Why piracy on firmware 3.60 won’t kill the PS Vita
Since the release of PS Vita game piracy tool Vitamin, I’ve seen growing discussions about piracy and how it will impact the future of the PS Vita. Spoiler alert: it won’t.
People on discussion boards easily surface examples of devices that were completely destroyed by piracy. The Sega Dreamcast is probably the most popular example: piracy is often used as one of the main reasons to explain the console’s ultimate demise. People also often mention the PSP as a device that was largely hit by piracy. Of course, piracy’s never the only reason a console performs poorly on the market. The NDS, PSP’s competitor, did great for many years despite its games being extremely easy to pirate with plug and play flashcarts.
I could of course mention how the PS Vita was dead long before piracy surfaced on it. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Today, I want to talk about cold, hard numbers, and how companies like Sony protect themselves against piracy much more efficiently than they used to.
It all boils down to the firmware updates, the added value of not pirating, and the potential number of people who can access the HENkaku hack (and therefore, play game “backups”) today.
Recently Yifanlu explained that there are about 100’000 HENkaku users since the hack launched. After discussing the source of this number with him, I understand the number to be pretty accurate. It doesn’t give us the whole picture, but we get a good idea of the scale. This number is massive, compared for example to Rejuvenate, which had (again according to Yifanlu) about 10’000 users.
Let’s assume for a minute that all these 100’000 users pirate games. Let’s even go crazy and imagine that this number grew to 150’000 since Yifanlu last announced the numbers.
Now lets compare this to the number of PS Vita owners: There’s no recent official numbers, but a quick look at Wikipedia shows us that we’re probably well above 6 million PS Vita sold by now (4 million by January 2013, plus about 2 million sold in Japan alone between 2013 and 2014). IGN say the number was 10 million by 2014.
Our 150’000 pirates represent 1.5% of the PS Vita user base. It’s not a completely insignificant number, but it’s not something that’s going to impact Sony’s bottom line or game developers sales. Would you be *** of if your salary went down 1.5%? Probably. But would you quit your job if that happened?
So the discussions about Vita Piracy, or Vitamin killing the PS Vita, and “independent developers” stopping support for the PS Vita are just from people who make lots of assumptions without even looking at actual numbers.
Additionally, it’s unlikely the number of HENkaku users is going to grow much further. Sony have patched the exploit in firmware 3.61. Many people will update their console before learning about the 3.60 hack, and even for those who know about the hack, there is a strong difference from the PSP days: nowadays, it matters a lot to be on the latest firmware to get the full experience.
In the new generation of consoles, Sony have made a successful transition to a system where having full access to the PSN services (and as such, being on the latest firmware and playing by the rules – yes, we can access the PSN with HENkaku now, but doing so is risky) is a requirement to get the full Playstation Vita experience. How many gamers will get tired of the possibility to pirate, and instead upgrade their system to get back to the full online experience?
I’m seeing these discussions happening already. As I said in a former article, piracy makes less sense nowadays than it did before, because the “legit” experience offers much more than a game: online access, updates, trophies, free PS+ games, social media… Sony has converted the gaming experience into a service that encompasses much more, making the value of piracy much less attractive to a significant amount of gamers.
Don’t get me wrong: people who want free games will pirate. Some of them will get a 3.60 PS Vita to get the best of both worlds. But at the end of the day, what matters is that Sony now has a good way of mitigating the risk of piracy because online access to the PSN is not only a requirement, it’s also a huge share of the experience. As such, the risk for them of piracy numbers growing exponentially is extremely limited, and today stands at less than 2.5% of the user base.
first?
no
yes
But then, there is ‘negative infinity-th’
not really no
Hey Wololo mods, can’t you ban people for making stupid “first” comments?
It’s disruptive and childish.
Hey Wololo mods, can’t you ban people for making stupid “ban this guy because I don’t like him” comments? It’s disruptive and childish.
