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Imagine the PlayStation was able to be used to mine crypto. Game developers depend on gamers to actually play their games, what would you have Sony do? Encourag

by m3kw9 6y ago

Imagine the PlayStation was able to be used to mine crypto. Game developers depend on gamers to actually play their games, what would you have Sony do? Encourage it or do nothing? Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it.

anothernewdude 6y ago
They literally did that with the PS3 for clusters (though not for crypto mining) and shut down the ability to do it.
- robert_foss 6y ago
  And were sued for doing so. Removing functionality from an existing product is not acceptable.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    which is why they've announced this limitation before the 3060's release
- bretpiatt 6y ago
  To my knowledge they didn't shut it down, PS4 architecture moved to standard x86 PC so no longer advanced vector units available through PlayStation that you couldn't get separately in an easier to work with way. This led to the rise of the current Top 500 which are a mix of CPU and GPU.
  - rincebrain 6y ago
    No, they famously shut down the ability to use PS3s for this and got sued for it.[1] Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
gruez 6y ago
>Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it. It's not really the same because playstations are sold at break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the same as a sale to gamer.
- johnday 6y ago
  This may look true from the perspective of a single sale, but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing that valuable market position.
  - gruez 6y ago
    This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums, but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer practices over the years.
    - j1dopeman 6y ago
      I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc gaming completely or never getting into it in the first place. A market that has and should be growing will shrink instead.
      - Filligree 6y ago
        This is already happening. I have friends who would, in other circumstances, be building gaming PCs right now, so we could play games together, but– It's simply not possible.
    - comex 6y ago
LMYahooTFY 6y ago
This example makes no sense to me. I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place. You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed. I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos. This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.
sandworm101 6y ago
They are obligated to shareholders. But i am not a shareholder. I am a gamer who wants to buy a new graphics card. So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a little closer to those of thier consumers. Free speech is a necessary part of a free market. Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Why is Free Speech necessary to a Free Market? I thought a consumer choosing to spend their dollars was the "speech" in a Free Market environment. And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm" "Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the point of buying some. So it is only fair game.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Free speech is also product review, such as LTTs recent video on this subject. Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to kill secondary markets.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      > Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. "Regulation" in the old sense of "making regular", perhaps. Establishing fair weights and measures, preventing fraud, etc. Ensuring that individuals are free to trade and that all transactions are in fact voluntary (including, most importantly, transactions with the government itself). But when your "regulation" consists of applying force to micromanage how people—shareholders in this case—employ their capital for the benefit of some other group, you've moved well outside the realm of the free market.
dylan604 6y ago
"See, the truth is, they can do whatever they want with them. They bought them motherf**ers." Eazy-E
bretpiatt 6y ago
"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world."* Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them. * https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe... Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer
- derefr 6y ago
  Sure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market will bear (and they generate only negative press coverage on top.)
- friedman23 6y ago
  Sony disabled this functionality later on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
RyEgswuCsn 6y ago
One alternative could be for Sony to launch a new line of PS that is optimised for crypto mining but way less cost-effective for gaming.
- jbay808 6y ago
  They'd be competing for the same production resources.
windexh8er 6y ago
Not trying to pick on your comment but I'm always frustrated when someone points out "obligations to shareholders". I wish people would push back on this more. Sony's obligation when building and selling the PlayStation is to the end user customer. Not the shareholder. Because if Sony has only the shareholder in mind then a gaming console is probably the wrong market to be in from a pure profit perspective. Sony's obligation is to the gamer who wants a competitive, performant console. If they put out a next-gen console that has no games to play nobody will buy it and end up with no profits. Organizations have it backwards if they think they should be catering to their shareholders. Shareholders expectations should be that Sony has expertise in the field of consoles and I'm investing in Sony with the understanding that I want to invest in that. When I buy Sony stock I don't think Sony has bringing me a few more points in profits first over doing the right thing and building the best product for the end user. I hope that my investing in them allows them to better continue to innovate and bring compelling products to the market. Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have different motives than that of delighting the customer. Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic way to purport value. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
- kergonath 6y ago
  Thanks. There should be such a comment every time someone mentions “but they have to maximise profit” and “think of the shareholder”. This point of view is not rooted in any law or legal principle and is just the Wall Street version of “might makes right”.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    Of course it is rooted in law, natural law. Imagine a company makes a decent profit and then decides its goal is not to make so much profit anymore? What do you think would happen? I would vouch for Parkinsons Law kicking in instantly. This would just end up in a waste of resources and misery overall
josefx 6y ago
At least some consoles are sold at a loss to keep the entry cost within an acceptable range and expect to recoup that from game sales. One PlayStation generation came with a somewhat crippled other OS feature. By the time Sony killed the feature people already build quite a few PlayStation powered compute clusters.

