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Everytime console hacking comes up I start to wonder how well a manufacturer would do if their next console was open. Would they see a decrease in legit purchas

Everytime console hacking comes up I start to wonder how well a manufacturer would do if their next console was open. Would they see a decrease in legit purchases if the console was open for hacking and exploitation? I would think it would be a lot like the PC game market which as far as I can tell is still thriving today. So assuming there is no economic impact, what is it that makes us want to lock down consoles (similarly cell phones) when we do not do the same to the personal computer we hold so dearly? It is a fascinating story that I suspect is due to timing and when devices hit markets but curious what others think about this.

Klathmon 10y ago
Hacking and cheating are huge problems on PC. And without a locked down client, these things run rampant, and can very frequently ruin a game. Keeping the system locked and having it balk at every modification makes it much easier to control that.
- notyourwork 10y ago
  It does simplify things but do you feel if cheating could be curbed we still need locked down consoles?
  - eropple 10y ago
    Not the OP, but I do, in that I think that the piracy concerns do still exist. PS4 piracy is effectively impossible, and that's a very powerful argument for the platform holder to continue locking it down. One that both game developers and other application providers appreciate the control the platform provides; controlled platforms like phones and consoles are the only places that most people ever see YouTube ads, for example.
  - TwoBit 10y ago
    Yes, because they are locked down for other reasons too, such as the fact that they are sold at a loss, with the assumption they are used for gaming and thus can recoup the loss.
  - pandaman 10y ago
    Another issue people overlook in these comments is quality control. You cannot get a Chinese PS4 knock-off, which would play some games and fail on others. Likewise, every licensed game you buy is, at the very least, verified to run adequately on every PS4 out there. It does not mean every game is going to be fun but even this low bar is impossible to reach on an open platform.
    - izacus 10y ago
      How is that connected with the ability to run your own binaries on the PS4?
      - pandaman 10y ago
        I am not sure what are you asking about. I was replying to a post about the need to lock down consoles. Historically, this event caused the lockdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras... I was not much of a gamer in 1983 but I believe on-line gaming and cheating was not a significant issue at the time. Nintendo first moved to lock its system and take control over the content due to quality concerns.
- davexunit 10y ago
  This is a poor justification for user subjugating software.
ethbro 10y ago
They don't do it initially to lock the purchases so much so as to ensure people aren't getting free hardware. Due to the economics and competition, consoles are almost always sold at a hardware loss early in the generation, and only begin to become profitable at some much later point. Ergo, if someone buys a console and buys no games, Sony/MS/Nintendo (maybe not the last) loses money.
- notyourwork 10y ago
  > They don't do it initially to lock the purchases so much so as to ensure people aren't getting free hardware. This is an interesting thought I hadn't considered until now.
  - AtheistOfFail 10y ago
    This is why console development is expensive. You have to rent your dev kit and you pay per update. This ensures the hardware is "below cost"
- zanny 10y ago
  Interestingly enough, none of the consoles in the most recent generation (PS4 / Xbone / WiiU) were ever sold at a loss leader price. They were all profitable at their release prices (400 / 500 / 300) from the get go.
  - gild 10y ago
    Source? I seem to recall that the WiiU was sold at a loss from the get-go, but I may be confusing that from around a year later when they cut the price down to $250.
    - qbrass 10y ago
      The hardware cost less than the retail price, but they had to recoup development costs. They claimed that the purchase of just one game was enough to make the console purchase profitable.
waiseristy 10y ago
Looking at piratebay, there are 1000+ seeders on most of the recent AAA PC titles. Who knows if those people would actually shell out 60$ for a game, but it still is a real issue the PC gaming market faces. With current generation consoles, piracy has so far been impossible. Perhaps in the future this won't be the case, but currently every purchase is legit. I can't see any scenario where going from 0 piracy to who knows how much piracy would be rational
- tossedaway334 10y ago
  its perfectly rational if it increases sales, there are indications this is the case with PC piracy, especially with titles that would otherwise lack exposure. Its also rational if it allows them to move away from custom designs entirely, and save a truckload of money, more than they lose to the nebulous spectre of "piracy".
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    But the parent post references AAA games. In reality "piracy is organic advertisement" is a tired excuse. Large titles are already spending spending large portions of their budgets on advertising (sometimes more than their development budgets!), and small titles get shafted by petty piracy all the time (see mobile gaming, I've known multiple devs whose games show up on pirated APK sites before their main sites on google). People usually cite narrow cases where an AAA game succeeds in spite of lacking DRM as if piracy helped, or games that didn't spend anything on marketing and get big through marketing, which is an exceedingly rare lottery to win. No one ever cites games like Crysis 3 which had been pirated more times than it ever sold days before release
    - chii 10y ago
      but those pirated copies _would not_ have been sold had there been no piracy. I argue that piracy doesn't decrease sales, just increases the amount of utility that society gets from software.
      - 10y ago
mpd 10y ago
> Everytime console hacking comes up I start to wonder how well a manufacturer would do if their next console was open. Would you consider a PC as an 'open' console for this context? If not, what would differ?
- notyourwork 10y ago
  Yes, sorry I thought that was implied by my question.
ekianjo 10y ago
no need to wondee. The Amiga was a console like computer used mainly for games back in the days and it was completely open and cracked games were everywhere. It sold very well.
- vidarh 10y ago
  It sold ca. 5m. Which was a lot for a non-PC platform at that point, but not enough to prevent Commodore from going bankrupts (admittedly in part thanks to a lot of mismanagement). And while the low end Amigas were used largely for gaming, many were not and the high end models certainly not. I love Amigas, but they're not exactly a stellar endorsement of that model.
