Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Bizarre PS3 Save Copy Protection

I'm sure this is covered in many other places, blogs, forums, and has been argued to death. But I just experienced the World's Stupidest Copy Protection Scheme Ever.

It's a longer story I'll save for another time, but I have 2 PS3's in my household. Since I'm more active now on the 2nd PS3, last night I copied all my saves to the PSN Plus save cloud (or whatever it's called) and SD cards, from the first PS3.

Out of about 20 titles, only two gave me any trouble: Tetris...and Uno.

The saves for these two games are copy-protected...yup. You can't back them up to any media (unless you're doing a full system backup). Ok fine, I'll put them in the cloud, and pull them down on the 2nd PS3.

Wup, not so fast, Road Runner. You can upload these two saves as often as you like, but, you can only download them once in a 24 hour period! WTF? LOL!

So while waiting for the 24 hour time period to pass, I've been scratching my head wondering if there is any single possible scenario on Earth that would make this kind of protection seem like a good idea. Nope.

Anyway, certainly not the end of the world, I can certainly stand to not play Tetris for a day...and Uno. But seriously, what are EA & Sony thinking? What good would this function ever provide anyone?

Bizarre. Also, I fully expect the next next-gen consoles (PS4, etc) to store all our saves in the cloud, automatically (optional of course). What sort of artificial limits will arrive then?

So very strange.