Talk Playstation 3 News

VG247 made a post about a slide at the Media/Investor Conference. Slide 39 shows that there will be a “new revenue stream from subscription”. What this subscription might be, they don’t know yet and as do we so far (we’ve contacted out SCEE rep). Though the PlayStation Network is listed as a key advantage on the PlayStation 3.

Could it perhaps be a subscription for the comic store? Or is it the thing we’ve dreaded the most, online subscription like with it’s counterpart Xbox Live.

What do you think it might be?

Source: VG247

SCEE has announced movie titles available for download once the Video Delivery Service comes in Europe later this month. Movies you’ll be seeing are listed below.

• Bruno, Angels & Demons
• Casino Royale
• Crank 2: High Voltage
• Hannah Montana: The Movie
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
• The Hills Have Eyes
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Only France, Germany, UK, and Spain will have the Video Service in November, while others will be added throughout 2010.

The studios on support of this are 20th Century Fox, Disney-ABC-ESPN Television1, Lionsgate2, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Starz Media2, Universal, and Warner Bros.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) is excited to announce a ‘Must have’ list of blockbuster hit films that will be available on the PlayStation Network Video Delivery Service before Christmas.

From action packed thrillers to a little something for the kids, there will be a host of fantastic films that all the family are sure to enjoy, some of which include: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Hannah Montana: The Movie, Bruno, Angels & Demons, Casino Royale, Crank 2: High Voltage and The Hills Have Eyes.

The service will allow movie fans to download the latest releases straight to their PlayStation3 (PS3) and PSP (PlayStationPortable) for viewing at home or on the go from this November in France, Germany, Spain and the UK with other markets to follow in 2010.

The video store will offer high quality entertainment, available to buy or to rent, from major movie studios including 20th Century Fox, Disney-ABC-ESPN Television1, Lionsgate2, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM), Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Starz Media2, Universal, and Warner Bros. In additional, a number of local studios will be announced closer to launch.

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Announced at Gamescom 2009, SCEE President, Andrew House said that early adopters of the PSPgo will be rewarded with a free copy of Gran Turismo PSP.

Those who register their handheld between October 1st and Ocotber 10th will be able to download a free full copy of the game.

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A week later then the US patch (we’re not going to talk about it). The patch for Asia should hit by the end of the week.

The patch numbered 1.02 contains the following fixes:

• The server selection heuristic has been modified so that ping time has been more heavily weighted when selecting potential matches. This will result in players being connected to games in such a way that game population and ping are more evenly weighted.
• Newly hosted servers will be more attractive to potential clients and thus fill up more quickly. The change will also better distribute connection attempts among servers and thus reduce failed attempts.
• Potential servers will be given less time to respond to ping requests. This should speed up that portion of the connection process.
• Selected servers will be given more time to establish a connection, resulting in fewer failed attempts.
• The connection code is less sensitive to packets coming back out of order. This was a cause of failed connections.
• Ice Mage and Dark Priest AoE scoring has been adjusted from 10 points to 2 points per enemy affected.
• Non-worker resource return has been reduced from 20 points to 10 points.
• Feeding the princess has been reduced from 20 points to 15 points.
• Castle door hit points have been reduced slightly from 30 to 25.
• The Princess’ calorie burn has been increased at weight stage 2, 3, and 4. Calorie burn was previously 2 per second at all stages. Stage 2 is now 4 per second, stage 3 is 8 per second, and stage 4 is 12 per second.

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Gamedivision.jp had an interview with Head of Product Planning for SCE, Naoya Matsui. In this interview he reveals that Sony were just waiting for the digital market to ‘mature’ a bit.

We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That’s what we’ve been working on these past two years. We’ll be selling the PSP Go alongside the existing PSP models, because it’s a product targeted at those people who are more accustomed to digital content.

People still needed to get used to the digital format, but replacing an entire or atleast for now let it co-exist format will not go well with the people that stayed with an format deemed a failure from the start.

Talking about the hardware

We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning. But if we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first, things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as ‘Media Go

The content transferral is still not strong enough, especially in the SCEE region which is missing two important things which could have helped in measuring the popularity of digital downloads, those are the Video Store and PSN cards.

We hope Sony realises and do something about it before they launch the PSP Go!

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PlayStation: Cutting Edge Technologies, catching title isn’t it. SCEE representatives Kish Hirani and Colin Hughes will be present in Brighton durint he Develop Conference to talk about the current state of the PlayStation platforms, as well as providing new information on motion controller and forthcoming PS3 and PlayStation Portable titles.

With the prize being a Limited Edition Steelbook copy, the only thing you have to do is draw a picture that will blow them away.

SCEE will be giving away 17 copies and the only limitation to his competition is that you are registered on the PlayStation Forums.
The rules:

All you need to do is draw a picture depicting the peace that should follow between the ISA and Helghast after the war on Helghan…. and you must do it using pencils, crayons and felt tips only!

Sign-up

Sucker Punch, maker of the upcoming game inFamous announced that they will bring out three “builds”. They look as following:

1. English, Portuguese, Russian
2. French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch
3. Polish

The Polish build is because the PlayStation OS doesn’t support the language yet. The English build will support Portuguese and Russian language settings. But the second build is where the problem arises.
At the request of SCEE, build #1 and #2 were seperated. Why? We don’t know (yet), Sucker Punch probably doesn’t either. People in The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France and Italy who prefer to play their game in English will not take this lightly. Some might even boycott the game. SCEE has made weird decisions in the past but this one might harm software sales for local retail stores.

I guess this will be a good time for UK online retailers, as they will probably get a boost in sales from the European mainland

Source, via VG247

We were quick to bring out the “good new“. That we forgot to verify if the new blog would go live on April 17th. We’re said to announce that won’t be the case.