by m3kw9 6y ago

anothernewdude 6y ago

They literally did that with the PS3 for clusters (though not for crypto mining) and shut down the ability to do it.

robert_foss 6y ago
And were sued for doing so. Removing functionality from an existing product is not acceptable.
- michaelt 6y ago
  which is why they've announced this limitation before the 3060's release
bretpiatt 6y ago
To my knowledge they didn't shut it down, PS4 architecture moved to standard x86 PC so no longer advanced vector units available through PlayStation that you couldn't get separately in an easier to work with way. This led to the rise of the current Top 500 which are a mix of CPU and GPU.
- rincebrain 6y ago
  No, they famously shut down the ability to use PS3s for this and got sued for it.[1] Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

gruez 6y ago

>Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it. It's not really the same because playstations are sold at break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the same as a sale to gamer.

johnday 6y ago
This may look true from the perspective of a single sale, but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing that valuable market position.
- gruez 6y ago
  This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums, but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer practices over the years.
  - j1dopeman 6y ago
    I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc gaming completely or never getting into it in the first place. A market that has and should be growing will shrink instead.
    - Filligree 6y ago
      This is already happening. I have friends who would, in other circumstances, be building gaming PCs right now, so we could play games together, but– It's simply not possible.
  - comex 6y ago

LMYahooTFY 6y ago

This example makes no sense to me. I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place. You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed. I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos. This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.

sandworm101 6y ago

They are obligated to shareholders. But i am not a shareholder. I am a gamer who wants to buy a new graphics card. So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a little closer to those of thier consumers. Free speech is a necessary part of a free market. Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Why is Free Speech necessary to a Free Market? I thought a consumer choosing to spend their dollars was the "speech" in a Free Market environment. And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"And when you lobby the government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market paradigm" "Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the point of buying some. So it is only fair game.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Free speech is also product review, such as LTTs recent video on this subject. Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to kill secondary markets.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    > Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. "Regulation" in the old sense of "making regular", perhaps. Establishing fair weights and measures, preventing fraud, etc. Ensuring that individuals are free to trade and that all transactions are in fact voluntary (including, most importantly, transactions with the government itself). But when your "regulation" consists of applying force to micromanage how people—shareholders in this case—employ their capital for the benefit of some other group, you've moved well outside the realm of the free market.

dylan604 6y ago

"See, the truth is, they can do whatever they want with them. They bought them motherf**ers." Eazy-E

bretpiatt 6y ago

"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world."* Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them. * https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe... Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer

derefr 6y ago
Sure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market will bear (and they generate only negative press coverage on top.)
friedman23 6y ago
Sony disabled this functionality later on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

RyEgswuCsn 6y ago

One alternative could be for Sony to launch a new line of PS that is optimised for crypto mining but way less cost-effective for gaming.

jbay808 6y ago
They'd be competing for the same production resources.

windexh8er 6y ago

Not trying to pick on your comment but I'm always frustrated when someone points out "obligations to shareholders". I wish people would push back on this more. Sony's obligation when building and selling the PlayStation is to the end user customer. Not the shareholder. Because if Sony has only the shareholder in mind then a gaming console is probably the wrong market to be in from a pure profit perspective. Sony's obligation is to the gamer who wants a competitive, performant console. If they put out a next-gen console that has no games to play nobody will buy it and end up with no profits. Organizations have it backwards if they think they should be catering to their shareholders. Shareholders expectations should be that Sony has expertise in the field of consoles and I'm investing in Sony with the understanding that I want to invest in that. When I buy Sony stock I don't think Sony has bringing me a few more points in profits first over doing the right thing and building the best product for the end user. I hope that my investing in them allows them to better continue to innovate and bring compelling products to the market. Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have different motives than that of delighting the customer. Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic way to purport value. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

kergonath 6y ago
Thanks. There should be such a comment every time someone mentions “but they have to maximise profit” and “think of the shareholder”. This point of view is not rooted in any law or legal principle and is just the Wall Street version of “might makes right”.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  Of course it is rooted in law, natural law. Imagine a company makes a decent profit and then decides its goal is not to make so much profit anymore? What do you think would happen? I would vouch for Parkinsons Law kicking in instantly. This would just end up in a waste of resources and misery overall

josefx 6y ago

At least some consoles are sold at a loss to keep the entry cost within an acceptable range and expect to recoup that from game sales. One PlayStation generation came with a somewhat crippled other OS feature. By the time Sony killed the feature people already build quite a few PlayStation powered compute clusters.