Originally Posted by ArugulaZ
There could very well be a mod chip in the PSP's future. This could get around all this firmware nonsense once and for all.
Frankly, I'm surprised at how quickly people had hacked the PSP. Most of Sony's systems are considerably more difficult to crack... while people started burning their own Dreamcast discs two years after the system's debut, the Playstation 2 has been so resistant to cracks that a complicated system modification is the only practical way to run homebrews, emulators, and pirated games.
I don't think homebrew software on its own is going to sell many PSPs. I bought my own console in part because I hoped it would be cracked by ingenious underground programmers, but I'm sure far more people purchased it because they wanted their whiz-bang 3D gameplay on the go (and because Nintendo stubbornly refuses to give them games with mass genocide, profanity, and hooker beating, but I digress). Emulators and homebrew games will be of absolutely no interest to them... they want the considerable power of the PSP to be fully tapped, and a single programmer living in a studio apartment, distracted by a full-time job and saddled with a limited budget and primitive development tools, simply cannot do that.
Sony will move a couple thousand PSPs due to the interest in homebrewed games and emulators, but they won't sell any games, and as another poster already mentioned, that's where the real money in the gaming industry lies. If anything, the threat of a firmware upgrade has me thinking twice about future PSP purchases. The game in question is going to have to be INCREDIBLE before I would even sacrificing my emulators... and such a PSP game is a long ways off.
By the time truly worthwhile games like Burnout Legends and Pursuit Force are released, there's a pretty good chance that the latest firmware update will be cracked, thus starting the cycle anew. Unless Sony comes up with a firmware update that's absolutely impenetrable by hackers, we're going to see a lot of them in the future.
JR