Well this is really neat. It's both a bit brute force and a bit genius. I certainly question whether it's smart to pre-order it, but I definitely want to see how this plays out, because even if it's not the perfect piracy solution it may be "good enough" for most users.
P2P Networking: It seems to me that any concerns about cartridge hosts could be resolved by using TOR/I2P to route the requests. That way Sony can't see the real hosts. There are several unknowns here such as how much latency can be tolerated and how much data the authentication handshake requires, but if the answer is "a large amount of latency" and "a small amount of data" then I don't see why this has to be run against a public network. In which case I don't see hosting as being too difficult; I'd gladly plug my carts into my server and call it a day as long as it's cloaked.
One-To-Many: The bigger question, I think, is whether this system only allows 1 Vita to authenticate to a cart over the entire gaming session (one-to-one), or if the hosted cart is only needed for initial authentication (one-to-many). If it's the latter, then you only need a handful of copies of each cart for a viable service since a cart is only unavailable in that short window where another Vita is being authenticated. Get enough carts to ensure that a user only needs to try an average of less than 2 times to properly launch, and that would be a sufficiently sized network, I am willing to guess. Otherwise if this is a one-to-one service I'm not entirely sure why Cobra is even launching it. Even if everyone hosts all of their own games, the service is going to be useless for newer, high-demand games.
Incentives: I also agree that even in a one-to-many scenario, the service needs some kind of incentive for sharing. For the moment I'm going to work on the assumption that this can be cloaked (to be visible to Sony as validating other Vitas would be crazy), which does make incentives a bit harder. Even if you know who is who inside the network, you'd need some way to use that information to reward hosts. Physical rewards that can be traced back to anyone - including hardware discounts - seem risky. Otherwise what can you do? Some sort of priority access on the network? It's possible incentives may not be needed to ensure enough hosts on the network, but I have my doubts.
Console Bans: Assuming there is P2P cloaking, the only real risk is having your console banned if Sony finds a way to detect this in the Vita firmware. Which would be unfortunate, but that's the name of the game with piracy, and we went through this with the PS3 already. For that matter they could likely do the same thing to us over Rejuvinate, though there's obviously a big difference between piracy and homebrew. Ultimately it means there's some risk involved, but the worst thing Sony can do is keep you off of PSN. MP games haven't been a massive draw here, and preventing people from buying games doesn't seem to be a major loss when the entire purpose of this in the first place is piracy...
Cost: They'll have to find a way to keep this under $100 USD. This is purely supposition on my part, but I don't see how this can be successful if it costs as much as a Vita itself. The problem is that this may be tricky given that it's a 3 part system[/b]: the Vita dongle, the wireless (Bluetooth?) adapter, and the Black Fin card reader. Cobra will want to make a tidy profit on top of that.
Simplicity: In some ways this is definitely worse than Rejuvinate right now - and Rejuvinate is definitely one of the harder to use hacks right now - but in other ways it's easier. You still need the PC host to access the P2P network, but if I'm understanding the technology right, this is all fairly automated. The dongle reaches out to the PC, where a daemon is listening and then reaches out to the network. This is going to be easier than the "push" nature of Rejuvinate that requires manipulating both the Vita and the PC. Plus there's no need to deal with the email hack to renew any licenses or the fact that you lose Rejuvinate the moment you quit PSM. The benefit, for better or worse, is that this gets you access to retail quality games rather than just emulators and a small amount of homebrew, so people are going to be more willing to jump through hoops here. The unknown is whether the market for this device is big enough. How many people want to buy a piracy dongle that only works when networked? There is definitely some kind of market, but I don't know if one can really do enough research to predict this one.
Detection: I don't know if there's enough information out here yet to really answer this one, but what are Sony's options for detection? If we're just passing off the authentication request to a real cart, then it seems like Sony can't radically change the auth mechanism since it will still pass. Maybe tighten up the timing mechanism to require a response sooner than a global network could deliver it? I think yifanlu may be the best person to comment on that, as while it's obvious that the Vita isn't vulnerable to replay attacks, it's otherwise not very clear what the authentication mechanism will tolerate.
Future Firmwares: Along those lines then, a lot of the viability of this product will depend on if Sony can block it. If you can't use future Vita firmwares, and hence can't play newer games, then this is a de facto legacy game solution. Which isn't killer - it's not like there is much development in the west going on these days - but forward compatibility is better. Having to pick between newer games and Rejuvinate is already an annoying problem that has me pondering giving up Rejuvinate in the first place.
GonnaGetPSVita wrote:It's straight up piracy device and inconvenient one at that, without homebrew capability. Wow.. i don't even know how to respond.
i
Most people want to pirate games. This is bad for people that want homebrew, but it's great for that larger audience...
yifanlu wrote:
The gamecart is not just a storage device. There's a computer chip inside of it too that can respond to requests. Cobra has not figured out how to fake this computer chip (typically flashcarts do this; see: sky3ds). Likely they never will because sony is actually good at these sorts of things.
Yifanlu, normally I wouldn't argue with you. But looking at
your own tear-down images for a game cart, they show a single chip that appears to be a custom NAND solution. Perhaps I'm being a bit too literal here, but are you sure there's an ASIC of any kind in that package?