[zed]

Originally Posted by JasonLD

I just want Sony to release Vita phone.

It doesnt even need that, it just needs txt'ing ability
I predicted the vita was not going to do well if it didnt have the ability to send txt's (voice calling is not important)

[Brad Grenz]

Just give me a google voice app. That's how I do all my texting anyway.

[Arwin]

Apparently you may be able to get PSM on some other Android devices if you've rooted them:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/10...rooted-device/

[owen]

I'd only build something for this if Sony contacted me personally. Otherwise it seems to be just another "lets poop out a .NET 3 evironment and make them code around it until we shelve it from something better in 2 years". FTS. Its the same thing that happened back in the day when all the companies where making stupid Eclipse plugins as IDEs for devs to work on while they collect the money off the "ecosystem".

[Arwin]

Eh ... I'm pretty sure this nothing like Sony has ever done before.

Anyway, seems more people give similar reasons for PSM to be attractive for devs: http://www.psnstores.com/2012/10/pla...terview-panic/

[Bigduo209]

I'd say the biggest problem with The Vita is it's price, along with it's proprietary hardware and overall user experience.

I know the PSP the was pirated back and forth, but it went that far because Sony never supported the system the way it should've done from day one. Sony was late as hell when establishing PSN on the device, and there was little focus on integrating the PSP into the service. The comics reader was a good example of that, it was cool little service but a "too little, too late" type of deal when it all was said and done. People who hacked the PSP managed to get more out of the device well before Sony did with their firmware updates. The hacking community brought youtube to the PSP, downloadable/digital/free/backed-up games, an app store approach before the iPhone, etc. I don't say this as someone who hacked his PSP, but I say this as someone who saw what they were doing and wondered why Sony couldn't do similar things for it.

I'd say Sony targeting a more tech-savvy crowd for the PSP and Vita shows a flaw in choosing it's demographic in the first place, focusing on a crowd of people who want the latest and greatest is a fleeting investment if all that crowd wants is the newest smartphones/tablets/gadgets on the market. It's roughly the same market who actively follows any exploits, cracks, or other circumvention techniques.

Sony only started putting back the focus on the PSP well after it was hacked, and couldn't build up a legal user-base because of a lack of incentives over the illegal alternatives. The truth is the Vita can beat out piracy if...


1. Sony can find creative ways to leverage PSN and it's services. Cross Play, Cross Buy, and PS Plus are great examples (provided third-parties buy into these things).

2. More gaming content showing up on the Vita. It's an obvious one and PSM helps bring wide variety of content if enough devs hops on-board. And yes Sony needs to consistently update PSM for devs to help make it successful.

3. Less focus on the anti-piracy stuff (the content manager, no account switching), more focus on improving the overall experience. Continue to create an experience worth buying into, and keep trying to attract a wider audience who want the Vita in the first place. The anti-piracy measures shouldn't need to get in the way, and the barrier to entry doesn't have to be so high with the Vita and the expensive Vita-only memory cards.


The iOS devices have been jailbreaked like crazy, but the tech-savvy are the only ones who care. The majority of normal users will continue to be invested into the iTunes ecosystem, not really know much about jailbreaking, and wouldn't risk hacking their device for the fear of losing their iTunes account they've sunk money into. If Sony wants to see success, they've got to have that kind business-sense in mind. The success of the Xbox 360 and Apple devices proves that in spades.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Bigduo209

The iOS devices have been jailbreaked like crazy, but the tech-savvy are the only ones who care. The majority of normal users will continue to be invested into the iTunes ecosystem, not really know much about jailbreaking, and wouldn't risk hacking their device for the fear of losing their iTunes account they've sunk money into. If Sony wants to see success, they've got to have that kind business-sense in mind. The success of the Xbox 360 and Apple devices proves that in spades.

I agree with the rest of your stuff, but the thing is that Apple has nothing to lose with iPhone/iPad CFWs/jailbreaks. The whole business model of the PSP/VITA/PS3 is to SELL games.

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by tuna

I agree with the rest of your stuff, but the thing is that Apple has nothing to lose with iPhone/iPad CFWs/jailbreaks. The whole business model of the PSP/VITA/PS3 is to SELL games.

The operating costs of the App Store (management staff, designers, developers, bandwidth and storage) have to be earned back though. It actually took quite a while for even that to happen (though now I understand they make quite a buck there too). If everything would be pirated, then they'd lose a lot of money on it. Obviously though, a lot of users don't bother with piracy on the platform nearly as much as on Android.