Can you both just ***? >.>
Hey Wololo mods, can’t you ban people for making stupid “ban this guy because I don’t like him" comments? It’s disruptive and childish.
Great article, but online experience on PS VITA its far from a good choice (remove facebook, remove this, remove that)
The vita was already dead, you can’t lose $ from something you left to die.
Except it’s still alive. Get out from under that rock.
Nice thing I am a single player, and can still play at the PSP like I used long time ago, even if the servers are down
I dunno if you know this but you can still play a bunch of PSP games online with the PRO plugin @ Coldbirds server–> https://pro.coldbird.net/
Ugh, piracy never harmed any console. Dreamcast was ahead of its time and pricey. Sega just coming out with consoles instead of one that had longevity. PSP was killed because of lack of quality games that its counterpart the DS had. No console has ever suffered from piracy, just lack of being taken care of from their parent company. Most of the time it’s too much trouble and work for the casual person to pirate. I find this article was a fluff piece. Piracy has been around forever and it never has taken anything down a notch. It usually helps sell a console, games, and especially the scenes like the vita now.
I didn’t say that piracy ever killed a console, but that’s what people like to attribute a console’s failure to. My point is that piracy is less likely to have an impact in terms of numbers today because of the added value of not pirating, which was not the case 10 years ago. Maybe you should read that “fluff piece” again as it seems you missed my point.
How do reset my ps vita without updating. I’m already on 3.60. But don’t want to use my legit PSN?
lol ahead of its time and pricey? Yeah. No. It was $200 upon release, $100 less than the standard $299 at the time and it was current arcade hardware, basically. It was barely a half step ahead and it came when a full step ahead was incoming (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox).
The Dreamcast broke launch records for consoles and software and peripheral records at the time. Its sales did not dip until the PS2 came out. If the dreamcast would have had a DVD drive, even if priced $50 more, it almost certainly would have staved off the PS2 longer because the PS2 had a disasterous launch and its initial software lineup was unheard of weak back then. Truly awful.
But Sega being Sega they didn’t capitalize on the PS2 faltering until after it recovered. The PS2 sold back then because it was then the cheapest/best deal for a DVD player that also happened to play games.
So, yeah, absolutely, the PS2 is what killed the Dreamcast, NOT piracy, but lets remember things correctly all the same.
The only thing piracy DID kill was the Famicom disk system. Verifiable and Nintendo actually killed support and advanced cart tech in order to maintain the benefits while forgoing the then cheap and easy piracy aspects of floppies.
PSP broke sales records and made Sony an extremely tidy profit. It had what, 4 or 5 revisions? Hardly anything close to a failure. Initial sloppy launch software and poor support is what hurt it, piracy and homebrew probably kept it alive during those dodgy years. As it stands, it would have destroyed Nintendo if not for their regrouping with the Lite and it still made unprecedented inroads to Nintendo’s handheld dominance.
But yeah, people really need to stop acting like Piracy is THE problem. It’s the SYMPTOM of larger problems.
AMEN! Makes me happy to see that people out there actually GET it. Piracy has been around for decades now folks…adapt or fail I say.
Jack, the PS2 didn’t kill the Dreamcast. The PS2 came out in 2000, while the Dreamcast came out a year earlier (and was only on the market a year and a half).
It was ahead of its time because it had online play before internet connections became mainstream, voice control, motion control, inter-connectivity with its “micro-console” and a bunch of other stuff. You should google “why the dreamcast was ahead of its time”. It’s an interesting read. The PS2 outweighed it because Sony made the right call to use the DVD format instead of CD, which was huge at the time, and it basically turned the PS2 into an affordable DVD player, just like the PS3 was an affordable BluRay player.
The Dreamcast was ahead of it’s time with many innovative features not ever seen before on a console but I gotta say that the PS2 absolutely killed the DC. There is a good Youtube video of Sega of America company execs talking about getting the death call from Sega of Japan and what led to it’s demise.
