To a for-profit game developer, that could make the difference between it being worthwhile to make a PS3-only game that spends a lot of development time squeezing every last drop of performance out of Cell, or a multi-platform game that works passably well on PS3.

I am making assumptions here about how much any given developer relies on the knowledge of people outside their own company–I suspect it’s a lot, but I don’t really know.

Although I agree that Sony is in a somewhat unique position, having positioned the PS3 and the Cell as a research platform, I’m not sure the willingness of alt-OS folks to use the box has a meaningful effect on platform adoption by game developers.

That is, I don’t really see a for-profit game developer throwing down the gauntlet and saying, “since you took alternate OS capability away from users, I refuse to program for PS3 or the Cell.”

On the other hand, the alpha-geeks will definitely make big brouhaha out of it, and for what? Keeping copied games out of the hands of the microscopic number of PS3 owners who can exploit whatever @geohot has figured out?

It’s probably not sales so much as programmer goodwill towards the Cell architecture that’s at stake on this side of the equation. It’s new and rather different from what programmers are used to, so the programming community has a lot of collective knowledge and lore to accumulate to catch up with optimizing on more orthodox platforms.

How many actual, installed units are using modifications to steal games? 2%? 5%? I could believe higher numbers in some poor countries, where the number of installed units is small to begin with. But I have a hard time imaging high numbers in Japan, the US or Europe.

The iPhone, for example, is currently running at about 1.5 million hacked (based on the number of clients connecting to Jay Freeman’s free software repository) to run non-App Store software, in an installed world base of something like… a lot. They sold 7 million in 4Q 2009 alone, perhaps 30 million are live in use right now?

And hacking the iPhone is ridiculously easy, requiring no special equipment, no irreversible hardware modification, or cash outlay. The fact is, most people just don’t want to bother, because they are happy with the system as delivered.

I would argue that you’ll probably find similar extremely low numbers for almost every platform that has basic copy protecti0n that is relatively easy to crack.

But I have a hard time seeing it rise above the 5% range on any platform that requires you to jump a few basic technical hoops. So, at best, the difference between OK copy protection and incredibly invasive copy protection is perhaps 5% of sales.

Now, I’m not defending pirates or claiming that pirates are doing nothing wrong. But Sony needs to think about the sales they will really lose by allowing their copy protection to drop from “really good” to “just OK”, versus the sales lost by getting raked over the coals in the media by some extremely vocal, and extremely capable, technical users.

I don’t doubt that they have some mental/mathematical model in which their actions are rational, but I do wonder if they’ve empirically tested it.

One has to imagine that if you worked at EA, those pirate kids would be really damn annoying. Just like foreign policy, there are no doubt many “piracy hawks” within any software company for whom “defeating” the pirates is not just necessary to continue making money, but an end in and of itself.

I’ve argued from exactly the opposite perspective w/r/t music, by the way. But I think the two situations are fundamentally different. Executables can be secured in ways that data formats can’t (not perfectly, but considerably more can be done to make reverse engineering a pain), and you can’t just substitute other technology for, say, GTA4 the way you can substitute an ogg or mp3 for a wma. The economic model is also different: there’s a greater per-unit incentive to pirate videogames; their sales cycle is typically fairly short, so the security only needs to last for a few months; and there aren’t other goods like concert tickets that can be used to justify losses to piracy as a promotional cost. Plus greater capital requirements mean that the videogame market isn’t as close to perfect competition as the one for bands — you can get away with making your customers jump through DRM hoops.

Furthermore, this could provide evidence that piracy is a red herring: rather than worry about piracy (and add DRM, etc.), companies should be worrying about those other factors (and thus working harder on demographics or streamlining distribution channels).

Unrelatedly: George Hotz is pretty amazing — he’s also one of the most important figures w/r/t the unlocking of the iPhone — and worth following (@geohot on twitter).