Consoles suck

Gaming
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1

Every time I hear about Sony or Nintendo I get a sick feeling in my stomach. For the first time in my life I feel like an aspect of my childhood that I actually enjoyed is being trampled upon.

I got an e-mail from Sony a couple of days ago:

Thanks for your patience and continued support during our service outage. To show you how much we value that, we want to let you know about our "Welcome Back" appreciation program:

Two Free PS3 Games
Select two PS3™ games from the following list:
(yours to keep*)

  • Dead Nation™
  • InFAMOUS™
  • LittleBigPlanet™
  • Super Stardust™ HD
  • WipEout(R) HD Bundle

Two Free PSP Games
Download two PSP(R) games from the following list:
(yours to keep*)

  • Killzone(R): Liberation
  • ModNation™ Racers
  • LittleBigPlanet™
  • Pursuit Force™

PlayStation(R)Plus–30 days free**
A premium subscription service that gets you access
to free games, huge discounts and great exclusives.

100 Free Virtual Items
To welcome users Home, PlayStation(R)Home will be
offering 100 free virtual items.

This is our way of saying thank you for being a loyal fan.
And once again, welcome back to PlayStation(R)Network.

Sincerely,
The PlayStation(R)Network Team

The thing that disappoints me the most about this message is that I have a feeling it is going to work. Millions of customers will decide to trust a company with their private information, for no apparent reason. A company that will sue them if they try to modify the device they thought they owned. People are going to see these “gifts” and will forgive, but even worse, they will also forget.

A little over a month ago I was planning on buying Portal 2 for the PS3. Instead, I sold my PS3 and bought a 3DS. My hope was that Nintendo, which doesn’t sell devices at a loss, would be more sane in their business practices.

Apparently someone hit me in the head with a brick.

I like the 3DS. I liked my PS3 (despite it not being able to play all my PS2 games, which I also liked). But I can’t stand Digital Restrictions Management, or companies claiming copyright over my creative works, or companies using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to stifle expression and tinkering.

So, now I am selling my 3DS (because I am not monetarily well-off enough to destroy the device). I will use the money I recover from it to start a laptop fund, so I can get rid of my other broken computing device (a 15" MacBook Pro, ugh).

I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t identify as a video gamer, because video gamers give up so much for so little in return. There has to be a better way.

2

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/10/homebrew-nintendo-3ds ??? This is the kind of hope I am clinging to. I want people to keep breaking it, until the people at Nintendo throw up their hands and embrace it. Or something.

3

But that isn’t homebrew. That is a web game. That is like calling Wikipedia a homebrew encyclopedia (for the 3DS).

They aren’t going to throw up their hands, because people who bought their machines don’t care. And I didn’t research properly before buying mine, and now I have a piece of crap device that imposes on my rights.

I think it would be interesting to see someone hack the mechanism that bricks the devices. This is a classic sci-fi scenario where their creepy backdoor backfires on them, destroying their product.

I am so bitter, because I am ashamed that I bought such a broken device.