this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
823 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

60062 readers
3563 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For::Sony says Mythbusters and more Discovery TV shows are going away whether you bought them or not

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Classic sony move. Remember Linux in ps2...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't blame them as much for that one. It's a bad look, but the PS3's architecture was such that they could be used to make a cheap supercomputer and they were being sold at a fairly significant loss.

The cheapest way to build a supercomputer was to have a bot farm buying a bunch of PS3s, and don't wouldn't be able to recoup the losses through software sales.

They should have just sold the ability to unlock OtherOS for "X" dollars to offset the loss.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but then you get into the "so, do I actually OWN my own hardware, or don't I?" debate

Also, the fact that they disabled it AFTER it being a selling point they advertised, for people who ALREADY bought them, without a way to revert

Anyway... Yeah, I don't take that as an adequate excuse. You sell the hardware, you no longer own it, so stop breaking it or forcing people to use it a certain way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get what you're saying, but I can also totally see Sony's POV that they were losing money on every unit sold. It was becoming popular enough for distributed processing/supercomputing they had to either stop supporting the Other OS feature or raise the price when they were already by far the most expensive console and way behind the much cheaper competition in sales.

They could hurt the minority of users who were costing them money by removing OtherOS, or they could hurt everyone by increasing the price of the console by a couple hundred bucks. Between the two options they absolutely made the better decision from a business standpoint, and it was also the better decision for 99.9% of the users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sure... But breaking the feature for people who ALREADY bought it was absolutely the wrong call. For people who that's the only reason they bought one (or more) that got the update before realizing what it would do basically wound up with expensive bricks as far as they were concerned, with no real recourse

It's user hostile no matter how you look at it. They chose to set them up as loss leaders, and that's always a risky gamble, one which they lost.

New sales? Sure, remove the feature, it's costing them money (though I again refer to my earlier point about hardware we buy not actually belonging to us), but leave the systems that already have it intact.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It was both I think lol, except that the ps2 one still works if you can find the gear for it (especially an old IDE HDD, and the original HDD+network adapter for the phat PS2)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago