Sony Wants To Know Why You Hacked Your PSP
There has been a constant war between Sony and the PSP hacking community since the handheld launched. Sony releases new firmware with more features every few months in an effort to keep people from cracking it.
The image here is apparently only part of a new consumer survey that people are being asked to partake in. Is this Sony trying to actually understand why people are using custom firmwares? Or are they just trying to track people down?
Sony may be starting to realize what they are up against here. Obviously they can't outright support emulators and software that allows games to be played illegally, but people are going to find ways to do that regardless. Personally, I'd find some way to open the system back up with a patch, but include a user agreement restricting it to freeware and custom development. Or better yet, host their OWN site of custom PSP apps. They could filter out the trouble-making apps themselves and create a community of indie game developers. I'd love to see sites like Experimental Gameplay have sections devoted just to PSP development. I bet we'd get some awesome games, (and some more awesome PR for Sony).
Sony Wants To Know Why You're Hacking Your PSP [Kotaku]
Sgt. Sausagepants
Posted to Video Games on 11 April 2008
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: Firmware, Hack, PSP
No question on that survey asks about hacking for increased functionality or asks if you hack to play more games. The questions are all marketing and legal type stuff.
Well Sony, I hacked my psp because-
1. I own 2 games for it. There aren't enough titles that i want to own on the psp at the moment. Honestly the whole reason i got it was for Crisis Core.
2. Emulators. Yes, all that fun illegal stuff. Except that, i own about 95% of the roms i downloaded. It's just really neat and fun to have them on a handheld. Especially my psx games =)
Well they should have made a system that functioned fully out of the box and something that didnt need updates. Thats generally whats wrong with this generation of consoles... all brought out too soon without fully testing it. Bring back the old days when you shoved in a cartridge and that be that. Sure some games were buggy... but least they werent hacked.
Not that I'm a PSP owner, but that survey smells of "please help us figure out how to sell our anti-hacking efforts to the gamer press" and not "please help us to find a way to satisfy you PSP hackers".
I don't think it's a "track down PSP hax0rz" tactic (the survey seems to be invitation-only, meaning it might actually be an attempt at real research), but regardless, I'd stay away.
I took this survey and can confirm (and inform) that it was not developed by Sony (I didn't pay attention to who did develop it after I saw that it wasn't Sony). The questions were targeted directly at the hacking community and social awareness of what hacking is.
The purpose of the survey was to gather information about why people hack their mobile systems, especially the PSP.
There were questions that directly asked if the reason you (or one would-) hack is for increased functionality or to play more games.
It took about 15-20 minutes to answer all the questions (there were a lot of questions split up into several pages of only a few questions each, as pictured above).
Um... Maybe the illegal-ways are always cheap.