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by Published on July 10th, 2012 23:13- Categories:
- PS3 News
The end of the traditional console cycle has expedited the decline of the overall console market.
That’s the claim of Square Enix’s worldwide technology director Julien Merceron, who has branded the long shelf life of both the PS3 and Xbox 360 and “the biggest mistake [Sony and Microsoft] have ever made”.
“We have Sony and Microsoft talking about this generation lasting seven, eight, nine or even ten years and it's the biggest mistake they've ever made,” he told Games Industry.
“This generation has been way too long, and I say this because you have a lot of developers that work on a new platform, and perhaps will not succeed, so they will wait for the next generation, and will jump on that platform. You could not do that with this generation though.
“So these developers went elsewhere to see if the grass was greener. They found web browsers, they found iOS, they found other things and a lot of them won't come back to the hardware platforms.
“So you could look at it that thanks to Microsoft and Sony and the length of this generation, it helped the emergence of other platforms and helped them get strong before the next hardware comes out.”
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/long-...decline/099291 ...by Published on July 7th, 2012 22:23- Categories:
- PS3 News
While Sony has made a substantial investment in the Gaikai game streaming service – to the tune of $380 million – the company is still committed to retail, Sony UK's Fergal Gara told MCV. Fergal noted that UK retail is undergoing "a bit of a readjustment," referring to the trouble that retailers like GAME have suffered recently.
Still, despite the issues being faced at retail, Sony plans to continue leveraging brick-and-mortar – the company will use retail to demonstrate Wonderbook, for example. He added that he hopes retailers, and not just specialist retailers, will stay committed to stocking games as well, especially considering that the next generation of gaming hardware is right around the corner.
Of course, Sony is intent on creating a new cloud service, so it will be interesting to see how the company's next offering will fit into the retail structure. One example to follow might be that of GameStop, which makes asubstantial chunk of change selling redemption tokens for digital goods at its many retail stores.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/06/so...ikai-purchase/ ...by Published on July 6th, 2012 21:11- Categories:
- PS3 News
The next game in Namco Bandai's Tales Of series is coming to Europe.
The Japanese PS3-exclusive RPG was released in Japan last September and the direct sequel is already unerway for a November 1st 2012 Japanese launch.
Series producer Hideo Baba states at the Japan Expo in Paris, "there's a good chance" the West will see Tales of Xillia 2 if sales of Xillia perform well.
The Tales of series has sold over 13 million units worldside with the latest title, Tales of Graces, due to release this year on August 31st for the PS3.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/tales...-europe/099158 ...by Published on July 6th, 2012 21:07- Categories:
- PS3 News
Atlus has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 version of Arc System Works fighting game Persona 4: Arena will be region-locked. This, we believe, makes it the first PS3 game to feature any region protection since the system's launch in 2006.
The news was revealed in a post by a member of Atlus USA staff on the publisher's official forums. "The PS3 version will be region-locked," the post reads. "To reiterate, [the North American] version of the game works for the North and South American regions.
"Also, keep in mind that both the NA and JP versions have both English and Japanese text and voice options, making them nearly identical. I'm unsure of what the case will be for the EU version."
The announcement was immediately met with widespread criticism from Atlus' committed fanbase, many of whom feared a repeat of the Catherine delay. Persona Team's erotic horror was released in North America six months after its Japanese launch - and it took a further seven months to reach European shores.
Geraint Evans, director of Zen United, the Bristol-based company which is working on the European release of Persona 4: Arena, does not expect the game to suffer Catherine's fate. The game launches in Japan later this month, and in America in August.
"It is always our intention to release as close to the US date as is humanly possible," he tells us. "We don't have an official date to confirm at this moment, but we hope to be able to do that soon, and we appreciate people's patience in the meantime.
"We want to serve the people that enjoy our games as best as we possibly can, and try to reduce any kind of delay. That's always been our goal with all the games we work on."
While Evans won't be drawn on the thinking behind the decision to make Arena PS3's first region-locked game, our suspicion is that it was inspired by the committed western fanbase that Atlus games enjoy.
When Catherine was finally released in the UK in February, it debuted in a lowly 20th spot; how many of the chart-topping 162,000 Japanese week-one sales came from UK importers? Atlus has no idea, and this is surely the way to gauge the true demand for its games in the west - region-locking seems like a small price to pay, even if doing so will inconvenience its die-hard fans for a handful of weeks.
