Yeah Vita at $249 looked like a good deal next to 3ds which was also at $249 until 3ds massively slashed their prices. Vita probably should have gotten rid of the back touch and oled. I doubt it would have made that big of a difference in the long run since there are a lot of people who will not buy a handheld not made by Nintendo.
Did Sony tout the proprietary memory cards as an anti-piracy measure?
Vita had a massive software attachment rate. Sony definitely made money on every Vita sold even ignoring memory cards. Don't think for a second Sony didn't know that card prices were holding back many consumers from buying the hardware, and also vita owners from buying games. You can bet they'd have lowered the card prices if they could. Notice also how the very expensive 64GB cards were never sold outside Japan. Why leave all that profit on the table? If you consider the poor sales of the Vita, you should be able to understand how the low volumes of custom memory cards would have impacted individual costs. I'm sure Sony were expecting sales volumes closer to PSP, but they never got there.
A lot of hacks are tricky at first, taking sometimes years to get to an easy to use state, but once they're found, they never go away.
But if you think about it - those cards were obviously not an attempt at bleeding edge.
Nah, they wouldnt have bothered pouring more resources into the Vita and making the slim version in the first place if they wanted the Vita to fail. But going for Micro SD card wouldnt have saved the Vita either way. Maybe it would have sold a bit more units, but the problems were bigger than that. Price and game selection being the biggest factors.
Physical game saves work as you'd expect them to.
What does it have to do with piracy? Psp also had proprietary memory card.
Memory Sticks were Sony's version of SD card. PCs and many other devices had interfaces to directly plug them in and directly manipulate files.
It might seem pedantic, but they never once released a fixed version of a PSP game on Vita, the games were removed until the Vita firmware was updated with a routine to check that certain game's save and/or patching the PSP kernel exploits that were being used.
Yeah, you're right - I remember now. Still, removing legitimate PSP software because it could be used to exploit Vita's emulator to run unauthorized code - still locked within the PSP Emulator shell shows how active they were in protecting the Vita - even when they weren't making big games for it anymore.
You could put files onto the Vita through the content manager - but not freely. It was far from the PSP situation where the launch firmware would run anything you put in the GAME folder. Games could be backed up and restored - and obviously that's going to be controlled through encryption.
Anti-piracy measures, particularly ones that bump up costs, are NOT great PR talking points. Sony have no reason to mention this publicly.
PSP used a card that was used in more than just the PSP. It was used in cameras and other devices. It was what helped hackers break the system so Sony locked it down with a card that only works in the Vita.
??? no
No, what helped hackers was Sony completely forgot to enable DRM/check if software was digitally signed or not in the original 1.0 firmware released in Japan. It literally gave people the ability to install software right out of the gate. Then when they released it stateside, the 1.50 firmware's protection was active, but so badly implemented that all it took was having 2 folders with the same name to by-pass the check. No matter what proprietary format they had used the issue would have been the same since Sony allowed you to transfer data to it.
This is also incorrect. The battery ('pandora battery' not really the battery, but semantics) hack on the original PSPs let you put the PSP into service mode, which let you get around the protections of the system, but that didn't come till much later.
Yeah, Sony fucked the PSP themselves. But how did people get unsigned code onto the device? By just plugging the card into any old card reader.
You are right. Pandora came later but the memory card format used had nothing to do with psp getting hacked
What a bomb of a syntax.
Whoops. Think I started typing before quote got inserted... Fixed now.
To be fair, Sony avoided external storage support while other companies got on board, instead opting to have replaceable drives that are encrypted.
