Poor Sales Due to Piracy? Nay.

Ever since the original PSP was hacked, we’ve all heard this millions of times from everyone- hacks and piracy “killed” the sales and the poor little thing in the long run. Consumers and often even the companies alike love to blame poor progress onto individual pirates and hackers, but in reality they are hardly the ones to blame. Not every evil in the world is solely destructive.

Lets look at Nintendo’s iron grip over all the youngsters and kids at heart alike since forever ago. When Gameboy Advanced and the DS launched, they were in fact, effortless to hack and run pirated games unlike the PSP. There was no risk of bricking the system. It was simply patch, plug and play. Now, have we EVER heard Nintendo publicly complain about piracy on their systems? Do you know why? Their target niche of customers have always been either absolutely faithful or simple too young to realize that piracy exists. Nintendo always made their buck no matter what surrounded them in the underground scenes of the online community.

Sony, on the other hand, always targeted the more mature gamer- late teens and early twenties and up, high school and college students. The ones who hardly have much money to spend on software and games, but definitely smart enough to find a loophole and get whatever they can for free. In such a case, the easiest thing for the company is to blame the hacking scene. Secure their systems tighter. Steer sheer numbers of potential consumers away instead of re-evaluating their target audience.

As I mentioned in the very beginning, private piracy- piracy of software intended solely for personal use and not profits. Profits off of pirated software is what actually hurts the companies and software developers out there. Private use, at its best, is actually a form of free advertizement. If you got to play the hottest new game for free, next thing you would do is tell all your friends about it. Then if they go buy it, they’ll do likewise and the wave takes off.

Remember, there are plenty of double-edge swords out there that majority of the public fails to see fully.

Custom Robo – Model Kits (Bandai)

Though I only played Custom Robo Arena on the DS, I loved the lil series and simply couldn’t pass up these 5$ kits. Parts are interchangeable and they all come with extra weapon hands. They even have the portable mini-versions just like in the game to boot.

Evolution of High School Standard – Ti-83 Plus Graphing Calculator

If you went to a high school in the US either half a decade ago or more recently, this calculator remains the educational standard for almost all of the levels of math classes taught. Did you know, however, that the gaming and home brew scenes also kept up with this device and a port was made for virtually all popular portable gaming and non-gaming devices alike? I will personally show you the evolution tree that I followed myself, so without further a due:

The Original, boring Ti-83 calculatorThe first and second steps of homebrew evolution, the Gameboy Advance (micro in my case) and Nintendo DS (Lite in my case):Next, Sony PSP got a port of a much more powerful, Ti-92 calculator

(I don’t really have a screenshot nor photo available, but you get the idea)

And today, the robust Android devices can use Ti-83 as well, even through a GBA emulator

(Or through the app, like Andy83)

The rate at which our technology improves is mind-blowing and I wish we would have gotten some of these bells and whistles a little bit earlier, when I actually needed them, haha.