[Brad Grenz]

They'd lose potential profits, but Apple makes the vast majority of their profit from the huge margins on hardware. If they never made a dime on apps they would still be enormously successful.

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by Brad Grenz

They'd lose potential profits, but Apple makes the vast majority of their profit from the huge margins on hardware. If they never made a dime on apps they would still be enormously successful.

Yes, but no need to have that eaten into by losses on the operating costs of the App Store. These are not small!

[owen]

If you own the platform and the app store that you use to sell products on your own device I think having operating costs is a part of the deal - otherwise why would you make a app store in the first place? why not just let somebody else run the servers? Clearly if you are burning tons of money on servers then that should mean people are using your hardware. You should not need to burden developers.

From the apple side; http://nottheinternet.com/blog/depre...the-app-store/

[Gitaroo]

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/...to-bring-risky

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/...4316/ps-mobile

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Gitaroo

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/...to-bring-risky

If PS3 ran PSM, then sure. Otherwise, creating a niche title for a niche market is asking for poor returns on investment. Unless Sony are offering to fund development, which isn't made clear in that article.

[Arwin]

I think this is partly just Sony positioning the place of PSM in the whole context of their publication channels:

- retail release (also always day 1 digital)
- digital native release
- digital PSM release

Right now they'll be telling indy developers that they're work will be suitable for PSM if considered a 'risky' release where you don't want to invest too much dev wise but still want to benefit from some Sony marketing.

They will still also occasionally pick an Indy developer for their Indy Pub fund I imagine, where they'll support them with additional marketing and more importantly, developer resources.

[Shifty Geezer]

I guess there'll be cases of a Steam title or somesuch that's too risque for iOS or Play but which could be ported to PSM. Good luck to Sony if they hope to grow their PSM business to a mainstream moneymaker on artistic merit though. How many art-house cinema's are booming cash-cows thanks to their artistic integrity?

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

I guess there'll be cases of a Steam title or somesuch that's too risque for iOS or Play but which could be ported to PSM. Good luck to Sony if they hope to grow their PSM business to a mainstream moneymaker on artistic merit though. How many art-house cinema's are booming cash-cows thanks to their artistic integrity?

I assume Sony would point to something like Journey being one of their most successful PSN titles.

Anyway, obviously it's just one approach they're taking to indy developers, and risky here also just means that it's a low-cost investment. This can also be for a massage game such as is found on the Japanese store, that has little artistic pretention, and is risky in a more down to earth manner.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Arwin

I assume Sony would point to something like Journey being one of their most successful PSN titles.

On PS3 with 60+ million devices. Taking a gamble on a potentially low-interest title can be offset be selling to such a large audience that the 0.001% who buy it is still a significant number of sales. If your market is only a few million, you need a decent sized adoption which warrants a more mainstream title.

Anyway, obviously it's just one approach they're taking to indy developers...

Surely the very best thing they can do for the platform is make it compatible with PS3. Even just saying they are intending that would make the platform far more appealing. I don't understand why they aren't doing this. It's the singular most important and effective move they could make to establish PSM in one fell swoop. As ever, I'm scratching my head over Sony's policies.

[Arwin]

We discussed this quite early on on the Beta forums. Currently, the very base requirement for a PSM title, is that it has a touch-screen. Buttons and sticks are optional, and PSM provides developer as well as user customiseable touch-screen replacements for them by default, where the developers basically don't have to worry about it no matter what supported platform PSM is running on.

When you start to support the PS3 as well, you'll suddenly basically have to require games to support buttons and sticks 'only' in order to make games that run on all platforms. This is not great. Also, there's a huge display size disconnect between Vita and Android phones and full size TVs. I did suggest that perhaps you could go a ways when you do cover PS3 + Move, as then you can provide touch screen interfaces with a Move cursor and support various tilting stuff, and that way you can still do quite a lot of things automatically, but unless you start doing dual-move stuff, you'll still exclude multi-touch and such.

Apart from the PS3 being memory limiting as well (split memory pool and even when combined, it's less than the Vita has - 256/256 for PS3 vs 512/128 for Vita), this would basically mean that you should be able to write apps that target either Vita and Mobile, or Vita and PS3, etc. And of course they'd have to rebrand PSM as well. (where the M is for Mobile)

So overall, for now I think they're better off the way they're doing it at the moment. If they pull it off well enough and it has gotten enough momentum, they can consider doing something similar that targets Vita + PS3, or perhaps the Playstation 4 will solve these issues by having a default input method available that aligns better.