Piracy was actually stopped on the Dreamcast with the revision VA2 that took away support of MILCD. GD-ROM discs are actually around 1.1GB, but people figured out how to get them to properly boot from a boot CD and then eventually self-booting. Regardless, it was stopped, but DC just didn’t sell enough SYSTEMS.
If piracy is what killed it (which I know nobody has said, generally speaking), why did so few consoles sell?
Just going to point out that a console can come out a few years later than another one and still destroy things. Wii came out 2 years or so after the 360 and proceeded to annihilate everything in it’s wake in terms of sales.
Uh, no. The Wii came out 1 year later. There’s actually a big difference there. If it were 2 years later, smartphones would have been out by then, and the Wii might not have done as well as it did to attract the casual crowd.
You’re making the wrong conclusions by ignoring history.
Yes, it’s true the PSP sold extremely well. But software sales didn’t follow. Do you know why? Because it was a cool all-in-one media device (remember, this predates smartphones), and because piracy was extremely easy. This is why software support quickly subsided.
It took a major effort on Sony’s part to revive the device by releasing games people wanted, and convincing other companies, like Square-Enix, to release games for the thing, while putting a dent into piracy by paying off Dark_Alex.
Of course, the piracy scene caught up, software sales plummeted, and come 2011 publishers considered it not profitable to release a PSP game anymore, while the DS still thrived.
U must be high on grass or living on planet Mars my friend. With the sheer amount of quality content published, the PSP was never a loser to the DS.
The Dreamcast wasn’t pricy at all. Especially compared to its competition at the time, the PlayStation 2. The real problem was a drought a couple months after release, and the console not catching on in Japan and Europe (which in Europe’s case is mostly because they barely got a budget to market the thing). It didn’t help that everyone was revering Sony at the time, either.
Back to the main point…
Piracy helps sell a console if it’s not too easy to pirate and the console is popular.
The PSP never was all that popular, and it was far too easy to pirate games on it. While you can blame Sony for not supporting the PS Vita enough, they did try with the PSP. They even managed to revive the thing in 2008 by releasing games people cared about. You know what else they did around that time? Set back piracy by paying Dark_Alex to stop contributing to the scene. Coincidence? I think not.
Of course, the scene eventually got back on its feet, and starting 2011 sales plummeted again.
already saw some who upgrades just for PSN and online play!!
I REALLY enjoyed the youtube app the playstation vita had.
No ads, lightning fast searching and loading and full account support.
In terms of online Capability… Soul Sacrifice was amazing, Disgaea 4 and Oreshika had neat uses of it but it seems like the Vita needed Monster Hunter. I think that would have probably saved it.
Online play generally felt like an afterthought on the vita. Even as a commercial failure, it’s the best handheld ever made with the best D-Pad I’ve ever used.
There is a Monster Hunter online game called Frontier G. You can play it on the Vita but the annoying part is the language isn’t english thats about it. Unless theres a patch.
Yeah, I wonder what happened with Capcom. The MH 3ds games look like ps2 games!
Monster hunter is doing great in the 3ds. It”s cap com money pringing machune. But I would love to see it in a more powerful device like vita (and with two analog).
I wouldn’t even be that generous. More like PS1.5.
It’s a shame, but frontier g is *** next to the main games. Monster hunter could indeed save the vita.
Aren’t there like 2-3 MH games on the PSP already? The Vita can run PSP games, you know.
Doesn’t even seem like these hacks are even encouraging many more people to purchase a new Vita, if VGCharts weekly sales numbers are anything to go by.
Some people actually got two consoles with one 3.60 for free games and one latest firmware for best experience. The number of those people are growing. Anyway piracy won’t kill psv because it’s already dead a long time ago.
Yeah, speaking of which… Too bad the Vita wasn’t hacked 2-3 years ago. If more people bought a Vita + a SECOND Vita, sales numbers would’ve been up, developers would’ve looked at a higher potential customers for the platform (even if most of them were duplicates), and maybe (just maybe) we would’ve seen some really great games on it, instead of the developers simply dodging it due to low platform sales. Now I guess we’ll never know.
