News Sony: "You can always bittorent PSP games"

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/07/31/sony-you-can-always-bittorent/1

David Reeves, SCEE boss, has taken it upon himself to remind PAL gamers that they can always pirate games if there are too many delays.

 

ordered phantom hourglass for DS once. postal strike meant epic delay in arrival so i downloaded it to my piracy card and played it that way. sorted.

 

*Waits for hasty about face or "I was quoted incorrectly" press conference*

...

But let me take this opportunity to say that worldwide simultaneous release would NOT be a bad thing, and would probably go a long way to curbing 'casual' piracy. Because it's ridiculous that PAL territories can torrent something days, weeks and sometimes even months before they even have the option of buying it legally.

 

if i owned a psp I'd def pirate, i'm not paying 20quid for freaking tetris etc how ever I would pay 20quid for tekken

 

I remember when i bought animal crossing from america for teh gamecube. how long did that take to come out in the uk after america. i think it was something like a year or more

 

"Your honour, my client was told he could download these games by Sony."

I don't see that being a viable legal defence :B

 

What does PAL have to do with PSP/PS3 games? PAL is a video standard used in some areas of the world, and in the bad old days of analogue display outputs etc., you'd have to port games designed for US/Jap consoles (which output NTSC at 480i resolution) to make them work on e.g. UK consoles (which output PAL at 576i resolution). PS3 will happily scale its output to whatever display you have (anything from 480i to 1080p) and is effectively agnostic as to the whole NTSC/PAL thing, as evidenced by the fact that you can happily plop a US PS3 game in a UK console and it will just work.

PAL is even more irrelevant to PSP, which uses its own internal screen and is the same resolution the world over. So what does this guy mean by "we are in a PAL market and we are going to do it in PAL and we are going to do [localisation] properly"? I get the bit about localisation (though the coding required to change "color" to "colour" to "localise" a US game to UK English can't be that onerous), but PAL? Talk about muddying the waters.

 

PAL has just become a term to refer to european territories these days. its just stuck, as part of the localisation process with older games was actually converting for PAL, which was occasionally fairly challenging.

 

Don't forget NTSC runs at 60Hz, whilst PAL runs at 50Hz.. (although every TV now supports both 50 and 60Hz, So this detail is obsolete..)

.. I'll shut up now.

 

I downloaded Crisis Core once I heard how long it was going to take for the UK release.
Didn't think it was that good gameplay wise anyway.

 

Wonder if he'll write a guide on how to do it as well if we ask nicely?

PAL on the PS3 is merely annoying. My friends PS3 plays all new games fine, but annoyingly won't play any of our PS2 games since he got it from the US. PAL now is just an excuse to charge UK (and the rest of europe perhaps?) 40% more than the rest of the world.

 

exactly. see? now if you could have bought it, you might have done so. that is couple bucks they lost..now take the cost of that game you didn't buy, because you found out you didn't like it, and multiply that by however many other people might have done that. (i don't know what the populace is like down there) then add in the people that just don't want to wait, download, then never buy because they have it already. now, look at all the money these companies are screwing themselves out of for each game, just because they either: a. release it early in the US, or b: wait to release in the PAL areas.

simultaneous release worldwide, will bring more money, less piracy, end result better games.

 

And how, exactly, did you come to this ludicrous conclusion?

 

I have about 73 PSP game backups.

 

Localization is a b**** from a development standpoint, but there's no reason for them not to hand over the strings to their international distributors before release. They're shooting themselves in the foot in order to keep the games more secret.

 

I refuse to believe its piracy to start with since you cant buy it legally, so no damage done. (I dont even have a psp, so noone should jump to any assumption about me being a pirate).

less piracy = more money to develop better games.

 

I just wish I could understand what takes so long for EU/UK to get games that the US has had for weeks/months......

What is involved in "localizing" a game?

 

depends on the country, either they have to translate or not, they have to test it again to see if the translation is any good, then there is the censoring for certain countries (germany for example), there will most likely be a different marketing department for each country, so the artwork on the box will need to be redone as well as all marketing material, then it will need to get approved by whatever rating system the country has, they have to set up the contracts with the retailers for the good shelf positions (yes, game companies pay shops for placing games in good visible spots).
On top of all that then come the strategic release dates, not all games are released everywhere, so it might be that game a gets delayed so game b gets higher profits and then game a is released later.

 

Ok. But what about PSN games?

 

What is sad is that I am a big square fan. I have an impressive collection of square games for the snes and PS1 - including original US snes versions of Chrono Trigger and FFII (IV), but sinice the PS2 I feel that the quality has not been the same on all their titles - i'm not saying that they are all bad, just the number of titles that I find are good is not as many as it was on the snes and ps1.