mikewhy 10y ago
The Dreamcast was notoriously easy to copy games for, it's a darling of gamers but the companies making games didn't like it one bit. And while I do love my PC for gaming, it definitely feels more and more like an afterthought these past couple of years.
- rubyn00bie 10y ago
  I've been feeling better and better about PC gaming these past few years. Most people I know have been making the switch to PC from Consoles. The biggest factor being steam sales (or X company sales)... the sales themselves reduce the risk associated with buying games; especially, triple A titles which tend to be expensive and hit or miss. Grand Theft Auto for PC at 4K, while requiring a helluva graphics card, blows away consoles. To be honest any game I've played on a PC has been a better experience (with the exception of racing games and some side scrollers which benefit from an input device not being a keyboard or mouse).
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    The Xbox controller is supported by almost all games on PC out of the box, nowadays. It's the defacto PC standard.
    - mikewhy 10y ago
      Lots of games from triple-a studios support DS4 controllers as well. As in switching button prompts and using the light bar. Without the need for DS4Windows or Steams new controller support.
  - mikewhy 10y ago
    You're right, most games available on PC and console are usually better on PC, but I'm talking about Mortal Kombat, Batman Arkham Knight, No Man's Sky, Dark Souls, etc. Admittedly, on PC, there's probably hundreds of great games for each bad port, but it seems to happen more and more. Maybe I'm conflating it with the rise of botched releases in general. And yes, GTA4 is one heck of a PC port.
- 10y ago
kobeya 10y ago
If PS3 is any guide, they will see massive supercompute clusters taking advantage of the subsidized hardware and bleeding them dry.
- 6DM 10y ago
  If any were curious, PS3 used to support linux: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sony-Linux-PS3-Firmware-Update,10007.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sony-Linux-PS3-Firmware-Upd...
- NegativeLatency 10y ago
  I think the current generation is more in line with compute costs to the point that this wouldn't make too much sense
- djsumdog 10y ago
  The PS3 was a Cell processor, a new architecture promoted by Sony/IBM .. Toshiba? I think? PS4s just have a regular old AMD x86/64 chip in them ... plus all that other garbage he described in the talk. With all the hacks it takes to get Linux to even boot, I'm pretty sure it's not worth the cost compared to just buying a real x86/64 PC based server.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Except a "real" PC based server has 4x the cost.
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      Equivalent hardware doesn't cost 4x apples and oranges
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  Which current generation console was sold at less than cost? Is there any reason to expect next generation consoles to do so?
johncolanduoni 10y ago
What exactly is it that will distinguish this new open console from a PC? Unless there's a big difference, your platform is going to have the same drawbacks for game developers that a PC has (vastly easier piracy) without the advantages (many people already own one). Similarly users will lose out on the ability to run their normal programs on the same hardware, for the privilege of having access to less games.
- Fargren 10y ago
  The main advantage of developing for consoles is targeting exactly one hardware configuration. I don't think that's lost if the specs for the console are public.
gambiting 10y ago
If the PSP is any indication, it would do extremely poorly. Console sales were above 80 million, but any single title struggled to sell significant numbers, and it is widely believed that it was due to piracy(my personal view is that it's 100% piracy - when I was growing up I knew 7-8 people with PSPs and not a single one of them had one genuine game).
prodmerc 10y ago
> when we do not do the same to the personal computer Try installing Windows 7 or Linux on a newer HP laptop with UEFI. Those pricks also encrypt their BIOSes, make them non-downgradeable, and disable features for no real reason (locking RAM speed to 1333 MHz on Sandy Bridge comes to mind).
runn1ng 10y ago
OUYA tried to do an open console. It didn't work out well for them. It's true that it might have been due to other issues, but right now, the console industry have a very public, well covered by the press console, that has tried to be open from the start and that failed in a spectacular manner and is now a joke.
- striking 10y ago
  OUYA was mismanaged from the outset. Here's a great video that illustrates each mistake they made, point by point, as a supercut of other people's videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTqhyHuKVKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTqhyHuKVKA Open consoles aren't doomed just because they're open. OUYA was just a super underpowered system bundled with a crappy homebrewed controller. They could have made a tiny Android board bundled with a PS4 controller. They could've shipped it in a no-frills box. They could've used some of that Kickstarter money to start a development fund, to help kickstart games on their console. Instead, you get a crappy controller in a fancy box, and there are basically no interesting games you can play with your new device.
micheljones 10y ago
The main issues that drive hacking are 1) running homebrew/reusing hardware and 2) region free games. Manufacturers who enable both in some form see less hacking done on their consoles. Of course, hacking with piracy as the main goal always gets done, but at a much slower rate. Also, these days the 'reusing hardware' part is not as important as it used to be. It used to be a big deal to repurpose a cheapo device for some other function because it was the only way to do it for cheap. However, these days everyone has access to very cheap and quite open platforms in both portable (Android cellphones) and home (Raspberry Pi) format. So the main angle for homebrew functions these days seem to be adding multimedia/internet functionality to devices that have those limited in some way. One example is that everyone wants Kodi on their consoles for ease of use, so much that people resort to plugging ARM HDMI sticks that run Kodi into their XboxONE's hdmi-in port for ease of switching into the media player app. So, all a producer needs to do to significantly lower the number of people motivated to hack their console is 1) have Kodi installed on it 2) have a decent browser installed on it 3) not needlessly inconvenience people who want to play a game from a different country 4) have some way of running simple homebrew in sandboxed environment.

