The entire console market is retarded like that: you have to sign onerous NDAs, pay incredibly high fees for the "privilege" of creating additional software for the console vendors and thus making their consoles more valuable and all you get is some shoddy SDK with awful licensing terms (what? You used some (L)GPL'd code as your engine's base? Sorry, no can do. - You wrote your engine in an open source language that has no official support and you ported the runtime? Haha, LOL, no buddy, you can't give this back to the mainline developers, this contains our secret sauce, sucks to be you but you'll need to maintain this forever).
I have a PSVita and i really like its hardware, but honestly it was a waste of money since there isn't anything i can do with it. Switch also looks nice, but again it will soon be useless.
The best you can hope for with these is for someone to find some security flaw after the vendor has stopped supporting the device, that will allow homebrew development in the future. But by that time you might as well buy a cheap Chinese android device (or even better something like GPD Win that is a full proper PC in handheld form - though that isn't very cheap) and chances are it'll be both faster and better.
> Switch also looks nice, but again it will soon be useless.
> The best you can hope for with these is for someone to find some security flaw after the vendor has stopped supporting the device, that will allow homebrew development in the future.
Earlier Switches all have an unfixable hardware flaw, and long since there are cfw's (several), homebrew and even a hb eshop.
Even if the new ones are patched, you can easily buy a used prechacked (or not) one. The hackable serials number batches are easy to check, just google for it.
Yes, i've looked into it some time ago and i have my PSVita in a firmware version that was hacked (even installed Quake on it :-P) and was also looking for similar stuff for my PS2. This is mainly because i already have those devices around (except the Switch, i was just curious about that one because of its popularity and really i bought the Vita because i was lured in by the free SDK for C# games... something Sony abandoned and -even worse- completely removed soon after i bought the device) and since i have them, might as well try to use them.
But i shouldn't have to go through all these hoops to write and install software on a device i own.
And even if issues are found in the future, you can't just rely on them and often the way to exploit them are too convoluted (take a look on how to install homebrew on PS2 for example - and note that this is the easy method that people figured out in recent years).
Yes, it's called "Free McBoot" and also includes a related variant to be installed on internal HDDs called "Free HD Boot". The system architecture may be a bit quirky, but it's nonetheless more capable than the raw numbers might indicate.
Apparently someone missed the "moderately" keyword on my remark.
Yes there is some garbage there, but it is a drop in the ocean of garbage available on other platforms, with every high school kid dumping a copy cat of their favourite game with various levels of implementation quality.
I didn't miss it, i ignored it because it doesn't mean anything really. It isn't a matter who has the most garbage, consoles already have enough garbage that any illusions about quality control are just that: illusions. They are long past the point where you can ignore them, as shown in the first video.
The better way is shown by Steam: provide tools for people to find interesting stuff and have people manually make recommendations. Even just the tags that Steam has make it much better than 99% of other stores out there. I'm not a fan of Steam overall due to the DRM pretty much all of the games in there have, but from a UX and discoverability perspective it is pretty much the best store despite being one of the most open stores.
And anyway, consoles aren't locked down for quality control, that is just an excuse and was always an excuse ever since Nintendo said it back in the 80s. They're locked down so that they can have control over the software that appears on console, to get their cut from the software sales and be in control over the console's lifetime so that they can ensure nothing will keep it alive after they decide to make a new one.
None of these are about quality nor anything that is of any benefit for those who have purchased the console.
I have a PSVita and i really like its hardware, but honestly it was a waste of money since there isn't anything i can do with it. Switch also looks nice, but again it will soon be useless.
The best you can hope for with these is for someone to find some security flaw after the vendor has stopped supporting the device, that will allow homebrew development in the future. But by that time you might as well buy a cheap Chinese android device (or even better something like GPD Win that is a full proper PC in handheld form - though that isn't very cheap) and chances are it'll be both faster and better.