Its fairly simple really -- if you do not lock the whole system down end to end, it is easily cheated. So you weigh the risks versus rewards -- if you keep it an open and low-cost-of-entry system you get more titles in it and everyone is happy; if you make it fully locked down, it is more reliable, but you have few titles in it, and its a lot of work for everyone involved.
ie: signed an trusted 'official binaries'; does the end to end system only allow authorized versions? Then you need code signing systems, and official distribution points, and any app updates have to get sent to me (say) to authorize and update configs on servers; it raises the bar to developers who have to figure out the process, and add custom APIs, and end to end encryption, and so on.
To block cheating, you have a large surface area .. the game, and TCP trraffic recording so strong encryption and session handling, server defences etc.
Bleh. Instead, I went for fast and loose, throw it out there, see if the idea sticks; as is, its a prototype, and it was pretty popular for awhile; I don't knwo right now.. RL has been beating me to death for months so I've not been able to keep tabs on things or innovatge in the space much
Hopefully its still chugging along nicely
It used to be in the c4a website, if you opened up the history, it'd all show one day, or maybe today and yesterday. As of this moment, if you hit it, it shows from today back to the 10th, with some days having no traffic. Obviously despite having a fairly large number of games (mostly arcade, mind), people come, enjoy it a bit, and move on. Theres not as much 'long term' hook as we need. (Down the road who knows, maybe with Pyra say if we build it in as a core feature of the firmware and every app supports it, it could work better. But as is for Pandora, what could make it work more? Ultimately, only some number of people like score keeping/challenging.) I think for c4a to grow, it needs more 'features'.. more styles of 'play'; play against yourself, 'social' website tie-ins (?), intra-c4a person to person challenging, maybe on the fly sub-league creation so groups of friends can challenge and compete, include productivity apps, etc .. we just need more population, so that if 5% of peopel care, that amounts to a bunch of people. 5% of people who run pandora every day is not many people?
I started a rewrite that tightened things down more and added a lot of features, but its a long ways off. Such is life :/
jeff