Klathmon 10y ago

Hacking and cheating are huge problems on PC. And without a locked down client, these things run rampant, and can very frequently ruin a game. Keeping the system locked and having it balk at every modification makes it much easier to control that.

notyourwork 10y ago
It does simplify things but do you feel if cheating could be curbed we still need locked down consoles?
- eropple 10y ago
  Not the OP, but I do, in that I think that the piracy concerns do still exist. PS4 piracy is effectively impossible, and that's a very powerful argument for the platform holder to continue locking it down. One that both game developers and other application providers appreciate the control the platform provides; controlled platforms like phones and consoles are the only places that most people ever see YouTube ads, for example.
- TwoBit 10y ago
  Yes, because they are locked down for other reasons too, such as the fact that they are sold at a loss, with the assumption they are used for gaming and thus can recoup the loss.
- pandaman 10y ago
  Another issue people overlook in these comments is quality control. You cannot get a Chinese PS4 knock-off, which would play some games and fail on others. Likewise, every licensed game you buy is, at the very least, verified to run adequately on every PS4 out there. It does not mean every game is going to be fun but even this low bar is impossible to reach on an open platform.
  - izacus 10y ago
    How is that connected with the ability to run your own binaries on the PS4?
    - pandaman 10y ago
      I am not sure what are you asking about. I was replying to a post about the need to lock down consoles. Historically, this event caused the lockdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras... I was not much of a gamer in 1983 but I believe on-line gaming and cheating was not a significant issue at the time. Nintendo first moved to lock its system and take control over the content due to quality concerns.
davexunit 10y ago
This is a poor justification for user subjugating software.

ethbro 10y ago

They don't do it initially to lock the purchases so much so as to ensure people aren't getting free hardware. Due to the economics and competition, consoles are almost always sold at a hardware loss early in the generation, and only begin to become profitable at some much later point. Ergo, if someone buys a console and buys no games, Sony/MS/Nintendo (maybe not the last) loses money.