And after that developers would have quickly back-pedalled because the number of software sales didn’t match the number of sold platforms in the slightest. It would have been the PSP all over again, but worse.
It’s mostly Western developers dodging the device. It’s still alive and well in Japan, something which almost everyone here seems to forget.
Ya, its difficult choice.. Even if you have two consoles.. One pirated and other not, its seems better to have online experience as it lets you play with your friends rather alone which is shabby and boring… Ultimately you end up buying legit games as well as you spend cash on extra console.. Either way sony wins and gets your money.. Sony is *** smart.. Those people who thinks piracy will destroy game market i think they should rethink about it..Almost all PC games are pirated easily. Still, PC steam sales are running fine.. You end up buying legit games at the end cause with pirated games you cant go online. So, think of piracy as of demo or beta games for taste, ultimately consumer will buy legit games if they think the game is worth buying. Its like drugs… and with DLC’s and season pass *** they will get our money somehow..
The Vita is already dying and I doubt Henkaku or Vitamin will be considered the reason for it in the long run. Hasn’t there already been rumors of Sony developing another handheld?
No. I wish they would, though.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Its still alive in my heart
And let me add something here… Unless team molecule aded some tracking code in henkaku(which I hope there’s none) 150,000 is overestimating it. Since the hack works by having you to redownload it everytime you reboot your device. And assuming that 90% of the world’s internet users use dynamic IPs. And assuming they count the total users by unique visits per IP. I’d say it would be more accurate to say that there’s likely around 60,000 users total.
They use statistics from Google analytics. Those are as accurate as can be
Sony have been actively trying to kill the Vita for years, it just refuses to stay dead. They haven’t even published a game in 6 months. Its been 18 months since they actually developed one.
Who the heck cares about sony, it’s all about people and small-medium sized localization companies nowadays. It’s even worse that these people don’t go against sony, the beat the simple mem.
Let’s just say the game selection alone killed the Vita…the “Updates” Sony released which took AWAY from it (nice one there…), and the fact that the console got little life out of Sony’s lime light….I mean the console itself is quite capable as far as hardware goes. Locked down SD cards (which are over priced and too slow) also killed it.
Piracy…if anything…will extend the life of the Vita. Good or bad…that’s on the eyes of the beholder I suppose – But I personally think it’s good to see the Vita have some new life again 😉
I don’t understand how the ability to pirate games on an unpopular device will extend its life. If it was popular, it would help by lowering the barrier to entry, but this is a niche device.
Pathetic Jerks are just trying to justify piracy. nothing new.
Glad I have a 3.61 vita and 3.60. Honestly, it’s no justification, but I just pirate to demo games. Buying Odin sphere on my next pay because it’s fantastic
Nintendo usually gets all their consoles hacked pretty easy. Why does everyone still love it?
Well if the company cant use it as an excuse for a console failure then we use it as an excuse to feel better when pirate? This article will most likely soothing some pirate soul
Sony knew this would happen and thats why u can only have 1 account at a time, so even when having 1 hacked vita and 1 non hacked vita its still a blow to some pirates because not having all their trophies for example all in one place…..nice move sony….nice move
You can actually have 2 Vitas and 1 PS TV….
You can actually have 4 Vitas and 1 PS TV, and build like a mini-house with them (4 walls and 1 roof)!
Not everybody’s rich enough to afford 2 Vita systems, man…
If there’s a will, there’s a way
“Sony knew this would happen and thats why u can only have 1 account at a time, so even when having 1 hacked vita and 1 non hacked vita its still a blow to some pirates because not having all their trophies for example all in one place…..nice move sony….nice move” Read the post i replyied to then start ***.
Nice article but this isn’t exactly the case. Now that piracy is possible, who’s to say that something similar to 3ds piracy will catch up on the Vita. Where we can install digital games, homebrew, install multiple OS, play online, run latest OS, use the Eshop, rip official content from eshop, and much more. 3ds is still alive and well, with games coming out.
