Kasz216 said:
It was easier for the average person to pirate on a DS then a PSP... so the piracy excuse doesn't really make sense unless the PSP's were bought specifically for pirating. (In other words, PSP Sold better because of piracy. It's software didn't sell worse because of it.) |
I disagree. In theory, it's easier for the average person to pirate on the DS than the PSP because you do nothing more than put the R4 card in and you're donee, but in reality that's not really how it works out. The problem with the DS scenario is that your average demographic that purchases DS games or the average demographic that purchases DS games for their kids don't know about piracy on the console. The other issue is that R4 cards are only purchased through select online retailers or places like Ebay.
With the PSP, most people are already going to have or get a memory stick because it's required to even save games. If you're one of those people, as you're stating, who bought a PSP just to pirate, then you can buy a memory stick at any retail store that sells video game products. As long as your PSP was hackable, then it's nothing more than following a simple set of steps.
The picture I even posted about the number of illegal downloads at the time they did the study shows pirated copies of popular games at the time. Two high profile Nintendo games compared to Dissidia Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star Portable 2.
Then you state the PSP software didn't sell worse because of piracy?
GTA Liberty City Stories was released in 2005, selling 7.48m, but compare this to Vice City Stories which only sold 4.38m. One could argue that with the PS2 release of LCS that a lot of people didn't want to purchase the PSP version in hopes that VCS also received a PS2 release, which it did, but three million sales, especially when it's well known that PSPs had CFW and people found out how to rip UMDs and pirate them by that time.
Here are a few early released titles and their sales and then late release titles for comparison. Obviously just going by VGChartz data, and if you want to argue the sales are way off and undertracked, blame VGChartz, but doesn't VGChartz just track them themselves randomly and then update NPD numbers? If that's the case, the numbers won't be too undertracked because it's always the first month sales that matter most.
Crisis Core(2007) sells 3.07 million and Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep(2010) sells 1.89m. Birth By Sleep also had some heavy DRM that wouldn't work on CFW PSPs until months after release, so that right there is possibly why it has as many sales as it does. Dissidia(2008) sells 2.16m. Duodecim(2010) sells .78m. Final Fantasy 4 DS sells 1.15m while Complete Collection(2010) sells .46m, and argue as you might, it includes a two hour prologue, all the GBA dungeons, and the After Years. God of War Chains of Olympus(2008) sells 3.09 compared to Ghost of Sparta(2010) selling .83m.
If you don't just blindly think that the PSP didn't actually sell games and do a little bit of research, it's clear that the sales started declining the more prevailant the piracy became. As I said before, initial PSP2000s could use CFW but then Sony patched it and the PSP2000s were locked down quite some time, well beyond the release of the PSP3000.
From Wiki.
"The PSP scene is well known for its homebrew community. The homebrew community were initially unable to hack the later PSP-2000s and the PSP-3000 because it had a new CPU (motherboards revealed to be TA-088v3 (for PSP Slim) and TA-090v2 (for PSP-3000)) which does not support the PRE IPL Exploit used in hacking the previous versions. This is due to the motherboard having its own PRE IPL where it checks the firmware thoroughly; if passed, the PRE IPL is cut off entirely to prevent unwanted modifications to the system.
In November 2008, Datel announced a "Lite Blue Tool" battery which allows the PSP-3000 to boot into service mode. This battery is not able to start homebrew as the new PRE-IPL has yet to be cracked. The Lite Blue Tool was deterred from distribution due to legal action by Sony. Some time later, Datel changed the name from Lite Blue Tool to Max Power Digital and changed the description.
MaTiAz, a known hacker in the PSP hacking community, found an exploit which is done with a US copy of GripShift and a HEN save game exploit. However, this was only temporary. After the release of this initial hack, a sizable increase in sales of the game was experienced. Many eBay sellers inflated their prices to cash in on the sudden demand. A revised version of the PSP firmware (v5.03) was released shortly after to patch the exploit. Malloxis found a TIFF crash which is proven to work on 5.02 and 5.03 firmwares for PSP-3000; further crafted and engineered by MaTiAz, the TIFF crash became a TIFF exploit capable of loading an h.bin from the root memorystick. Davee, another hacker, further engineered this exploit with a privilege escalation exploit and created a Homebrew Enabler (HEN) which would allow the execution of unsigned code by users. In firmware revision 5.50, the TIFF vulnerability was removed, preventing any further firmwares being affected by the exploit. The HEN for the TIFF exploit, which was called "ChickHEN", was released on May 5, 2009.
On June 5, 2009, custom firmware version 5.03GEN-A for HEN was released, which is compatible with both PSP-2000 v3 and PSP-3000. It allows users to play game backups (ISO/CSO), PS1 games, and includes access to PSN, VSH, and recovery mode. This marked a major step forward in ending Sony's PSP-3000 piracy protection. Two days later, on June 7, 2009, a duo of hackers (Xenogears and Becus25) released custom firmware support software based on a modified work of the released 5.03GEN-A for the formerly unhackable handheld called "Custom Firmware Enabler 3.01" in which PSP-3000 users can install custom firmware and load those firmware's files onto the PSP's RAM with the direct usage of "ChickHEN".
From this point on, everything but Go was hackable. It wasn't until too long afterwards that it became easier than ever to hack the PSP.
On January 2, 2011, Mathieulh announced the discovery of the PSP's master keys, allowing homebrew to run on the PSP without any firmware modifications.
This includes CFW applications which can now be loaded and installed without doing anything special.
*edit*
Edited something that VGChartz listed as 2004 releases, but the PSP came out December 2004 in Japan, 2005 in the west.
