Sony Fined $14 Million For Damaging Third-Party PlayStation Controllers

Fun bit of context: if I, an individual, found a way to remote into Sony Playstation and hack them in such a way that they disconnected from their controllers?

I would be in prison. For years. Remember what happened to Aaron Schwartz? Kevin Mitnick? They do not fuck around on computer crimes.

But when a corporation does it to their customers and competitors? Pay the fine and get back to business as usual.

So google and data collection in a nutshell

As of January 2024 Sony has a market cap of $116.02 Billion. This makes Sony the world's 119th most valuable company by market cap.

Yeah, $14 mil is the cost of doing business for Sony, a slap on the wrist.

A straight cash amount is never enough, should be more like a whole number percentage of all dividends payed out that year. The guy who owns just a little of Sony might lose a couple dollars, the majority shareholders will lose millions personally and will put pressure on Sony to cut it the fuck out
- It should be 2x the msrp for every damaged controller.
It's not even that. That's like a rounding error for them. They won't even notice.
But this does damage the brand. Not only am I never going to buy another PlayStation, I'm not going to buy another pair of Sony headphones.
- Unfortunately, brand damage isn't really a thing anymore. You're never going to buy a Sony product again the same way I'm never going to buy a Blizzard product again. They account for the loss of sales

Sony's excuse is bullshit. If they really were convinced these were counterfeit 3rd party controllers, they should've popped up an on-screen message "defective counterfeit controller detected, please only use properly supported hardware". That would've made the error clear. But random disconnects are just sabotage.

Microsoft did it even worse by not allowing any third-party controllers to even connect to the Xbox one (series S/X) via wireless or even a USB port, via a controller firmware update.
- Is that why my GamePass games are being finicky with a controller now, even though I'm on PC? I use a third-party controller myself.
  
  They used to work with any controller, no problem. But after a month or so ago, they all started playing really weird.

I actually put in an order for hall effect stick/trigger controller from amazon, hopefully it's as good as it gets reviewed by internet people. (should arrived later today, a GameSir T4 Cyclone Pro.(I don't really intent to use it wirelessly but still got the pro version for the mechanical switch face button.)

If this one is good I will phase out using official branded drifting prone controllers from my setups.

It's crazy during my research, how much worse the C/P is to use official controllers shown in the video reviews. And they aren't going to cost you that much anyway. (the top wireless many function stacked controller is probably slightly over 100, if you can wait and buy from aliexpress then it's usually < 100.) Compare to Xbox Elite/or DualSense Edge, it's no brainer. No wonder they want to wreck the 3rd party controllers, they are no where near in terms of quality/features competition, likely 2-3x more expensive, and will be broken quickly if you are heavy user.

TIL. But I'd like to know what exactly the damage was?

Now I'm wondering if all the problems I had with DS4s is related to Sony doing shady shit.

I still have a DS4 which will sometimes work via Bluetooth and sometimes not.

It’s financial damage, by intentionally causing third party controllers to be unusable when they otherwise work just fine. This gave the manufacturers a consumer impression of being shit when, again there was nothing wrong with the hardware.
- Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.
The damage is the frequent disconnections on 3rd party controllers due to a system update which Sony claims was for combating Counterfeit controllers. I didn't find anything else.

I kind of feel like if you're the sort of person who wants third-party controllers, you're probably going to be happier playing games on the PC (or some equivalent, like the Steam Deck) than a console. The console is a closed system. For controllers, console vendors leverage that, don't want people to cheat in multiplayer games, aren't going to want to permit people to bring their own controllers (and Microsoft's apparently cracking down on third-party controllers as well). That's not necessarily a bad thing -- if you want a level playing field between two people who aren't physically co-located, it's a hard problem for console vendors to solve, and so at least for multiplayer games, this is a legit route towards that -- but it's going to come with baggage like a limited controller selection.

The console's strong point is that the console vendor and/or developer works on a particular system which is identical to all the other systems out there. Easier to debug and diagnose problems, gives everyone the same experience. There's little end-user setup or troubleshooting. Those are real plusses, but achieving that inherently involves placing restrictions on the end user.

The PC's strong point is that it's an open system. One can modify the environment, produce a better experience with more money or the advance of technology or tweak to particular tastes, or mod games without restriction. If you're partially-blind or have restricted hand movement or whatever, you can throw some macro software on the thing and use foot pedals or whatnot.

I see people complaining that a given console game doesn't support N FPS or doesn't let them modify some settings or doesn't have some kind of hardware support due to the console vendor restricting what can be connected to the system, and I think "if that's what I wanted, I'd probably just use a PC, rather than trying to fight it out with the console vendor, especially given that they have some not-unreasonable reasons for doing what they're doing."