The 3DS is still alive and well because of two reasons: 1) the market has already proven itself to be profitable and 2) enabling piracy on the 3DS is still a pain in the ***.
What realy killed the Vita from the beginning was the poor battery life and a stupid expensive Memory card Requierd because the first one did not have any internal storage. This Hacking proggress might get more people looking for the vita. those in store Right now have not been updated to 3.61 yet. That might add up a little of the 1.5% you talk about
long ago, my friend give me PS vita for birthday present. I never play it because game is very expensive (why vita game price not like Android games?) .
since henkaku I can play it. so I’m not 2.5% of it because I’m never buy game.
You know, I wish the phone game market would support full priced $40 games. Because then you can get games that aren’t overburdened with *** like F2P everywhere, or $3 mini-games. That’s pretty much 99% of the games on iOS or Play Store. I still enjoy playing console-quality games (even niche Japanese ones) over 99% of the mobile games out there.
There are some, but it’s so much quicker to produce shovelware, and also more lucrative.
because piracy on pc not kill the pc
You cannot kill whats is already dead.
Well. It’s great to say that the platform manufacturer wont care if 1.5% of users pirates software. But what about the game makers? 1.5% of a platform’s users are a lot bigger percentage wise for game makers. And its the game makers that are the driving force behind why someone chooses X platform over Y platform. IF peeps target your games for piracy on x platform, you may choose to drop it.
hahah you know what. if we can really start pirating from PS vita carts (and maybe other game carts too) there may be an actual industry for game rental stores. You pay the 6$ to “rent” a game for a week, and bam, you got your 40 dollar game for $6.
Piracy is NOT a good excuse and never has been, PC still has a very strong game base and its always had piracy and always will.
The PSP had piracy from day one and it had a long life. The DS has piracy and did very well. The 3DS has piracy and its outlived the Vita and still going strong.
Whats next? Oh DVDs, you have been able to pirate DVDs for a very long time and you still buy DVDs.
Music, pirated and still going.
Piracy has always been there and its not stopped anything. Its a poor excuse for a demise of anything. Do you blame piracy for the downfall of the betamax or the HDDVD? No, you blame VHS and bluray for being more popular.
If piracy was so bad there would be no DVDs, no music, no games, nothing as everything has been touched by piracy and everything is still going strong.
Blaming piracy for thr fall of dreamcast is just stupid. How about blame the other more popular consoles first. Or lack of games, lack of supoort, poor marketing, there are many real reasons for its demise and piracy is not one of them.
Piracy has already ‘killed’ the PC, you just aren’t looking at the details.
1. PC software is locked behind DRM based platforms: Steam/Origin/Uplay.
2. Look at the top games on Steam, notice they are all F2P or MOBA type games.
3. Single player games are either badly ported or are delayed compared to consoles.
You can quote growing PC sales, but those are fueled by the rising trend in Asia to play those F2P games, not the same type of traditional games found on consoles. That is good as dead to me.
The DS and 3DS were popular enough to bear the piracy, having a proven market to back it up.
The PSP had a long life because Sony made an effort. But you can’t really call the console a success because of low software sales.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. I’ll assume that when people mention “kill the Vita” they mean “kill the localizations”.
In summary your numbers are:
100,000 henkaku installs (upped it to 150,000 for argument)
10,000,000 total Vitas
If all henkaku installers pirate then that’s just 1.5% of all Vita owners.
What is being glossed over is that most localized Vita games with few exceptions sell in the high thousands to low ten thousands. So lets be nice and say 20,000* on average. That means that for any game released in the west only 0.2% of all Vita owners buy it. So Henkaku installers outnumber legit purchasers 7.5 to 1 for localized games.
