Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Paul Tassi via Forbes

There has been a lot of debate about the potential of upcoming “half-consoles” that Sony and Microsoft are rumored to be making. Sony’s PS4.5, or PS4K, or NEO, seems to be more tangible, as at this point leaks have spilled nearly every detail about the system, which may be coming this fall. And though Microsoft has cautiously backed away from talking about an “Xbox 1.5,” rumor has it they are indeed testing more powerful versions of the Xbox One behind the scenes.

Some view these consoles as inevitable, that technology is evolving in ways that require incremental upgrades rather than these big leaps every 6-7 years. The idea is that the original sin was releasing underpowered Xbox Ones and PS4s to begin with, and now these new consoles may be what they were supposed to be originally. The “death” of the console generation could be a good thing, as it may allow the industry to evolve along a smoother curve with smaller upgrades in time, and so long as there’s backward/forward compatibility, it shouldn’t disrupt players who own even older versions of the new consoles.

That’s all great in theory.

What I can tell you in practice is that no matter the logic here, if Sony releases a PS4.5 as an entirely new, more powerful console this fall, you are going to make a large percentage of ~40 million PS4 owners pretty damn angry. The same goes for the Xbox crowd if Microsoft does something similar.

by Brad Bourque  via Digital Trends

Getting my PlayStation account hacked was terrible, but Sony made it a whole lot worse.

Instead of helping me, Sony decided that I had to pay for the games that my hacker purchased, or face a permanent ban on my account.

It all started Saturday afternoon. I was scrolling through my inbox and noticed some odd emails from PlayStation, all of them at 3:01 AM. There were three $25 payments to my PlayStation wallet, and a purchase for NBA 2K16 and some credits. After checking to make sure my roommate hadn’t drunkenly purchased the game, thinking he’d pay me back later, I noticed even more concerning emails.

The first asked me to confirm a change to my PlayStation account’s email. The email wasn’t opened, nor had any odd devices accessed my email account, but another message less than a minute later confirmed the email change. Yep. While I was sleeping, someone locked me out of my own account.

But PlayStation requires you to confirm an email change by clicking a link in an email sent to the old account first, right? Wrong.

As it turns out, hackers have an easy way around this problem. Payment info, or at least a portion of it, is visible in the web interface for a PlayStation account. Once an attacker has your password, they can chat with Sony tech support, explain that they don’t have access to that email anymore, and use the visible info in the account to verify their identity, changing the email on the account to prevent recovery by its rightful owner — in this case, me.

In the meantime, they added a device to my account, a PS Vita. Unlike a PS3 or PS4, a PS Vita can’t be removed from the account by Web, it can only be deactivated from the device itself.

Fortunately, social hacking your way through tech support tends to be a double-edged sword, and I knew I would be able to wrestle my account back by providing the right info. Both consoles that regularly access the account are in my home, so that’s a form of proof, and because Sony doesn’t let users change their user names, no email changes could alter my gamertag.

Following the paper trail

This all happened on a Sunday, so Sony’s phone support wasn’t open, and I was forced to use the text chat. This actually ended up working to my benefit, as we’ll see shortly, but it also raises some problems of its own.

I wasn’t at home when I noticed the hacker’s activities, but I needed to stop the intruder from making any more purchases. I called PayPal support, and an agent there was quick to de-authorize my PlayStation account from making any more pre-approved purchases. Then, I filed a dispute on all three $25 charges.

Once I got home, I sat down at a computer and fired up Sony’s chat support. At first, the agent was helpful. The intrusion and email changing were a separate issue from the disputed purchases, so we would deal with them one at a time.

The agent rolled back the account’s email to the previous address (mine), and forced a password reset when I confirmed the change. Then I was a little bewildered as the agent asked: “Now what do you want to do about the purchases?”

“I don’t want NBA 2K16, and I don’t want to add $75 to my PlayStation account,” I said. It sounded simple enough, or so I thought.

The agent passed the buck. They explained that in order to issue a refund, I needed to cancel the dispute with PayPal. Essentially, PayPal had taken the money back from Sony, and I needed to have PayPal release it so Sony could hand it back to me.

So I contacted PayPal. This turned out to be a process in and of itself. Because the dispute was security related, I had to call PayPal support, verify my identity, and then say in no uncertain terms that I was closing the case permanently, and get a guarantee that PayPal wouldn’t reopen it.

I informed the Sony tech support agent once the dispute was canceled. I didn’t get a human response. Instead, I got a copied and pasted statement explaining that Sony doesn’t offer refunds, and the funds would only be returned to my wallet. I asked what would happen if I issued a chargeback at the debit card level, and the agent explained matter-of-factly that my account would be banned until I paid the $75 in fraudulent charges.

After six years as a paying PlayStation customer, my account was now being held hostage, not by a hacker, but by Sony. I had to cover the cost of the metaphorical broken window, or my account was going to be locked. Basically, I had to apologize and pay for a thief.

Why hasn’t Sony learned?