[ERP]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

On PS3 with 60+ million devices. Taking a gamble on a potentially low-interest title can be offset be selling to such a large audience that the 0.001% who buy it is still a significant number of sales. If your market is only a few million, you need a decent sized adoption which warrants a more mainstream title.

I'm not talking specifically about Journey here, but while what you state is nice in theory, the numbers I've seen imply that the majority of these esoteric "indy" titles don't offset the costs in sales even with a 60M user base.
Some of this is because online game sales are still a really tiny portion of total sales in the console space.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Arwin

...
So overall, for now I think they're better off the way they're doing it at the moment. If they pull it off well enough and it has gotten enough momentum, they can consider doing something similar that targets Vita + PS3, or perhaps the Playstation 4 will solve these issues by having a default input method available that aligns better.

Fair points, but I think that just shows Sony haven't thought it through. MS's solution is games and apps that play on all your Windows devices. All it needs is a dual control schema, or an opt-out for certain platforms, or even a requirement for joystick+2 buttons minimal with a default on-screen control interface for touchscreens. Treating mobile devices as separate is missing the trick, and when Joe Consumer can buy Windows apps that play on all MS devices, or Android apps that run on their Android TVs and phones and GoogleBox, discrete PSN and PSM titles will be an archaic inconvenience. If Sony are going to support cross-device applications then they should be starting from that. They should have a clear vision how to support touch-screens and controllers and mouse inputs, UI guidelines, and be promoting cross-device design and development, to offer a significant differentiator to propel the platform forwards.

Any word on the HTC and ASUS device integration? the WikiPad is out soon, but I doubt it'll do too well.

[Gitaroo]

http://www.xperiablog.net/2012/10/16...inancial-year/

Assuming that they are all PS certified, and if they do sell that much by then than thats already 50 millions users in a year. No comparison to the entire android userbase by any mean but if that thing takes off and become successful, other companies will want to look into supporting it. PS3 would be tricky one some rumors say using move to substitute the touch screen.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Fair points, but I think that just shows Sony haven't thought it through. MS's solution is games and apps that play on all your Windows devices. All it needs is a dual control schema, or an opt-out for certain platforms, or even a requirement for joystick+2 buttons minimal with a default on-screen control interface for touchscreens. Treating mobile devices as separate is missing the trick, and when Joe Consumer can buy Windows apps that play on all MS devices, or Android apps that run on their Android TVs and phones and GoogleBox, discrete PSN and PSM titles will be an archaic inconvenience. If Sony are going to support cross-device applications then they should be starting from that. They should have a clear vision how to support touch-screens and controllers and mouse inputs, UI guidelines, and be promoting cross-device design and development, to offer a significant differentiator to propel the platform forwards.

Any word on the HTC and ASUS device integration? the WikiPad is out soon, but I doubt it'll do too well.

How do you control the touch-screen based apps on google tv?

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by tuna

How do you control the touch-screen based apps on google tv?

Dunno. Could well be those apps aren't listed as compatible with Google TVs if they're not. That's how Play works, and that'd be suitable for PSM at a pinch if they can't come up with something more sophisticated. The main objective should be to get devs to move away from Android SDK and Win SDK and Mono and iOS SDK and onto PSM SDK, even if not creating mobile apps per se. If PSM was available on PS3, you'd get people creating 'minis' and PSN titles for PS3 and then porting to mobile, and vice versa like Plants vs Zombies. That'd eliminate a wall to starting into PSM development.

[Arwin]

Shifty, this one might warm your heart

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2012/...ek/#more-96235

Alien Breed features:
Classic Mode – Play using the original graphics, music and controls
Enhanced Mode – Featuring enhanced graphics, audio and controls
8 new levels – entirely new levels that intersect with the original Alien Breed story
6 original Alien Breed levels
12 Alien Breed Special Edition levels

Hope there will be more things like this in the future.

[Shifty Geezer]

It did indeed. Would be great to see more Amiga games on devices. I saw Bitmap Brother's Z on Android and am very interested. As I have no device that can play PSM games at the moment though, I'm not terribly excited.