Bugs, Glitches and Pesky Laws Prevent Digital PSOne Game Releases

[Logan Westbrook]

Bugs, Glitches and Pesky Laws Prevent Digital PSOne Game Releases

Games can languish in legal limbo for years, says Sony's PSN team.

The ability to pick up classic PSOne titles digitally is incredibly convenient, not to mention a great way to fill in holes in your collection. But as Sony's Ross McGrath explains, actually getting the games onto the PSP and PS3 can sometimes be a long and convoluted process.

The first hurdle a game has to clear is a legal one. If the developers licensed anything from a third party - and it can be anything from a piece of music or clothing, to a character on loan from another game - then Sony has to check to make sure that license also covers a digital release. Often, these licenses were only designed to cover the original game's life, and any re-releases requires additional negotiation. Not only that, not every license applies in every territory. A game might be cleared for sale in North America, but can't come out in Europe, for example.

In some cases, McGrath said, a game's original publisher didn't exist anymore, and it could get rather confusing trying to figure out who actually owned the rights. He said that Sony will often try to come to an agreement with the rights holders - whether they hold publishing rights or licensing rights - over re-issuing games, but that sometimes it could become prohibitively expensive. Even if cost isn't a factor, it can take a long time to get rights issues cleared up. McGrath said that some games have been waiting for the legal green light since 2007.

Once Sony has cleared up any potential legal problems it gets down to the business of actually playing the game to make sure it works. The team looks for game-breaking bugs, and McGrath gave examples such as upside down menu text, or games getting slower and slower the longer someone plays them. These errors are often fixed with new versions of the emulator that the PSP and PS3 use to play the games, however, so games that have previously failed are periodically rechecked with new software. McGrath said that there was a list of "must-have" titles that users had created over the years that the team was slowly working its way through, doing its best to clear up legal problems or just get the games to actually work.

Obviously, McGrath's focus is on Sony games, but it's reasonable to assume that anyone publishing older games digitally will experience the same hardships. Providers like GOG or Steam, which reach further back than the likes of PSN or XBL, must run into the problem of publishers not being around anymore with alarming regularity.

Source: PlayStation Blog [http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/01/31/psone-classics-where-we-all-stand/]



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[vxicepickxv]

It sounds like the exact same problem that Microsoft has too. They pulled several games from X-Box Live after the original rights holders folded, simply because the agreement didn't cover continuations past that. There's a small list of games no longer available for Live because Microsoft doesn't have the rights to sell them anymore.


The biggest hurdles with emulation is changing things to get them to work. I know when I run Persona 3(or FES either version), I get a game crashing bug that prevents me from continuing every October. In order to get past this bug, I have to start the drive again, by ejecting the disk, and then inserting it again. That's not going to work so well digitally.

 

[TheXRatedDodo]

All this red tape makes a damn good case for Piracy.
FILE X FORM AND TAKE IT TO Y DEPARTMENT AND WAIT Z AMOUNT OF MONTHS FOR ANSWER ONLY TO BE HANDED ANOTHER SHEET OF PAPER.
God, we're a generation of beurocrats.
All of this just so people can play some games.

 

[Jacob.pederson]

This is but one of many many reasons that copyright should be seven years . . . as originally intended. Do you know whats going to happen to all these "protected" games? They are going to slide into permanent obscurity because nobody can figure out who "owns" them. A fan will preserve something forever; a business will preserve something for exactly as long as it's profitable.

 

[Sneaklemming]

I want to play crash bandicoot 2 real bad now.

 

[Modus Operandi]

It's been said before, and bears repeating again. The copyright & intellectual property laws are a bureaucratic mess, and, as usual, it's the end users that suffer when content providers get stuck trying to untangle it.

Once the original author/owner (or the last of a group) is dead, the work should become public domain. And none of this "hundred years after death" bullshit.

 

[runedeadthA]

I want to play crash bandicoot 2 real bad now.

