Making an observation and playing devil’s advocate a little here.

Both Sony and Nintendo have announced new software offerings for their portable gaming consoles this year. Nintendo’s is already in effect. Sony’s is expected soon. You may have heard of DSiware, which is Nintendo’s downloadable game store solution for the DSi. These are very small in size, price and scope and would typically be comparable to online Flash games. Some are a bit better than that, many are not even worthy of that description. Sony has announced PSP minis which are essentially the same thing: very small games offered as purchasable downloads only from the Playstation Store.

Now why are Nintendo and Sony doing this?

Because Apple has, almost accidentally it seems, arrived as a serious competitor just recently in portable gaming, an area that both Sony and Nintendo are veterans of. When the iPhone was first portrayed to the general public as a potential gaming device, most of the gaming community sneered at the idea. Myself included. And now many of those same people have had their minds changed for them as apps and games have flooded onto iPhone and iPod touch and for generally reasonable prices.

I find this very, very funny.

Why? Because both Sony and Nintendo have avid fans. Fans who have been passionate enough to create their own software for DS and PSP. Useful little utilities that are handy to have easily available on a portable device. Or even amateur-created games in many cases. Of course, to be fair, in order to run this software, it’s necessary to “hack” said portable devices to allow them to run unsigned code. Meaning software that the hardware manufacturers have not placed their stamp of approval on for retail sales. What has been the reaction of both Sony and Nintendo? To treat the entire homebrew community as if they are all criminals. And fighting that community tooth and nail by continuing to release new firmware designed to block their efforts.

Granted, some of them are criminals. Because a side effect (OK, for most a primary purpose) of “hacking” these devices is that they can then run pirated copies of retail games. Which legitimately does harm sales, which legitimately does harm the entire community of PSP or DS players. Because if a game designer/publisher is considering putting a game out on PSP, for example, but they know that the piracy problem on PSP is outrageously bad, they might just decide that it’s not worth their development and marketing efforts. And in reality, they may be right in making such a decision. BUT again, to be fair to those using hacked devices, in the case of the PSP especially, many players are not pirating games, they are just using images of games they have purchased so that they don’t have to undergo the poor experience of playing off of a UMD drive and lose battery power faster than they really need to. But I would venture to guess that these gamers of good integrity are few and far between in the community of custom firmware users.

So Sony and Nintendo choose to treat their app-creating fanbase as if they are shrewd, conniving villains and spend who knows how much money every year combating them. Aaannnd Apple’s idea? Why not stimulate and encourage the creativity of iPhone and iPod fans, allowing them to make some money off of their creations while nurturing a growing, innovative community?

And which mentality is thriving?

And which of these companies have suddenly realized their bad, bad mistake and are trying to make laughably silly, too-little-too-late efforts to catch up?

Hilarious.

Interesting how fear turns out to be the wrong reaction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.