Lord N said:
HappySqurriel said:
Lord N said:
HappySqurriel said:
Tif this hackability doesn't kill software sales (as it did with the Dreamcast and PSP) it can actually be a good thing
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Those two consoles being hacked had nothing to do with their software sales being poor.
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I think you might be able to argue that these consoles being hacked wasn't the only reason the had poor(er) software sales, or (possibly) that the consoles being hacked wasn't the main reason they had poor(er) software sales but the fact is that piracy will impact software sales.
If your system is difficult enough to hack that it requires some sort of hardware modification that will void the waranty 75% (or greater) of people who might consider stealing a game won't because they don't want to risk the money they spent on their system. On the other hand, if your console can easily be hacked using a 'softmod' (like the PSP), or no modification at all (like the Dreamcast), then many consumers who would normally buy games will end up stealing games and (potentially worse) many of the consumers who end up buying your system do so because it is easy to steal games ...
Now the PSP has other reasons software sales are so poor (mainly that its media functionality attracts people who buy the system with no intention of playing games on it) but when you have sold more units than the PS3 and XBox 360 combined and sell approximately 1/2 the software of either system (and the system has a reputation for rampant piracy) it is fair to conclude that piracy is having some impact on software sales.
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Let's look at the Dreamcast first....
1) When it launched in 1998/1999, the vast majority of people were still on dial-up. This was a time when it could take several hours to download a 3MB mp3 file, and several days to download a Dreamcast game.
2) File sharing apps like Kazaa, Limewire, Emule, Bittorent, etc didn't exist at the time, so in addition to Dreamcast isos taking longer to download, they'd have been harder to find.
3) As is with the price of Blu-Ray recordable drives and Blu-Ray media, CD burners and recordable CDs were rather expensive at that point in time. Most PCs shipped with just a CD-ROM or maybe a DVD-ROM, and an 8X CD burner at that point in time cost in upwards of $300, and the media wasn't cheap either.
The Dreamcast itself never sold that well to begin with after launch, and neither the system nor the games had any chance at all once the PS2 was announced, which immediately killed them.
The PSP....
1) You've already mentioned this, but it was marketed more as a multimedia device than it was as a portable gaming device, and that's exactly how people bought it. I wouldn't be surprised if half of all PSP owners are using them as MP3 players and portable video players.
2) It also didn't help that there was a rather large game drought until mid-2006. Even I, a proud PSP owner, have to admit that all the banter on the internet regarding "THE PSP HAS NO GAMES!!!!" was not entirely unfounded, and rather true.
3)It had(and still does, to an extent) too many PS2 ports and other such games that would have been much more appropriate if they were on a home console. It looks to me as though Sony and third parties, in an attempt to exploit the technical specs of the PSP, failed to take into account what kind of games work best with a handheld.
4) The PSP, while having a lot of good games, doesn't have a lot of "must have" titles. It doesn't really have a Brain Age, Nintendogs, Mario Kart, NSMB, Pokemon, etc.
5) The cost of the games themselves. $40 is quite steep when compared to the $30 launch price of most DS games.
Yes, people have and are still buying the PSP because it's rather easy to get games without paying for them, but that has no effect because if this weren't the case, then these people wouldn't have bought the PSP at all, much less the games. Having to mess with the hardware isn't a deterrent either as the mod scenes for both the PS2 and the Xbox were rather large and neither of those saw such low software sales. Finally, it's even easier to play games for free on the DS considering that flash carts have been available on Amazon for the bleedin' longest.
To sum things up, "piracy" is just a scape goat that the industry, analysts, and other people who follow sales data use to explain poor sales. I'm not denying at all that there are people who were going to buy a game, downloaded them, and then didn't buy them because they, in effect, already had them, but when you look at the big picture, this is de minimus.
If the effect on the industry was even the least bit serious, then nearly every record label would be filing for bankruptcy considering that it's possible to download an artist's entire discography in mere hours at the most. Itunes should have also crashed and burned, because why would people buy mp3's when they can use P2P to get them for free?
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