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.

Facebook, Now on PS Vita

Kinda cool, though having 3 devices that all do the same thing is pretty redundant lol. Entering age of redundancy.

Also, first post off my Galaxy S2.

PS Vita Impressions and Review

So now that I got a chance to play with this guy for a few days, here comes a proper overview.

PSP 1000, 2000, Vita.

The weights go roughly as follows: 1000 at 280 grams, 2000 at 180 (207 w/ extended battery), and 285 for Vita.

New perks and quirks are all very cool- touch screen front, touch pad all across the back, great dual analogs unlike the old flat nub, buttons feel very good and responsive. The cameras are only alright, but considering Wifi b/g/n, bluetooth, gps, and 3g the system sports, camera quality in both can be overlooked in favor of it having them at all (and a mic to boot, say hello to Skype whenever it hits PSN).

Front, then rear camera tests.

So far, everything works great. Wifi is lightening fast compared to old PSPs with only b band equipped. On-Screen-Keyboard works very well too, no complaints about input thus far. Vita even sports this feature by default, which I find as an extremely great touch-So, as far as games go, I only got Dynasty Warriors Next thus far, but the game fully utilizes everything but maybe cameras in the unit and that makes it an excellent launch title. From touch screen, to the back pad, to even the gyro and motion sensors of the system- you’ll be using them all for special attacks and mini cut-scene fights. Gyro sequences are especially cool because it simulates looking around in-game by moving the system around yourself.The battery life isn’t too bad, I would guestimate maybe 3-4 hours including sleeping/standby in between (of up to a day in total thus far, since I do sleep once in a while ;p ).

All in all, this is an extremely promising system that sports truly powerful hardware (like a quad-core CPU, that even the smartphones these days haven’t yet equipped), and enough useful quirky ways to control the system and the games without making your eyes bleed like the 3DS.

Viva La Vita!

So, got my hand on one of these babes, so far so good.Now to sit on it and wait for the hacks 😉