The DCEmu Public Interview (Question #10) How Do We Get Homebrew Mainstreamed ?

[wraggster]

To those who dont know what this is ill let you in to what this is.

This is a rather unique experiment if you like of a public interview of up to 40,000 people who are members of the DCEmu Network. We are all here for the love of homebrew and gaming and so the questions will be based around that subject.

Heres question 10

How Do We Get Homebrew Mainstreamed ?

Now heres a toughy to answer, first off you would have to say that no Warez/iso loaders. Secondly using commercial roms in emulators would have to be a no no.

But other than them i dont see why companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft cant let us have a way of using their systems for homebrew, in this day and age where developers find it hard to break into the market it could be great. Maybe getting Homebrew Mainstreamed will give coders the chance to sell games they make ?

The only systems where Homebrew going commercial and being sold are on the Dreamcast and Mobile Phones (GP2X Soon), but will the 3 main players do it, we know they are all looking at emulation in some way but i cant see them letting people run code on their systems.

SO How Do We Get Homebrew Mainstreamed ?

[felonyr301]

this is a toughy to be honest i dont have a good suggestion maybe somebody else has one..

[Eric]

Well i would have to say that Dreamcast in my mind is pretty mainstreamed. I know tones of people who use homebrew. Myself,possibly my cousin and an old friend probably still uses it. Down here in Canada was mostly talked about homebrew and was one reason why i bought the system as said in an ealier post.

But to make homebrew mainstreamed that is a tough question. Well not really you have to make really good games with good control,great graphics,good sound and of course most importantly the fun factor has to be high. Also people these days are looking for 3D games well the younger ones cause basically thats what the grown up with.

So to make it mainstream we would have to make the kids and most of what the people are using today which is all of the above what i said. Again i'm going to point out Feet Of Fury i think that game was very professionally done and looked great and if there were more games like that then i could see mainstream. I would also point out DCastle cause i havent even talked about that great game.

2D is fun but i think thats would be the reason why people are pushing off homebrew and of course emulation is getting old which could be pushing off the current systems popular for homebrew. Make better homebrew stop making emulation to me that sounds like a good deal i dont know.


Eric

[mog]

I thought the main reason homebrew coders can't really release their games mainstream and sell their games, is because they aren't paying for sony's official psp libraries and sdk. I thought companies need a proper licence from sony before they are allowed to create psp games.

I'm probably wrong as I haven't actually read much about it...
But if that is the case, the homebrew developer probably wouldn't make enough money back to be able to afford to sell the games.

Sony are loosing quite a bit of money on each psp unit sold aren't they? and trying to make a profit through game and movie sales...
Maybe it would have been better if sony sold two types of psp... the one at the moment where they loose money on hardware but gain money on software, and another type that is sold at a stupidly high price, but users can use their psp like a pc and have full access to psp system resources for programming and homebrew.
That sounds wierd though and highly unlikely any company would consider doing that..

Oh yeah, my answer to the question... we don't!

[Poem58]

Here's and Idea...Make code necessary to run homebrew available on a UMD that has be be in the drive during execution of unsigned code? Once loaded the UMD drive then becomes inoperable until the PSP is restarted?(UMD for profit called individual developers kit)

Or more simply...a mode on the XMB that allows unsigned code but deactivates the umd completely and limits the file size to say 50MB so Iso's are to large?

[ClintiePoo]

Here's and Idea...Make code necessary to run homebrew available on a UMD that has be be in the drive during execution of unsigned code? Once loaded the UMD drive then becomes inoperable until the PSP is restarted?(UMD for profit called individual developers kit)

Or more simply...a mode on the XMB that allows unsigned code but deactivates the umd completely and limits the file size to say 50MB so Iso's are to large?

Nobody is going to like limited homebrew.

In my mind, if homebrew goes commercial, is it still homebrew?

[b8a]

I think it's really about as mainstream as it's going to get already. But, if we're speaking purely hypothetically and supposing that there was a larger actual potential audience, then homebrew in general would to have to do, at a minnimum, two things better.

First, it would need to be more user friendly. Better UI, better documentation. Since both of these facets are usually pretty tedious and are usually polished up toward the end of the development cycle, homebrew developers would need to commit to the project for the longhaul. Which is, realistically, out of the question in most cases, and it's also the reason why I don't think that homebrew is going to get much more mainstream. A majority of people can't use/understand well-documented commercial software, so if homebrew can't compete in the arena of user-friendliness, it's just not going to happen.

The second point, which is really just an extension of the first, is that the overall quality and usefulness of homebrew would need to be raised to a level where it could, if not compete with, than at the very least be comparable to commercial software. People just aren't going to take notice of software that is hard to understand and performs mainly obscure functions.

However, if institutions that teach budding programmers were to promote projects within their students that embraced the "homebrew" essence, then I do think that the overall quality of homebrew would increase and that it's public visibility would also increase a notch or two. The reason I say this is that, institution-backed projects (such as class work, exams, and competitions) generally have well-defined paramaters as well as the ability to motivate the students. I have no doubt that motivated programmers working within well-defined paramaters would turn out more publicly-palpable "homebrew".

Additionally, if there were exclusive, "must-have" homebrew releases, I do think that a lot more people would take notice (look at what emulators on the PSP have done for public homebrew awareness).

Of course, if you take away the need for programmers to work for a living, then you'd free them up for working on and completing homebrew, and we'd doubtlessly (slight sarcasm) see a surge of useful, publicly-visible software that would result in it being more mainstream. But that's just communism (!_!)

[GinaWrite]

Haven't you heard of all the Atari homebrew games? There are titles available for the 2600, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar.

[MaxSMoke]

I think you have to remember that we're talking about SONY here. This company took nearly 10 years just to officially support the MP3. They put viral copy protection on Audio CD's! This company is so poorly run by greedy, selfish, corporate twits, that they've near gone bankrupted despite still producing some of the highest quality and most successful electronic products on the planet! They will *NEVER* support Homebrew. They are incapable of seeing all of the wonderful things Homebrew that make the PSP the best game system around. In fact, they see it as a plague that must be "Cured" through constant, mindless, pointless Firmware releases! Oh look, it's firmware 2.7....

I love the engineers at Sony that make these electronics. They have some of the best Hardware and Software Engineers on the planet. But the Management is just plain clueless. It's worse then old IBM over there. Dilbert would feel right at home.

If you want open and free support of Homebrew on a handheld, go buy a GP32. Otherwise, you'll just have to put up with Sony's stupidity. Speaking of which, I wonder what a GP32 is going for these days...

[Emulation_Chief]

Hello:

This question, indeed, is the toughest to answer. Still, it resumes with one word: money.

These giant corporations spent too much money for releasing the hardware and software for not to make some big bucks in the process. Security for their consoles are always priority one.

But we hope now with next-gen consoles to change all that. X360, PS3 and Revolution has online services as part of their offerings for their hardware. Making Homebrew games available via downloading service would be a good alternative to expand their game libraries. Security issues will be solved this way. All depends on the major competitors to create policies and limitations for Homebrew to be hosted for download.

On the commercial point of view, I think the industry fears the possibility of a big piracy scale if a homebrew developer has a Dev Kit available. What they do not understand, and possibly will not in the future, is that small teams and companies that create these homebrew games puts much more time and effort in produce high quality and more entertaining titles than theirs or their third parties do. And at a smaller price too.

Let's wait what Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will say about that in the future. And I hope they will say a word about homebrew sooner than never.