The Axis of Bozz A blog that is all over the place about all sorts of things

A Bold Idea for the PS3 and PSN

Over the past few months I've had some worries regarding my PS3. Now, I originally purchased my PS3 back in December 2007, getting the 80 GB with PS2 software emulation. Up until 2 months ago I never encountered any problems aside from some incompatibilities with PS2 games, from the more serious problems playing Tales of Legendia to slowdown encountered when playing graphically intense games like Final Fantasy XII. Problems did occur one night when I turned off the PS3 as per my usual, which was turning it off via the XMB (Cross Media Bar) on the PS3 and then switching the power off from the back switch when the red light lit up at the front. This time I was not as lucky as usual. Somehow during this process the hard drive managed to become corrupt costing me my saves.

I was lucky that I had made backups a few weeks before but I was lacking some saves from more recent games I had purchased such as Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. For most of my PS3 titles I retained their saves with 2 exceptions: Street Fighter IV and Killzone 2. Both of these games are encrypted with some form of software to prevent it from being copied. This isn't such a big problem if you make a backup of your PS3 to restore onto the same PS3, but if you are getting a new one, therein lies the problem. At the time of my corrupt hard drive issue with my old PS3 I decided on switching to the more power efficient PS3 Slim and wasn't surprised by my lack of Killzone 2 and Street Fighter IV saves.

Now, I am not entirely sure why this encryption was incorporated into both games; whether it was a means to subvert players from copying their saves to other PS3s to unlock trophies easily or otherwise. I am not sure how far spread this issue is with regards to the entire PS3 games library but I would think that Sony might want to consider one of the following suggestions I have to alleviate the frustration of PS3 owners who are switching systems due to choice or due to hardware failure or warranty expiry

My first suggestion is a sort of compromise wherein the encryption would still remain. My first step would be to permit PS3 owners to copy these encrypted saves but have it tied into their PSN account whereby once they have copied over the save they must go into the PSN store to authorize the save to be able to use it. I would think giving the user the same amount of authorizations as for PSN purchases would be fair.

My second suggestion, especially in light of Sony's desire to push premium services to the PSN, would be to make use of this cloud phase that is sweeping the computing world and provide a service where you can backup your saves online via your PSN account. This service should have a reasonable price tag, I would see myself paying $20 a year, as to promote interest in the service and make it affordable. This idea wouldn't be restricted to only encrypted game saves but to all your saves. I would think it's a small price to pay to know you can backup all your saves.

Now the one major problem with this idea would be server reliability. If the servers hosting your game saves were to fail what would happen to your save files? Much like the recent fiasco at Microsoft where servers that stored personal data for users of the T-Mobile Sidekick cellphone encountered hardware difficulties leading to loss of data, one needs to worry about some means of local backup to complement the server-based backup. Currently the Sony backup for game saves can be quite tedious and you are able to only copy save files one at a time and of course there is also the issue of encryption of certain game saves. If Sony were to go ahead with a cloud backup service, like I am suggesting here, I would highly recommend that they not only incorporate my first suggestion but also make it easier to backup game saves.

If Sony were to go ahead with either of these ideas in the future I would be pretty happy as a fan of Sony products and more importantly as a PS3 owner who enjoys making use out of his nice little black box.

Credits/Sources (images): Kotaku, PlayStation Blog (US), Joystiq, Technotalks