Dammit me to. i actually have a PS1 sitting next to me, but i lost crash 2 Still got Crash 1 though

 

[Justanothergamer300]

I guess this stuff happens to the virtual console too. Because they're several games I would get but can't

 

[SpaceMedarotterX]

This is why it's taken forever to see SRW Games on the PSN (we're getting 2->F Final I believe, and Gaiden or EX and by WE I mean the Japanese)

Oh sure Banpresto still exists. Except they did these games with Winkysoft, and since they are crossover games from multiple companys. And that's just the japanese release. If they wanted to make an ENGLISH release they would have to hunt down the rights holders from all over the world. And what do we do about games with 'Macross' in them? Harmony Gold still wants to milk that piece of shit Robotech (Shut up I don't care about your nostgalgia) until they drop dead. There's a HUGE legal mess there

 

[Leg End]

While this explains a lot(that I actually knew), I'm just sad that the PSOne Cardcaptor Sakura games will never get a PSN Import release...

I'm a sad Panda.

 

[Funkysandwich]

Sounds like it's easier to buy a PS1 and games off ebay. Probably cheaper too.

 

[Trogdor1138]

I wish there was an easier way, the Australian PSone range is lacking a lot, I was dissapointed when I discovered America gets Castlevania SOTN, I would've bought it instantly

Luckily it's made FF7 affordable and I'm having a blast playing through it for the first proper time. I'm loving the PSN store, I got my PS3 for Christmas and I've already spent about 80 bucks on games off it.

Good job on them for going through all the hassles. In the future publishers and developers will at least be more prepared, since Digital distribution was practically nothing back then so it was never written in the contracts.

But still, they wonder why we use piracy, sometimes it's the only solution.

 

[Iglock]

Umm... I think you missed some interesting info from the blog post and comments.

There are some PSone titles that we have been seeking legal clearance to publish from as far back as 2007, some of which are still on going and some (such as the six mystery titles I mentioned recently? here?s a freebie? one of them is Wild Arms) have only just been legally cleared.

Oh, and we're re-releasing Crash Bandicoot 2 on Wednesday. Yay!

It seems a little like going back and trying to get PSONE titles released are a slight waste of resources. Why not axe the idea of PSONE games and do PS2 games. MASSIVE library, and maybe easier to get the rights?

Could work on PS3 and the upcoming NGP? Just an idea

A very good idea too.

Oh, and there's more than one Spyro title in QA at the moment.

Yes sorry, I don't want to put out misleading information.
The deal with Monkey Paw is going ahead, it has been finalised for some time as I understand it - we will be getting at least 10 Japanese Import PSone titles.

The Resident Evil titles now have an internal ETA, but I can't tell you when it is.

I know this doesn't sound like much but to put this in perspective, they didn't have ANY ETA for a long, long time.

Maybe I'm badly misquoting him here, but this sounds like pretty good news to me!
I thought the European PSN store seemed just about dead, but it sounds like there are people still trying to resuscitate it for the NGP's launch.

 

[galaxygamer]

This article is a perfect example of why owning physical media is still hugely important. I am very, very fortunate that I own a fairly comprehensive collection of rare RPGs (and other genres) for my vintage, mint-y consoles.

 

[galaxygamer]

It may be more convenient to buy physical games off of the intertubes, but it may not be cheaper. Many retro gamers love rare games, and just about any rare game can cost quite a bit. Even though I am a huge proponent of physical media, I also believe that digital distribution, DLC, and re-releases can "fill in the gaps" for sought-after, but extremely hard-to-find games.

 

[galaxygamer]

So you're saying that both versions of Persona 3 (of the physical copies) have fatal glitches? That is strange considering I'm near the end of the original print edition.

 

[Meggiepants]

It's been said before, and bears repeating again. The copyright & intellectual property laws are a bureaucratic mess, and, as usual, it's the end users that suffer when content providers get stuck trying to untangle it.

