Sean Workman takes on critics of Sony’s agressive anti-hacking initiative.

A letter to the idiots upset by Sony’s promise to aggressively “pwn the hax0rs”:

by Sean Workman

Sony has announced plans to “aggressively pursue” hackers of their flagship Playstation 3. Is this news? No, not really. Any company that had invested as much money and risked so much of their future on a single product line would want to protect it. So if this isn’t news, why is it getting so much press in the gaming media? I’ll tell you why. You want free games. Piracy. There, I said it. You may not admit to it. You may actually actively claim to be against it, but THAT is the driving cause behind the buzz to this topic. Sony fights this battle on their PSP and has ever step of the way been losing. They’ve lost control of the PSP and in my opinion it’ll take a hardware revision and writing off all existing PSPs as “hackable” until it’s resolved, but for the PS3 it’s still a relatively locked down system. Locked down for a few (very important) reasons.

1. When you turn it on, if you’re connected to the internet, it checks for updates and won’t let you connect to the Playstation Network unless you update and are completely current (so avoiding that rules out any online gaming, purchasing DLC, and especially firmware updates. If you want any of the compelling advanced features offered by later firmware versions, you (at this time) simply have to keep updating your firmware. As a side effect of “shipping lean” on features, they’ve got SUBSTANTIAL bait to lure people into staying current with firmware updates. Staying current means letting the Sony carpenters spackle any holes in your system for you (whether YOU knew they were there or not). Notable features you’d miss out on if you never updated your launch PS3 sytem… PS1/PS2 backwards compatibility updates, PS1/PS2/DVD upscaling, Bluray downscaling to 720p, network streaming, internet-ready Remote Play to your PSP, and many, many others. Those are just some of the more tangible updates. At the end of the day, you may subscribe to the “I paid $600, I bought it and I can do with it what I want!” line of thought… remember, you’re accessing THEIR servers and services. They have every right in the world to keep you from doing that if you’ve done something to YOUR system that is outside the realm of what they deem legit. The online presence of both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 is only going to grow over time. Opting out means a larger and larger portion of their offerings will be off limits to you.

2. Nobody has (proven the have) successfully copied/hacked/played Playstation 3 pirated games “in the wild”. There have been claims by people (that I do tend to believe) that under certain circumstances and firmwares, they’ve been able to pirate games and play them but if only one or two or a hundred people can do this, it’s not even a blip on the radar. There are most definitely disc images available. But until people “in the wild” are able to actually boot and run them, I might as well archive up 14 gigabytes of recorded static and name it HotNewPS3Game.iso and let people wait in anticipation for the day some way to USE those images comes.

Read the rest of Sean’s letter tomorrow, right here on Sarcastic Gamer.

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