notyourwork 10y ago
> They don't do it initially to lock the purchases so much so as to ensure people aren't getting free hardware. This is an interesting thought I hadn't considered until now.
- AtheistOfFail 10y ago
  This is why console development is expensive. You have to rent your dev kit and you pay per update. This ensures the hardware is "below cost"
zanny 10y ago
Interestingly enough, none of the consoles in the most recent generation (PS4 / Xbone / WiiU) were ever sold at a loss leader price. They were all profitable at their release prices (400 / 500 / 300) from the get go.
- gild 10y ago
  Source? I seem to recall that the WiiU was sold at a loss from the get-go, but I may be confusing that from around a year later when they cut the price down to $250.
  - qbrass 10y ago
    The hardware cost less than the retail price, but they had to recoup development costs. They claimed that the purchase of just one game was enough to make the console purchase profitable.

waiseristy 10y ago

Looking at piratebay, there are 1000+ seeders on most of the recent AAA PC titles. Who knows if those people would actually shell out 60$ for a game, but it still is a real issue the PC gaming market faces. With current generation consoles, piracy has so far been impossible. Perhaps in the future this won't be the case, but currently every purchase is legit. I can't see any scenario where going from 0 piracy to who knows how much piracy would be rational

tossedaway334 10y ago
its perfectly rational if it increases sales, there are indications this is the case with PC piracy, especially with titles that would otherwise lack exposure. Its also rational if it allows them to move away from custom designs entirely, and save a truckload of money, more than they lose to the nebulous spectre of "piracy".
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  But the parent post references AAA games. In reality "piracy is organic advertisement" is a tired excuse. Large titles are already spending spending large portions of their budgets on advertising (sometimes more than their development budgets!), and small titles get shafted by petty piracy all the time (see mobile gaming, I've known multiple devs whose games show up on pirated APK sites before their main sites on google). People usually cite narrow cases where an AAA game succeeds in spite of lacking DRM as if piracy helped, or games that didn't spend anything on marketing and get big through marketing, which is an exceedingly rare lottery to win. No one ever cites games like Crysis 3 which had been pirated more times than it ever sold days before release
  - chii 10y ago
    but those pirated copies _would not_ have been sold had there been no piracy. I argue that piracy doesn't decrease sales, just increases the amount of utility that society gets from software.
    - 10y ago

mpd 10y ago

> Everytime console hacking comes up I start to wonder how well a manufacturer would do if their next console was open. Would you consider a PC as an 'open' console for this context? If not, what would differ?

notyourwork 10y ago
Yes, sorry I thought that was implied by my question.

ekianjo 10y ago

no need to wondee. The Amiga was a console like computer used mainly for games back in the days and it was completely open and cracked games were everywhere. It sold very well.

vidarh 10y ago
It sold ca. 5m. Which was a lot for a non-PC platform at that point, but not enough to prevent Commodore from going bankrupts (admittedly in part thanks to a lot of mismanagement). And while the low end Amigas were used largely for gaming, many were not and the high end models certainly not. I love Amigas, but they're not exactly a stellar endorsement of that model.

mikewhy 10y ago

The Dreamcast was notoriously easy to copy games for, it's a darling of gamers but the companies making games didn't like it one bit. And while I do love my PC for gaming, it definitely feels more and more like an afterthought these past couple of years.

rubyn00bie 10y ago
I've been feeling better and better about PC gaming these past few years. Most people I know have been making the switch to PC from Consoles. The biggest factor being steam sales (or X company sales)... the sales themselves reduce the risk associated with buying games; especially, triple A titles which tend to be expensive and hit or miss. Grand Theft Auto for PC at 4K, while requiring a helluva graphics card, blows away consoles. To be honest any game I've played on a PC has been a better experience (with the exception of racing games and some side scrollers which benefit from an input device not being a keyboard or mouse).
- bitJericho 10y ago
  The Xbox controller is supported by almost all games on PC out of the box, nowadays. It's the defacto PC standard.
  - mikewhy 10y ago
    Lots of games from triple-a studios support DS4 controllers as well. As in switching button prompts and using the light bar. Without the need for DS4Windows or Steams new controller support.
- mikewhy 10y ago
  You're right, most games available on PC and console are usually better on PC, but I'm talking about Mortal Kombat, Batman Arkham Knight, No Man's Sky, Dark Souls, etc. Admittedly, on PC, there's probably hundreds of great games for each bad port, but it seems to happen more and more. Maybe I'm conflating it with the rise of botched releases in general. And yes, GTA4 is one heck of a PC port.
10y ago

kobeya 10y ago

If PS3 is any guide, they will see massive supercompute clusters taking advantage of the subsidized hardware and bleeding them dry.

