makingmusic476 said:
greenmedic88 said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
greenmedic88 said:
makingmusic476 said:
The NGP is fully backwards compatible with all PSP games bought via PSN. There's been no word on games using UMD, but I doubt they'll offer a way to rip them to the system.
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I'm sure they explored all sorts of options for this with the PSP Go.
Naturally, the issue was a simple matter of one person buying a copy of a UMD and then ripping it to every PSP system owned by anyone that one person happened to know. Most wouldn't even see this as piracy.
Without a licensing code and a way to deactivate UMDs, I just don't see it happening short of making an offer to allow consumers to trade in their UMDs for PSN Store game redemption codes.
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What I was thinking was that Sony would let you USB plug in a PSP with a UMD into a PC, log into PSN, pay them a certain amount of money ($1-$3 per game, or maybe more for bulk tranfers), and they would put a locked copy of the game data onto either your PSP memory card, or the data on the PSP Go or NGP.
This way, even if you did loads, Sony would ensure the copies are just for the system(s) paid for, and see just a little bit of money, even if a game was bought used.
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The problem is, there's still no exchange of the original media and no record of where that media came from.
So hypothetical situation: I loan someone my games, they pay the minimal transfer fee and have a "legal" copy of the game for $1-3. I do the same, and then sell my UMDs on Ebay or to GS for a buck (or whatever ridiculous price they pay).
There's nothing stopping one person from buying one used or retail copy of a game and doing an indeterminate number of transfers to as many PSPs as they can get their hands on. All "legit."
I think the only way a transfer system would work is if you had to exchange your UMDs for game voucher codes.
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I'm sure they could rig somethign up with serial numbers. It'd just be a pain in the ass, and there's the issue of me using my number to get a PSN version of the game then giving my UMD copy of the game to a friend.
In the end, one copy of a game is turning into two or more.
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This was exactly my point. And legally, that "media transfer" purchased for whatever price $1, 3, 5 would count as a legit copy even if the game was borrowed, rented, bought used, stolen, etc. That would literally be the safest way to "legally" pirate the hell out of a system for a few dollars per game.
It still boils down to the physical media counting as your "license" since the PSP as a gaming platform was planned out in the early 2000s before the advent of DD licensing. It's a pretty safe bet they would have handled things differently had they known what a huge issue easy piracy would be on the platform.
I can laugh about it now, but I actually thought the PSP had the ability to legally install a UMD game onto a Memory Stick to avoid the disk access times and disk drive power drain before I fully thought through how that would work in reality. The PSP is already pirated to the point where it has effected both developer/publisher ROIs as well as the amount of software being developed for the platform as a whole.