You would think Sony would know how to handle hacking, especially after its multiple massive breaches (this one and this one) in the last five years, but it hasn’t learned. The PlayStation network has been around since 2006, but there’s no two-factor authentication, and visible payment info on the web front-end. This leaves a wide enough security hole for an elephant to walk through. The customer service agent suggested that I only use prepaid cards, but that’s more of a workaround than a real solution.

Sony has a history of poor responses to hacking. Back in 2011 when PlayStation Network went down for almost a month, the gaming brand offered affected players one month of PlayStation Plus, which meant you got a few games that were disabled after the month ended if you didn’t become a paying subscriber.

You could argue that the way it treated me is to avoid refunding purchases that people made accidentally (or drunkenly), but even if a few people take advantage of the system for an ill-gotten refund, at least they’ll stick with PlayStation.

As for me, I now have to decide whether I buy FIFA 16 on PS4 or PC. Right now, I’m not a big fan of Sony’s attitude or policies. It’s bad enough to be hacked, but it’s even worse to have to pay for the digital damage.

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by Chris Kohler via Wired

Is this year’s E3 going to be the Battle of the Slightly Upgraded Consoles?

Xbox chief Phil Spencer set off a flurry of speculation last month at an Xbox media event when he said that Microsoft would “come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible,” allowing Xbox to “focus more and more on hardware innovation without invalidating the games that run on that platform.”

Then, coming out of last week’s Game Developers Conference, Kotaku reported that Sony is in development on something of a “PlayStation 4.5,” which would be an upgraded PS4 that supports 4K resolution and boasts increased processing power that could allow Sony to create better-looking games on PlayStation VR.

It’s firmly within the realm of probability that we could see a PlayStation 4.5, or an Xbox One and a Half, at or before this year’s E3 Expo in June. This would be a pretty big shakeup to the console paradigm (which I’ve long argued has a fast-approaching expiration date on it). If it happens, it could all be because (if I may quote Spinal Tap) consoles’ appeal is becoming more selective.

“Part of the reason for this move is, I think, a general lack of confidence that there is the same number of people in the world who want to buy dedicated games hardware as there have been in the past,” said Ben Cousins, a veteran game developer who has written and spoken extensively on gaming’s future, in an email. “While I think there will always be an audience of a certain size for consoles, it might not be as big as it was in the past, because the ‘I buy a console when it’s $99 and only play Madden on it’ audience may have moved over to mobile gaming.”

In other words, Cousins says, releasing slightly upgraded consoles might be a tactic to sell more consoles to fewer people. It’s all about increasing ARPU—average revenue per user, the amount of money you get from a single customer. Console makers do this with software by selling DLC, a subscription, or a collector’s edition, he says, and releasing console upgrades could have the same effect on the hardware side.

“If they can communicate to consumers a strong reason for the upgrade… then they could generate a lot more income without having to grow the overall market for consoles,” he says.

Sounds like a slam dunk, right? Well, there’s a reason that neither Sony nor Microsoft has ever tried something like this before. Typically, consoles have a 4-6 year shelf life, during which the actual processing power of the hardware is never upgraded. The box might get shrunken, more optional features might get tacked on, but ultimately the games themselves don’t change.

For players, consoles are supposed to be an idiot-proof alternative to building a PC. Buy an Xbox 360, and any game that says Xbox 360 on it Just Works in your box, whichever box you have. For game developers, it means not having to make a lose-lose choice: If you create your game using the increased hardware power of the new box, you can’t sell it to anyone with the old machine. But if you make a game for the whole audience, you leave all that horsepower on the table and compromise the design of your game.

It’s worth noting that Nintendo, which does occasionally upgrade its portable game machines mid-cycle, just did this with the New Nintendo 3DS. This handheld can ostensibly run better-looking games, but in practice, only a tiny number of games utilize its additional power.

Phil Spencer, in his address at the Xbox event, connected this iterative-console concept back to, as Microsoft always does, Windows. He noted that these “backward and forward compatible” games could be developed on the “Universal Windows Platform,” the environment that lets developers create software that, once programmed, will run on both Windows 10 and Windows Mobile—and soon on the Xbox, Microsoft confirmed at Game Developers Conference last week.

Sony, which as far as we know has no such dream of unifying the PlayStation platform with PCs and phones, may simply see an opportunity to leapfrog the competition technologically, introducing a 4K-capable game system a little bit early in anticipation of the price of 4K sets coming down rapidly in 2016 and beyond. And since the PlayStation VR setup is a bit cumbersome at the moment, requiring an extra box that hooks up to your PS4 with its own AC adapter, perhaps a PS4.5 could integrate that hardware a bit more, just as the Xbox 360 Slim was made “ready for Kinect.”

Microsoft’s and Sony’s incremental upgrades may, therefore, end up being very different in their ends and means. Will either of them actually get gamers to buy in?

“It’s a really hard call to make,” Cousins says. “If we look at previous attempts to upgrade consoles (Sega 32X) you might think ‘no’… If you look at Nvidia’s business model from the 2000s of getting people to buy a new GPU every 18 months, you might think ‘yes.’”

If you’re a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One owner, it’s a call you might have to make for yourself, perhaps sooner than you think.

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