Prominent Homebrewer Wololo spoke with Digital Trends this week about the current situation that arose from Sony finding little exploits in their own games shortly after release. What am I talking about you may ask? Well, Sony took down two games from their store that were very specific PSP titles, but it looks like they were a bit hasty in their release.

Vita owners who were looking to download the Japanese version of Everybody's Tennis or Motorstorm Arctic Edge, you may have been sorely disappointed this week as Sony took both titles offline. The games were apparently highly exploitable and could have the Half-Byte Loader and you could run almost any PSP title on the Vita. Wololo was one of the first people to catch on to the story and recently spoke out about the problems Sony is having with piracy and what really needs to happen. He was frank about the way Vita and PSP weren't too dissimilar from each other and how Sony should really have merged the two together in some way.

“Vita is bridging a gap between the PS3 and the PSP, not only from Sony’s point of view, but also because hackers from both the PS3 and the PSP are interested in the new device. For now there is no Vita homebrew, just PSP homebrew made compatible with Vita. People are excited to try and use the full power of the Vita though, but that hasn’t happened yet,” Wololo discussed the finer points of the Vita Half-Bye and how quickly Sony reacted.

“Sony is doing a strong job securing their hardware nowadays. PSP was exploited on day one because its release was rushed. The first models allowed people to run unsigned code, and hackers learned a lot about the system as a result. In hacking, most of the initial information comes from hardware hacks, so Sony increased their security on it. They concealed most of the things that could help analyze the Vita’s internals without expensive tools.”

However, Wololo noted the main difference between the two handhelds, mainly the differences of network security. “Vita is more network oriented than the PSP. Even if it got badly hacked, Sony could simply revoke PSN access to pirates. In the days of the PSP it wasn’t a big deal, but for Vita that means no trophies, multiplayer, potentially no DLC, etc.,” Wololo noted “In that way, I think the Vita will end up similarly to the PS3. There are possibilities to pirate games on the PS3, but they come with so many constraints, including the risk of losing access to PlayStation Network, that most people won’t bother.”

Wololo hoped to meet a compromise with the large company and have them work together on exploits and homebrewing. “If Sony makes PlayStation Suite available for Vita, it could help mitigate [hacking] a bit. On iPhone, sharing your app means following Apple’s rules which are extremely constraining. People who want to use apps not allowed by Apple need to jailbreak their device. On Android, anybody can create their own app store (e.g. Amazon), or distribute their apps on their own website. The only thing users have to do in order to install ‘unauthorized’ apps on Android is to set an option in the settings,” says Wololo.

“If Vita offered the same type of options as Android, I would clearly spend more time with their tools, trying to port my own games, than hacking. But I’m pretty sure Sony will go the iPhone way. Sony’s work to stop piracy will only go so far though. “I don’t think anything a company will do can stop piracy. People who pirate don’t care about homebrew games, they want to play commercial games for free. Piracy didn’t exist on the PS3 until Sony removed the possibility to run Linux on it though, so maybe officially accepting homebrew games would help.”

I think Wololo's work is quite commendable but I doubt Sony would listen to anything he said due to the amount of investors and people who have stuck their hand in the air when it comes to who wants to fight piracy and how? Wololo's not the only dreamer, one day it'd be good to have a strong and free market like Android enjoys from time to time.

Via [DigitalTrends]

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