How many of those 150,000 Henkaku users are going to keep buying games? Even if half of them continued to support the Vita by buying games and the other half switched from buying new games to just pirating everything, that’s still 75,000 old customers that will no longer support it. Remember it doesn’t take sales to drop to 0 for localized games to stop. All it takes is for them to drop to just below making a profit before they’ll just pull support and localize just the PS4 versions instead. How much wiggle room in 20k sales do you think there is?
*For my numbers I’m using Estival Versus’ Vita version as a baseline. It sold 7,600 physical copies at release in March of 2016 so it felt like an apt baseline for the current Vita climate. I then multiplied that by 2 to account for EU making it 15,200, then rounded up to 20,000 to account for digital sales.
Source is the very last post here. 閃乱カグラ is Senran Kagura:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1207934&page=16
The real reason why the PSP died was $ony killing it off to make way for the Vita.
The reason the Vita died is unknown but $ony did it. It was dead long before piracy came along.
Some say the Vita died because of mobile phones. WRONG! If that was right the 3DS would also be dead but it’s not, its going strong.
the Vita is a way better handheld than the 3DS so i dont know why $ony killed it off so soon?
sharing is not piracy
It’s exactly what piracy is.
Sony could give away the Vita and make all Vita games on PS Store FREE and make a killing on the memory cards….they can’t be paying more than $5-$10 each…i mean, if i can go buy a 64GB MicroSD from WalMart for $25…you know Walmart is making a few bucks and the company that makes them is making money….so, a 64GB flash chip probably cost around $10-$12….Sony charging $100+ for the Memory Card is about 1000% profit….No telling how many people I have seen on reddit and other sites taking about buying a 32GB memory card or a 64GB memory card since Vitamin hit the scene….
always this Dreamcast example… the dreamcast had *** games and was totally unpopular
I dont understand, if vita sold at least remotely well, why the heck did sony drop it like a hot potato ? and stop even porting ps2/ps3 games to it? the machine sold well enough to encourage more development, yet people dropped it so quickly, I strongly believe the system could be saved if they released a 3000 model with AT LEAST 16gb internal storage, cus imo the stupid f*cking cards are what killed it, nothing like buying a $150 system and then instantly having to purchase a $130 glorified sd card to be able to install more than 2 games.
Also question, cant you play online with henkaku cus of the spoofing ? I personally havent tried as Im avoiding ban as long as possible but games ask me to log in when I start them up, would it be possible to log in even though risky ?
You can make an alt account if it helps then use account switcher to switch.
Enough said about Vita. What about PS4. When are they going to do the same to it ?
I don’t agree with “The NDS, PSP’s competitor, did great for many years despite its games being extremely easy to pirate with plug and play flashcarts.”
Maybe the NDS could survive despite piracy, but I think there were so many games in development before flashcards came on the market that the developers had no choice than to release them. I think flashcards were one of the key factors why NDS were sold in a huge number. Also the Wii was quickly und fully hacked. The consequences of piracy you can see now: Piracy was and is the main reason why the sales for 3DS and Wii U felt extremly: low amount of games because of no 3rd party support. No developer will invest years of work for a game which everybody can download and play for free on release date. Nintendo is not being able to secure their systems. So I think it will be the same with the Vira. I think the Vita is a dead platform anyway. So piracy won’t hurt the developers as NDS and Wii did and I don’t thin there will be any succesor of the ps vita. Well honestly and don’t get this piracy discussion
“The NDS, PSP’s competitor, did great for many years despite its games being extremely easy to pirate”
Wrong, there are two reasons the NDS is not a comparable to Vita
1. It appealed to casuals or kids, a market that may not even had a clue about piracy and continued to buy shovelware
2. Many documented devs saying despite the huge install base, no one bought software except 1st party games.
In the case of Vita, piracy will definitely hurt it:
1. Vita appeals to the traditional gamer or those in the know. Highly likely the very same demographics understand how to pirate.
