Sony gets in bed with its enemies

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s irony for you.

Shortly after the Sony PSP launched, industrious hackers started figuring out how to run homebrew apps on it. From then until now, Sony kept patching the firmware to lock out the homebrewers, and the hackers kept working around the patches. Sony’s message was clear, if ineffectual: thou shalt not homebrew.

Today, the Playstation Blog breathlessly announces that No Gravity: The Plague of Mind will be coming to the PSN tomorrow. In a very ernest attempt to part us from our dollars, the blog says, without a hint of hypocrisy, [No Gravity] hit the headlines for the first time in 2007 as a “homebrew” game for the PSP. It was acclaimed as a game that “puts tons of retail games to shame with its incredible polish.”

So apparently homebrew is evil and vile… unless suddenly Sony has a chance to make a buck off it.

5 thoughts on “Sony gets in bed with its enemies”

  1. That’s Sony in a nutshell, that last sentence. 😉

    I’m not an SOE hater (or Sony hater) in particular, but if it waddles & quacks…

  2. Situational ethics are the order of the day for most big companies (and banks lately). Even though it makes me sick to think about it, its the way things are so there isn’t much point in crying about it. I’m glad Xbox seems to allow homebrew stuff. WiiWare certainly doesn’t entirely allow it, you have to have an actual office for at latt 6 months for them to accept a game from you, which is ridiculous. Two guys renting an office doesn’t make a game any better, it just makes it more expensive for them to make it. Anyways, I’m with you on this one.

  4. I’ve moved beyond treating these huge corporations as unified entities. I found this particular behavior absurdly ironic (I love Thallian’s “situational ethics” phrase) but in general I really enjoy Sony’s hardware (own a PS3, PSP, and a Sony receiver) and games (EQ2). I don’t like, one bit, Sony music’s ‘rootkit’ fiasco even though I was never bitten by it.

    I’m actually a little annoyed with myself for coming across, apparently, as a Sony hater. A further irony is that I’ve gotten into huge flamewars on my other site defending Sony. 🙂

  5. Hah, you’re more sensitive than *I* am and that’s saying something. Just because I mentioned Sony-hate in a comment doesn’t mean I meant you. 😉 What I meant to convey was that there’s a lot of Sony-hate around. I was part of the SWG-NGE fiasco, so I know first-hand about SOE-hate. (Heck, ask Angela — there was a fair amount of SOE hate spewed when they opened the first whatchamacallit (RMT) EQ2 server — Exchange? Something like that.) I was also being a little pre-emptively defensive, since any kind of praise gets labelled fanboi and any kind of critique gets labelled hate, these days; we do like our neat little boxes (all made out of ticky-tacky).

    And yes, these corporations are far too large to be considered as single coherent ethical entities these days, especially when predicting behaviour. They’re more like tenticular monstrosities.

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