As you all probably know, after YouTube and Maps, now the PlayStation Mobile Service, PSM, is about to be discontinued at the end of this month as well. Due to less attention, bad advertising and a small audience Sony decided to shutdown the service after roughly 3 years.
In conclusion the idea of an easy way to develop small “Homebrew”-like mini games on-the-go (and even make a little bit of money out of it) wasn’t bad but I guess Sony secretly was hoping to address Indie Devs and get their attention to the Vita in the first place. In the end Sony even dropped the registering fee, so everyone could start developing and get their hands on it but I guess it shouldn’t be that way..
By reference to this chart you can see yourself how the general interest decreased with time. Anyway, I really enjoyed ‘Trolly Bird‘ back in 2014 but to be honest it was, and is, the only PSM game I ever had and will have. Most of what you can find is totally useless or expensive anyway.
So for us as Users, there are two important dates:
July, 15: No more Apps&Games will be available for purchase in the Store but you may still download what you already bought.
September, 10: Everything you have purchased will be deleted from your Download List and is no longer available at all.
(these are the officially announced dates for the Japanese PSN Users, all other regions will follow very soon)
The only thing you can do now is authenticate your system and make backups of your Apps&Games to your PC or console. To authenticate your system got to:
Settings –> PlayStationNetwork –> System Activation –> PlayStation Mobile –> Activate
So far from the official part..
Now we’re comming to the fun stuff:
You probably heard about famous hacker YifanLu strongly recommends YOU to apply for said PlayStation Mobile Service and play with it! Why that?
I think it would be wise for everyone (not just game developers) to sign up for an account (it’s free!), set up the developer assistant on their Vita, and run at least one sample application. If you don’t try this platform out and see what it has to offer, you might regret it. –YifanLu’s Blog
Lets take a recap first:
It was back in 2012 when PlayStation Mobile launched and just a couple of weeks later YifanLu came up with something called UVLoader (UserlandVitaLoader). One can see his project as a Hombrew-Loader like the famous VHBL (Vita-HalfByteLoader) for PSP and ePSP. This native usermode loader was never released and later announced to be ‘patched’ for newer Firmwares. (http://yifan.lu/2012/12/12/playstation-vita-the-progress-and-the-plan/)
YifanLu often stated that he regrets to have made informations available back in the days because people blamed him for not releasing and sharing his exploit. But if something was really patched why shouldn’t one release it so everyone can take a look and learn from it?
That’s the big question here and I won’t continue my speculations here, but I think you got the idea already.. 😉
What you should do before June 2015:
1) Sign in to the PSM DevPortal with your PSN account
2) Click the button to “Apply for PSM Publisher License” and follow the directions
3) After you get approved, download SDK 1.21.02 (NOT SDK 2.00.00 or Unity for PSM)4)Follow the directions to get the dev assistant for your Vita
5) Once everything is installed, play with a demo! For example, BallMazeDemo is pretty fun. Before the demo will run though, you have to generate an app key. Refer to PSM’s documentations for that.
[Tutorial] How to be a official PS VITA PS Mobile developer
[Tutorial] Generating keys for PSM
Sounds fairly easy until now right? But here comes the clue:
To do those steps you’ll need to be running the latest Vita firmware 3.50. In terms of ePSP hacking and general stability, this firmware is huge s****! And since we’re currently not aware of what this is really all about, it is, as always, your personal choice whether to update or not. But since we’re talking about YifanLu, you can be sure it will be something important! So better think twice before you get left out of a possible native hack and homebrew forever.
https://twitter.com/_GUIDOBOT/status/596801563982753793
That’s everything we know for now..
Catch me on twitter: @freakler94