Quote:Original post by Riviera Kid
i didnt say the homebrew would be free.
Terms and conditions, you make your silly 2d side scroller, submit it to sony, they release it for $x, at very little cost to them.

I think you need to redefine 'very little cost'.

There is both a real money cost and a serious business risk to that proposal.

Quote:Original post by Riviera Kid
Im talking about little things which are good for a laugh. Imagine channel4 games available on your ps3 for download. Its a reason to subscribe to an online service.

Imagine a game that (intentionally or accidently) floods or otherwise degrades their online service. Imagine a rogue game that exploits a hardware flaw. Or that accidently hits a flaw that fries the unit. Imagine a game that (intentionally or accidently) formats or corrupts the memory card. Imagine the support calls they are going to get when your indie game has problems. Imagine the testing they will have to do (the QA list is rather big) to make sure it works on all versions of the platform. Imagine the risk of their DRM system breaking because some smart people sent in a few games specifically for a cryptanalysis attack.

Those are all fairly expensive and risky to the company.

Quote:Original post by Riviera Kid
If sony feel the game is too good and compromises existing titles, they dont release it. Simple. Sony control the homebrew. Free developers.

The emulator would be debug and slow and awkward. Basically, the system doesnt harm anyone but removes irritating indie hackers who want to develope for consoles.

No, it's not just about the existing titles, and those 'irritating indie hackers' aren't a problem, the problem is the people who break the DRM and release it to the pirate community, or manufacture mod chips for the pirate community, and (most specifically) those who pirate copies of games.

They would need some way to allow indie games to run, without giving the ability for the commercial games to have something stripped off or decoded and being pirated and run. The profit margin is very small, and the risk of increased piracy means less games will be made.

They have to test those indie and homebrew apps. Sony does *significant* QA on everything they put their name on, and the book of requirements to pass QA is this thick (holds fingers apart). They can't simply control the homebrew, as you put it, because they would have to pay a small fortune in QA. The last thing Sony wants is to have their reputation tarnished by a few stupid hackers that exploit a flaw and get the bad code distributed by Sony.

They will get support phone calls. Even if the box has big bold warning "UNSUPPORTED -- CONTACT Riviera Kid at email@example.com" they will still end up fielding some support calls. Part of the expense and royalties cover that.

They aren't going to risk a program accidently (or intentionally) corrupting a memory stick or hard disk, or accessing a flaw on a specific version of the hardware.

They aren't going to pay the money to test the game on new hardware/software updates.


There are countless other business risks that they would be taking, and expenses that you didn't consider. I don't see anybody doing this any time soon.

OTOH, there are several active indie groups that you should check out, each with fairly big customer followings, as posted on this and other threads.

Quote: The problem is that Sony make money off the licensed games, not free/unlicensed homebrew.

You also need to understand that Sony et al. are creating an entertainment experience and are putting a lot of branding and development efforts behind a console for it to reach what we call a "tipping point". There is thus an incentive to protect that investment through DRM, UMD, and other proprietary mechanism for at least through that crucial period. If you freely open a platform to any and all developers, you are basically surrendering your entertainment experience value, and your console becomes a brandless commodity item. That's one reason why they are very selective in the titles they pick and support on their platforms, at least initially. The other reason is purely economical. If there is too many game suppliers chasing around a finite number of consumers, sooner or later each supplier sees its share of the whole pie drop and so are its incentives to deliver proper games or even support the platform at all.

All these ports and emulators get boring quick :P Take it from me, ive been in the pocketpc area for a while.

Playing Chrono trigger 30 times or Doom for the nth time gets really boring!

Why don't simply get a GP2X?

You can make anything you want with it, it's only like $190, and it has Linux. Excepting the 'official' basic libs that I've downloaded from the official SDK, all my SDK (compiler, additional libraries) was cross compiled by myself unsing the devkit script. It's simply so easy to begin developing things on it, and you get a mp3/movie/ebook player and picture viewer along with all. I've even ported the Chicken Scheme runtime to it, so I can use a functional language to create apps on it.

Superpig hit the nail on the head. With an outdated system like the PSP I could see how you could MAYBE create your game on an emulator, but with next-gen systems like the 360 and the PS3, there is no way to do it on your home pc with some emulator and expect it to perform well once dropped onto the actual system.

The reason that console developers charge lots of money for their devkits is not especially because they want more money, but mainly because it costs shitloads to manufacture a devkit in the first place.