6DM 10y ago
If any were curious, PS3 used to support linux: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sony-Linux-PS3-Firmware-Update,10007.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sony-Linux-PS3-Firmware-Upd...
NegativeLatency 10y ago
I think the current generation is more in line with compute costs to the point that this wouldn't make too much sense
djsumdog 10y ago
The PS3 was a Cell processor, a new architecture promoted by Sony/IBM .. Toshiba? I think? PS4s just have a regular old AMD x86/64 chip in them ... plus all that other garbage he described in the talk. With all the hacks it takes to get Linux to even boot, I'm pretty sure it's not worth the cost compared to just buying a real x86/64 PC based server.
- kobeya 10y ago
  Except a "real" PC based server has 4x the cost.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Equivalent hardware doesn't cost 4x apples and oranges
michaelmrose 10y ago
Which current generation console was sold at less than cost? Is there any reason to expect next generation consoles to do so?

johncolanduoni 10y ago

What exactly is it that will distinguish this new open console from a PC? Unless there's a big difference, your platform is going to have the same drawbacks for game developers that a PC has (vastly easier piracy) without the advantages (many people already own one). Similarly users will lose out on the ability to run their normal programs on the same hardware, for the privilege of having access to less games.

Fargren 10y ago
The main advantage of developing for consoles is targeting exactly one hardware configuration. I don't think that's lost if the specs for the console are public.

gambiting 10y ago

If the PSP is any indication, it would do extremely poorly. Console sales were above 80 million, but any single title struggled to sell significant numbers, and it is widely believed that it was due to piracy(my personal view is that it's 100% piracy - when I was growing up I knew 7-8 people with PSPs and not a single one of them had one genuine game).

prodmerc 10y ago

> when we do not do the same to the personal computer Try installing Windows 7 or Linux on a newer HP laptop with UEFI. Those pricks also encrypt their BIOSes, make them non-downgradeable, and disable features for no real reason (locking RAM speed to 1333 MHz on Sandy Bridge comes to mind).

runn1ng 10y ago

OUYA tried to do an open console. It didn't work out well for them. It's true that it might have been due to other issues, but right now, the console industry have a very public, well covered by the press console, that has tried to be open from the start and that failed in a spectacular manner and is now a joke.

striking 10y ago
OUYA was mismanaged from the outset. Here's a great video that illustrates each mistake they made, point by point, as a supercut of other people's videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTqhyHuKVKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTqhyHuKVKA Open consoles aren't doomed just because they're open. OUYA was just a super underpowered system bundled with a crappy homebrewed controller. They could have made a tiny Android board bundled with a PS4 controller. They could've shipped it in a no-frills box. They could've used some of that Kickstarter money to start a development fund, to help kickstart games on their console. Instead, you get a crappy controller in a fancy box, and there are basically no interesting games you can play with your new device.

micheljones 10y ago

The main issues that drive hacking are 1) running homebrew/reusing hardware and 2) region free games. Manufacturers who enable both in some form see less hacking done on their consoles. Of course, hacking with piracy as the main goal always gets done, but at a much slower rate. Also, these days the 'reusing hardware' part is not as important as it used to be. It used to be a big deal to repurpose a cheapo device for some other function because it was the only way to do it for cheap. However, these days everyone has access to very cheap and quite open platforms in both portable (Android cellphones) and home (Raspberry Pi) format. So the main angle for homebrew functions these days seem to be adding multimedia/internet functionality to devices that have those limited in some way. One example is that everyone wants Kodi on their consoles for ease of use, so much that people resort to plugging ARM HDMI sticks that run Kodi into their XboxONE's hdmi-in port for ease of switching into the media player app. So, all a producer needs to do to significantly lower the number of people motivated to hack their console is 1) have Kodi installed on it 2) have a decent browser installed on it 3) not needlessly inconvenience people who want to play a game from a different country 4) have some way of running simple homebrew in sandboxed environment.