“How Does Sony Stay in Business? - PC Magazine” plus 1 more |
| How Does Sony Stay in Business? - PC Magazine Posted: 31 Jan 2011 09:01 AM PST January 31, 2011 One top of all of its previous bonehead mistakes and missed opportunities, Sony has decided to sue the PlayStation hacker instead of hiring him.  The only explanation for the fact that Sony hasn't gone broke a dozen times already is it must be one of the great engineering companies in the world. I say this only because the company seems to shoot itself in the foot constantly with bonehead moves, incredibly poor marketing, and classic missed opportunities. This for me began in the early days of the Sony VAIO. When VAIO first appeared in the 1990s, I went to Sony's booth at CES to ask why it didn't bother showing the machines to the computer trade press. It left us completely out of the loop. Back then, the computer press was pretty much dominating and directing the scene. Sony's boxes looked pretty nifty, so I was curious. "Oh, we aren't marketing the VAIO to people interested in computers," I was told. "There's no need to talk to you guys." I thought this was incredibly peculiar, since the company had just come off a decade of dominance in the computer users' milieu with its superb PC monitors. Sony already had the reputation and brand name everyone in the industry liked, yet it wasn't going to leverage any of it on some whim. I thought it was idiotic. Within a few years, Sony ended up with a struggling laptop business and faded from the monitor market. The company, by staying away from the computer geek milieu, also missed out on trends it could have easily benefited from, including the mp3 iPod revolution, which it managed to completely ignore. Instead, the company moved into game console market, which was outside the scene. Again, through incredible engineering, it took its place at the top and managed to build a huge business with the PlayStation. I could go on and on with the missteps, but the ones that keep cropping up for the PlayStation are arguably the funniest and the most indicative of the company's weird arrogance and the fact that it lives in a bubble. Within a year or two of the PlayStation achieving dominance, a small company came out with an incredible emulator that let a regular PC run the games. Sony sued the company out of business. I was stunned by this, since I would have bought the company for less money than the lawsuit cost and started a new PC gaming business. Controlling the emulator would have given Sony all sorts of leverage, but nobody at the company seems to have the ability to think this way. It also should be noted that game sales account for profits not the sales of the consoles. So, how would the emulator hurt anything? Okay, now we come to chapter two of this history of suing, which happened last week. Bob Pegoraro described the situation on his Faster Forward blog in the Washington Post: "A California court has approved Sony's restraining order against George Hotz, who distributed a way to allow Playstation 3 [sic] users to put any operating system on their consoles -- an action that Sony claims opened the door to game piracy. PSX-Scene, a Playstation [sic] community, had the pdf files of the documents first. Hotz has been ordered to take down all links to the hack and turn over his computers. He maintains that he never intended the hack to aid game piracy and, in fact, told the G4 network show "Attack of the Show" that he took measures to keep the code from being used in that manner." So let me get this straight: Instead of hiring this guy to work for Sony, it sues him? Engineers like this guy are rare. Is the company that dumb? Or does it not hire outside its little cult? To me, it's an eye-roller. As Pegoraro points out, the hack is all over the net on mirror sites, so who are they kidding? Yet again, a golden opportunity turns into a heap of dirt as Hotz will probably end up working for Microsoft. How does this company stay in business? It's baffling. More John C. Dvorak: This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Sony detail PSone Classics process, 'always updating emulator' - Strategy Informer (press release) Posted: 31 Jan 2011 05:18 AM PST What to know what it takes to get those PSone gems on the PlayStation 3 and PSP? Sony has explained why it can be so darn hard to get them up. Some are still awaiting "legal clearance" since 2007. Some fail bug tests at QA, but get re-run when the emulator updates. What about the US/EU divide? "The journey from PSone disc to PSone emulation can be a long one – here's the short version," begins Ross McGrath from the PlayStation Store Team, SCEE. "We make sure we've got a good copy of the original disc (or discs if there are localised versions), then the game is cleared for publish by our legal department. They check there are no issues with any of the content in the game being under an expired license, or any confusion over ownership of the publishing rights." "Then we make a record for the game as it will appear on the Store, including the image and all the description text in the eight Store languages." "Next, the game disc is sent to SCEI (Sony Computer Entertainment International) to be turned into a digital version, where they run some initial bug tests before the package is sent to our software testing house in Liverpool," he said. "The game is played extensively to make sure that there are no serious issues and that the game works from start to finish. At that point, if no problems are found either on PS3 or PSP, we can publish it." Of course that's if everything goes perfect as otherwise things get ugly. "There are two major stumbling blocks between submitting a game for emulation and us being able to publish it: not getting legal clearance and failing quality assurance (QA)," noted McGrath. For the full breakdown from Sony check out the PlayStation.Blog post. As for why the US and EU PSN don't match in their PSone Classics catalogue? "This usually comes down to either publishing rights or bugs that occur within the emulated PAL version that did not occur within the NTSC emulated version." "There are several PAL titles that don't play well with the emulator because of a PAL-only copy protection system that was used in several key releases, and sometimes other bugs occur at random," explained the Sony exec. "In some cases the original publisher of the game in the US is not the same publisher as in Europe, so publishing rights need to be secured – once again, a lengthy process and one that some publishers choose not to undertake because of the costs and time involved." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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