On the state of GSHI, and the 'Scene' in general...

[Lazy Bastard]

Agreed on all counts. Hackers hoarding knowledge is always a problem, for both reasons you mentioned. Although, the developers on the other side are much more likely to be able to quickly figure out what was done than the other hackers on our side, hence keeping details a secret is detrimental to the hacking community and barely bothers the developers.

Most important is your comment about money. We must keep in mind that the impetus for these companies is money. If they can save money by including a disclaimer screen for seizure-prone individuals, and avoid costly lawsuits, they'll do it. If they could spend an extra $100,000 on developer pay to create a feature that would toggle flashing light scenes to protect seizure-prone individuals and entice them to buy the game, and they've calculated that they'll make an extra $50,000 in sales because of that, they won't do it. Some companies will go to considerable effort to include every such option that might make fifty customers happy, aiming for the "Wow, this company does everything for its customers" response, but these are few and far between, and seem to have a habit of going out of business, probably because the leadership of the company shifts focus to what's cool and convenient and forgets that everything is second to what makes money...otherwise, a company disappears and can no longer produce what's cool and convenient.

Hence, the game system manufacturers, and the game producing companies, will not do any of the things we'd like them to do until we can show them that the cost of doing so will be significantly less than the benefits of doing so, and that these benefits will be worth whatever added risk they incur. The most likely way of doing this would be to create a massive demand for hacking systems and cheat capabilities, and hammer these companies with requests.

[Lazy Bastard]

I should add that when I spoke with Sony for official licensing of Artemis (and Sony dev resources, including a review of our source by Sony developers after NDA), starting with a receptionist and ending three tiers up the 'chain of command' with the head of Sony Licensing (actually, this took a few days and multiple phone calls, along with a little social engineering for direct numbers...), I convinced everyone that it was a great idea, and they were all completely on-board. That was because so far, there was no cost to Sony, I'd laid out a great plan to mitigate risk (Sony would have full knowledge of the entire source code, and the ability to veto any change that caused an issue, etc), and I'd inspired the general feeling that this would be a cutting-edge feature that would not only garner support from existing hackers, but bring new customers to the hacking scene, and pouring into Sony's customer base as the only choice.

What happened next was that he spoke with his boss, whomever that was, and called me back to inform me that his boss had told him this will never happen. His boss explained that Sony wasn't necessarily against the idea (and in fact his boss had apparently thought it was interesting as well), but that Sony would lose the support of game development companies, who would be concerned over intellectual property issues (essentially, game development companies are concerned that information gleaned using hacking utilities could be used to determine aspects of source code), the threat of hackers still finding a method of affecting online game play, and a myriad of other things. His boss then offered the impossible option of me convincing a lengthy list of game development companies to sign off on this concept. Needless to say, I didn't bother attempting that.

[OldSchoolGamer]

I read that whole story months ago in this sites wikipedia or wherever it was posted. Very interesting read. You came so close. What a dissapointment. After reading the above post, it got me thinking... what ever happened to Galoob? Have you ever tried to contact them? Maybe with a company behind you there could be a better chance of success. They might be interested in getting back into the mix. Or atleast could give you some input or advice of how to convince game companies. I would assume that Galoob had to go through the same process back in the day. They managed to sell their idea to the companies. I don't know if Galoob even exists anymore, but even if it doesn't, maybe tracking down the owner or top guys of the company to seek their help.

[Pyriel]

I'll have to find that story. I never knew you approached Sony about licensing. The developers bring in the dough, so naturally even their irrational concerns are much more important than such a novel and niche service.

The only developers who have a legitimate gripe regarding something like that are the ones that make games like that "Spyro" thing, where you're supposed to buy peripherals to interact with the game. A system like Artemis could cost them tons of money, if their encryptions and protocols are easily cracked (or even crackable, if the game has a long life-cycle). Everyone else is pretty much pissing and moaning. They lose far more "intellectual property" when one of their employees takes another job--non-compete clauses be damned--than they ever could to a bunch of end-users poking around for fun. I suppose developers could invoke the nebulous concept of "competitors", and hordes of evil competitors using Artemis to analyze their software. Honestly, though, the notion that Capcom or Konami has so little expertise that they'd need to reverse-engineer Final Fantasy to make a salable RPG is just a laugh. Not only that, but they already have the ability to do it, if they want.