SCEE had this to say

The blog will be launched in English first, with French, Italian, German and Spanish versions to follow soon after. There will be a period between the closure of ThreeSpeech and the launch of the EU blog, during this time please check PlayStation.com and the official forums for news and updates on all that is going on in the world of PlayStation

Atleast we know it’s coming now, the questions remains when?

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As of yesterday a patch for Street Fighter II HD has been made available. Capcom was planning on releasing the patch of both the 360 and the PS3 at the same time. But it seems SCEE was too eager to drop the patch.

Please keep in mind, that for the folks in Europe, you might be experiencing some issues connecting because you will not be able to play anyone outside of the SCEE territory that hasn’t patched yet.

If you forgot what they have fixed in this patch check the list out:

• After a number of games, the HUD will be corrupt. Yellow lifebars will freeze, the round counter flags will all be on, and the names will show more than one name
• Frequent disconnects during VS transition screen. Often caused by selecting START color of character
• Title crashes if user has a large friends list and tries to access the friends list
• Rating being set to “0″ and from then on, rating remains at “0″. Once that patch goes live, we’ll reset all leaderboards/scoreboards
• Vega sometimes causing desyncing, especially when using the fake wall dive
• Lobby list containing full rooms instead of only rooms that users can enter
• Zangief Super Motion not working on both sides and in both directions
• During the start of the match, there is slight slowdown. This has been minimized as much as possible
• If connecting to a ranked match through the quick match function, it is best out of 3 rather than best out of 5. It should always be best out of 5
• Sending messages via XMB during a game causes a freeze
• Players not added to “Players Met” list
• Analog and D-pad can accept input at the same time
• Player stats not reporting correctly

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For those of you that don’t you Playfire, it’s a social site for gamers, where they can discuss games, show their game collection and achievement/trophy collection. Though the achievements from Xbox Live were done automatically, the PSN trophies had to be added manually as SCE had not implemented this system (yet). The site is run and maintained by the same people who are behind PlayStation Universe (PSU).

But starting last week SCE has made a step in the right direction by making it possible to see you complete trophy list from you profile (US PlayStation site), though you can’t see those of your friends. The European website had yet fallen behind again, but through Playfire some interesting news came out. Very soon it would be possible to see your trophies from the European site as well, and even better Playfire will in the future automatically synch your trophies on you Playfire profile.

This means Playfire holds the premier of being the first (and only non Sony website) which supports auto synch from your PSN trophy card (you still have to synch it on you PlayStation 3 to make sure the servers have the latest info).

The auto synch function is currently made unavailable until the official launch is announced by SCEE. We for one are very happy with this development, and might have feeling this is linked to the rumoured released of firmware 2.70 for March.

So join Playfire and get more people onto your friends list who share the same love for games as you do and don’t forget to join our Talk PlayStation group.

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Here is a walkthrough video of the Warhawk Command Center which shows you the all important ‘Sand Table’. On the US version of Home you are now able to enter this space and plan your tactics.

On the US PlayStation Store you will be able to get the game for $19.99 untill March 11. Booster Combo Pack will run you $9.99 (All three expansions). But if you don’t want them all you will be able to get each Individual Warhawk Booster pack for $4,99.

So what is the news on a European release for the Command Center?

The content has arrived here and is being prepared for SCEE’s audience now. We will bring you more information on these as it becomes available

Right, why wasn’t this done earlier we ask. This is only more oil on SCEE’s burning (and heavily damaged) reputation with it’s userbase.
TedTheDog is doing his best to keep tempers low but we don’t know if they can wait ‘a few more weeks’ for info or a release.

Were glad to see that Warhawk is setting the tone for what is possible in Home.

Since the post has been removed we thought we’d post this under rumors.

As VG247 reported, an SCEE staffer said on the European PlayStation forum that Sony would discontinue with the Go! service on the PlayStation Portable from 31 March 2009.

Go! is a communication service by BT and SCEE which didn’t live up to the numbers they wanted

Although it proved a popular concept, achieving a significant number of registrations, it didn’t gain the number of regular users that BT and SCEE were aiming for

One reader of VG247 commented by saying

…so it was a good idea, VERY poorly executed

And we agree, Sony has some bright idea’s from their hardware, but it seems they don’t know how to bring it to the public in a right way.

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Sony Computer Entertainment Germany have announced that that there are now 1 million Playstation 3’s in the country. This means that SCEG have reached their target two months ahead of schedule.

The company wanted to achieve this by end of the 2008 fiscal year on March 31st.

Meanwhile, the Wii has sold more than 2 million in Germany but things could change quickly.

Source.

David Reeves talked to The Guardian about the PlayStation business. As expected he sees the PlayStation branch to have it hard but it will bounce back strongly in the long-term.

It’s like Ali v Foreman – go eight or nine rounds and let him punch himself out. We’re still standing, we’re still profitable and there’s a lot of fight in us. I don’t say we will land a knock-out blow, but we’re there and we’re fighting

While keeping development on reducing PS3 component costs is a main focus the question about a price reduction keeps popping up every time.

If we’d cut the price, lost another billion dollars, we might have had a huge Christmas but it would have been followed by a huge loss. The company could have thought: ‘Hmm, I’m not sure I want to be in this business at all.’ But we’ve shown Sony this is still a good business to have

Admittedly, in the current climate, more people will go for the lower price, but we still make a profit and that is our objective

Reeves expects the PS3, to enter more homes as a home entertainment system by introducing more ‘non-game apps’.

We hope that he means the PlayStation Video Store which will become available to Europe before then year ends.

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