2. Vita software sales are already niche, any imbalances to sales can easily wipe out a product.
Because “What Is Dead May Never Die”
I agree, the piracy killing hardware thing is stupid. As has been said numerous times though, Sony didn’t need any help killing the Vita, they did that all on their own by turning their back on it and drying up first-party support. Based on that treatment third-party developers, some of whom had already made some AA or AAA titles depending on how you look at it abandoned the system early on into it’s development cycle. In my opinion those actions did a real disservice to the hardware engineers who built what is, in my opinion, one of the best looking handheld devices ever made, at least in the first draft (the Slim is an ugly cut down cheap effort in my experience, which is why I sold it and just kept my two OG models). C’est la vie though, it’s out of our hands to dictate how the company who creates the hardware then proceeds to treat it after release, but it is worth saying they also basically sc*** the people who early adopted it on the promise of a killer games library as well. I’m a latecomer, I have two Vitas and a PS4 and it still makes me angry how the PS4 is the favourite and the Vita is the red-headed stepchild. Especially since my PS4 is basically abandoned to my Wii U, which I enjoy more because of the excellent homebrew.
Good homebrew/ability to hack is a big decider in purchases that I make when it comes to consoles and smartphones. If it can’t be exploited at a low level and made to do things beyond what the manufacturer intended, then I am usually not interested in picking it up. Exception for the PS4 which I bought for some exclusives, and beyond inFAMOUS: Second Son and Mankind Divided which I’m still yet to pick up I’ve not been impressed with at all. Whereas the Wii U can comfortably and brilliantly run Wii U games off an SD card (minus online support; hey, if I like the game I’ll go grab a legal copy anyway), as well as doing the same via SD or USB HDD for the Wii/GameCube games and also a nice line of emulators like the SNES/Genesis via RetroArch on the vWii. This makes it a powerhouse machine despite it’s fairly limited hardware power as compared to the current release PS4 and Xbone; it’s not raw power that counts, it’s what you can do with what’s there that makes it interesting to me. And the Vita shares this – what homebrew can do make it very, very interesting.
Loss of online services is not a problem for gamers like me in about 90% of cases – I still prefer a dedicated single player experience first and foremost. About the only game I’ve played online heavily is Mario Kart 8, and that’s because I three-star gold trophied all the cups in all the CC classes and wanted more of a challenge, which online play happily provides. And I didn’t have to waste £40 on a yearly subscription for it to work either – legally purchased disc copy and away you go, Nintendo make it simple and fun.
So yeah, personally loss of online features for the Vita isn’t an issue. After all my Slim was kept fully updated until I sold it and after finding out PS4 Remote Play was basically sucky and unusable I didn’t use any of the other online features that are apparently so important to the “gaming ecosystem” or whatever BS name you want to give it. Trophies? Not really something I’m bothered about, I don’t need a little pat on the head, I’m usually too focused on the game if I like it to even read what they say when the notification pops up anyway. If I want new games from the store I can purchase and download to PS3 and use the qCMA trick.
What I’ve most enjoyed about Vitamin under HENkaku is that I can take all the legally purchased cart games that I barely ever play for fear of losing them or the lot getting stolen along with the console and turn them into DLC copies, basically, without having to essentially pay Sony for the privilege. Same with all the Wii and GameCube games – why would I pay for them again? Especially when you consider I can’t get GameCube games via Nintendo VC anyway.
What it comes down to for me at least, and probably a significant percentage of others, is why should I be limited when I know the hardware is capable of certain features but the manufacturer/maintainer doesn’t support it for whatever legal/too much effort reason? I own the hardware, don’t I? I’m not going to cheat or anything like that online, so why shouldn’t I maximise what the hardware can do to get more use and enjoyment out of it? I don’t call that piracy. Far from it. I’m getting my money’s worth from the games I’ve bought and the hardware they can run on.
It’s killing the software and that’s exactly what all adequate people are irritated about.
I use HENkaku for emulators and homebrews. I might end up downloading some pirated copies of games, but only of those games, that aren’t released here in Europe. I’m happy, that HENkaku grants more freedom, but I won’t suddenly start pirating games like crazy.
Sadly you are the extreme minority.