Once the original author/owner (or the last of a group) is dead, the work should become public domain. And none of this "hundred years after death" bullshit.

You can blame large corporations like Disney for this type of thing. They don't like the competition. They aren't the only ones, to be sure, but they are one of the reasons the laws were re-written in the last 20 years to extend the life of copyrights and trademarks. The little guys, i.e. the Tolkien family for instance, don't have the money to lobby the government, but they still reap the benefits.

 

[Baresark]

All this red tape makes a damn good case for Piracy.
FILE X FORM AND TAKE IT TO Y DEPARTMENT AND WAIT Z AMOUNT OF MONTHS FOR ANSWER ONLY TO BE HANDED ANOTHER SHEET OF PAPER.
God, we're a generation of beurocrats.
All of this just so people can play some games.

I have seen first hand that the pirating community has fixed a lot of PSX games to run on the PSP. Sounds like they should hire some of those guys. My buddy was explaining they have something called..... I want to say POPS... something. Anyway, he explained that it lets you choose the emulator version that the game worked best on. sounds like those pesky pirates have something. My buddy told me that he has been able to get every single PSX game he wanted to play working with very little work.

 

[Baresark]

It's been said before, and bears repeating again. The copyright & intellectual property laws are a bureaucratic mess, and, as usual, it's the end users that suffer when content providers get stuck trying to untangle it.

Once the original author/owner (or the last of a group) is dead, the work should become public domain. And none of this "hundred years after death" bullshit.

You can blame large corporations like Disney for this type of thing. They don't like the competition. They aren't the only ones, to be sure, but they are one of the reasons the laws were re-written in the last 20 years to extend the life of copyrights and trademarks. The little guys, i.e. the Tolkien family for instance, don't have the money to lobby the government, but they still reap the benefits.

This is a pervasive infection that has affected most things that involve an IP or even some patents such as drug company products. A fine example of how bad this is. A drug company can keep a drug patent for 5 years, after that you get the advent of the non-name brand. Well, in order for a drug company to keep that patent longer, the formula has to change in some capacity and it has to be able to treat a different illness, in addition to or instead of the original. So, they change the chemical formula in some nonsensical way ("we'll add an extra S-nomer here..."), and they invent a new illness. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed a crazy new disease or ten that was nowhere to be found only 5 years ago.

OT: This is no different than that. But instead of an S-Nomer, they slightly change a logo or remove the logo of the company that no longer exists, then charge you a price for a game you had when it came out in 1997. Last I checked, you were allowed to own an emulated version of a game as long as you owned the original game first. That is how those crazy emulator sites stayed around without getting their pants sued off.

 

[Meggiepants]

It's been said before, and bears repeating again. The copyright & intellectual property laws are a bureaucratic mess, and, as usual, it's the end users that suffer when content providers get stuck trying to untangle it.

Once the original author/owner (or the last of a group) is dead, the work should become public domain. And none of this "hundred years after death" bullshit.

You can blame large corporations like Disney for this type of thing. They don't like the competition. They aren't the only ones, to be sure, but they are one of the reasons the laws were re-written in the last 20 years to extend the life of copyrights and trademarks. The little guys, i.e. the Tolkien family for instance, don't have the money to lobby the government, but they still reap the benefits.

This is a pervasive infection that has affected most things that involve an IP or even some patents such as drug company products. A fine example of how bad this is. A drug company can keep a drug patent for 5 years, after that you get the advent of the non-name brand. Well, in order for a drug company to keep that patent longer, the formula has to change in some capacity and it has to be able to treat a different illness, in addition to or instead of the original. So, they change the chemical formula in some nonsensical way ("we'll add an extra S-nomer here..."), and they invent a new illness. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed a crazy new disease or ten that was nowhere to be found only 5 years ago.

Exactly. And of course in the case of medicine, it's even worse, because you are condemning people to go on being ill because they can't afford your pills. All this just to please shareholders.