ping home. I'm met with hypothetical dilemmas based on fear and distrust (some of which is well earned, but some of which is irrational) so I am offering hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems. They might not be foolproof, but they don't feel any less invalid versus the hypotheticals they're meeting.
I
Dude plays a lot of Fat Princess and he's not even that good at it.
The net effect of this PS3 store episode, for me, will be to buy fewer games. I should only buy games that I'm going to play and not accumulate a large back log of games I might play.
The PS3 store episode has reminded me that modern games and consoles have a shelf life that is shorter than the simpler games and consoles of the 8-bit and 16-bit era.
Somewhat related. I logged into Steam today for the first time in over a year. I find that 75% of my games are not playable because I updated my Mac OS. Apple no longer supports 32-bit applications on the new OS and so all my 32-bit games are not supported. There are ways around this but they are are, to me, inconvenient.
The PS3 store episode has reminded me that modern games and consoles have a shelf life that is shorter than the simpler games and consoles of the 8-bit and 16-bit era.
Somewhat related. I logged into Steam today for the first time in over a year. I find that 75% of my games are not playable because I updated my Mac OS. Apple no longer supports 32-bit applications on the new OS and so all my 32-bit games are not supported. There are ways around this but they are are, to me, inconvenient.
Ludendorkk
(he/him)
Mr. Sensible
Pitch and Putt Duffer
Nice, just tested that plugin and it works brilliantly for browsing PSP/PS3/Vita titles on the PS Store.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
Oooh, thank you. We're near our bandwidth cap for April but on May 1st I'm just downloading everything I don't already have on there.
Is the website's download queue working?
Thanks for the reminder that this is also gonna happen to my enormous backlog of MacOS Humble Indie Bundle games (unless the authors put out new versions) and I really need to think about keeping a Mini with a 32-bit compatible OS version around for hooking up to my TV...