As with everything else, there's alternatives that arise to build competition. With competition comes the pricing as well. With the rise of cheaper clones such as JB-King, True Blue seems to have not taken a liking and have clamped down with new security features.
These features affect the operation of your PS3, if the dongle firmware detected it was being used on a cloned dongle. True Blue says that there are various side effects, the main one being the formatting of the PS3's internal hard drive. With stuff like this in place and True Blue not doing anything more about it, is there still room for redemption?
If you've been following the PSP scene long enough to know about Dark_Alex and team M33, you know where I'm heading with this. Back when M33's custom firmware was released for firmware 3.51, PS3News has been editing the releases and redistributing them. To combat this, the team implemented a CRC check in the installer for 3.52 M33, which would brick the PSP if an untouched version wasn't been used. PS3News was warned of this check and was told to quit. However, they did not heed the warnings and as a result, several users were royally screwed. The response from M33 was to point fingers at the webmaster of PS3News, who condoned the activity and to go after him. At the same time, they promised that they would provide a solution which would reverse the bricks caused by the installer. A couple of months later, the Pandora Battery and Service Mode was born, which restored a working firmware to the PSP regardless of motherboard.
Can you say that M33 was wrong for dong what they did? Yes, you can.
Did they fix the problem that they were causing? Yes, they did.
Is everything all honky dory now? It sure is.
It's more or less the same story for True Blue. Honestly, I think that they are justified for doing what they did. However, the way in which they went about it was wrong. They did give a public warning about the securities in place but it's not really presented to all users when you come to think about it. For example, not everyone has 24/7 access to the Internet nor do they know of which sites to check out for the latest scene news. On top of that, there's nothing implemented in the firmware to display a visual warning that using it with a cloned dongle will format your hard drive and brick your console. While my PS3's hard drive remains rather empty, it doesn't take much to think of the negative repercussions. Tons of data ranging from game saves, account information, music and pictures are gone just like that. It's not the ideal business practice.
The PS3 format issue was already defeated by the JB-King team and a new firmware has been pushed for their dongle. True Blue hasn't responded to this as of yet. Now the question is, will True Blue be able to make up for their actions and reestablish their position in the PS3 scene or is it too late for that?
Another point can also be bought up here as well. If True Blue is taking such steps to establish themselves as the #1 guys out there, shouldn't they be reordering their priorities here? I forgot the last time when patches were released for games. I don't own a dongle myself but I haven't seen anything pop up as of late. Who knows what they have planned at this point...
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