Based on the time we've spent with the game - look out for a preview in E244, out August 1 - it's going to be worth the wait. It'll make its western debut at Evo 2k12, the world's most prestigious fighting game tournament, in Las Vegas this weekend.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/pers...on-locked-game ...by Published on July 5th, 2012 23:44- Categories:
- PS3 News
If you've been aching to wile away hundreds more hours replaying Final Fantasy classics on the go, then Sony Japan's got some good news for you. It's finally revealed that the ability to play those charming, if a little dated, PSOne titles will arrive on the PS Vita's next software update, version 1.80, later this summer. This little nugget was tucked away behind the news that a handful of PS2 titles, playable on allversions of the PS3, will launch in the Japanese PlayStation Store on July 25th. The first wave of titles include Biohazard Code: Veronica, Siren and Dragon Force, all priced between 800 and 1,200 yen. No news yet, however, on when (or if) a similar retro-gaming bounty will arrive outside of Japan.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/05/p...es-on-ps-vita/ ...by Published on July 5th, 2012 23:40- Categories:
- PS3 News
Sony could be ready to announce to a new PlayStation 3 model, according to new documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission.
The images posted on Pocket News refer to a CECH-4001x model, which Eurogamer suggests is a new, slimmer console that will be launched at Gamescom in August.
Sony has yet to comment on the FCC documents.
"We haven't announced anything new on PS3 in terms of hardware revisions," president of Sony's Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer in June.
"We should never say never - hardware guys are always looking at ways to make things cheaper, smaller."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...super-slim-ps3 ...by Published on July 5th, 2012 23:38- Categories:
- PS3 News
DICE's general manager calls out the next FPS trend as near-future
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DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson believes first-person shooters need to do more to innovate. Before Modern Warfare hit the scene the big time period in first-person shooters was World War II, but these days players can't get enough of fictionalized version of current conflicts. Troedsson called out the modern setting as one way FPS developers have been resting on their laurels.
"I think we're going to start seeing people moving away from the modern setting, because every now and again settings or themes start to get stale and then everyone jumps over," Troedsson told Edge Online. "You know, at some point dinosaurs are the hottest thing and everyone is making games with dinosaurs, but there are trends. It used to be WWII, and recently it's been the modern era and people are now moving towards near future."
"But it's a bit cheap to just say, 'Okay, we're going to switch and go back in time or into the future and that will be innovation'. It will definitely drive the franchise forward for whatever game, but it's not true innovation, it's more a thematic change that has a perceived value to the gamers out there. But as a developer you can only make so many games in one particular era, and then you personally start to get a bit bored with it," he added.
Troedsson said that developers need to push themselves, technically and thematically.
"I think it's our responsibility as game developers to always push ourselves when it comes to the experience of games. To always make sure that when we put games in the hands of consumers that we are proud of what we've done," he said.
"We want people to be amazed when they look at our games. We want to make the best game that we can, and we want that game to be the best one on the market. If gamers think that, then we've done our job. We're not there yet, but we're working on it."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-getting-stale
...by Published on July 5th, 2012 22:34- Categories:
- PS3 News
New release could be announced at Gamescom, according to reports
Sony is working on a new model for the PS3, a filing to the US Federal Communications Commission suggests.
As unearthed by NeoGAF, a potential new 4000 series – the CECH-4001x – could be yet another smaller and slimmer model of the current-gen console, following on from the previous PS3 Slim released in 2009.
Whilst Sony is widely believed to be working on a next-generation console the PS4, a cheaper PS3 could be seen as a way of tempting late adopters to purchase the system and increasing its lifespan.
It is reported that Sony could unveil the new super slim model at German games industry consumer event Gamescom next month.
Sony has declined to comment.
http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...sts-FCC-filing
...by Published on July 4th, 2012 22:55- Categories:
- PSP News,
- PS3 News,
- PS2 News,
- PS1 News,
- Playstation Vita News
Digital Foundry on why the Gaikai acquisition goes beyond simply streaming PlayStation games
Despite some bizarre denials, the news that Sony was going to move into the cloud gaming space ranks as one of the worst-kept secrets in the games business, leaked to the press over a month before the official announcement. Perhaps what is more surprising in the light of Monday's confirmation of the Gaikai acquisition is that we still have very little idea of what it all actuallymeans for the gamer.
"Gaikai is more than just a delivery platform for existing content - in the hands of Sony's game devs, the possibilities for new gaming experiences built for the system from the ground-up are mouth-watering."
The only additional piece of detail that tells us much of interest is that it's Sony Computer Entertainment that is the buyer, meaning that this is a PlayStation deal, not just a shot of gaming adrenaline into the arm of the company's ailing HDTV business. Sony's statements on its plans for the cloud sound suitably grand, but don't really tell us anything we didn't already know anyway:
"By combining Gaikai's resources including its technological strength and engineering talent with SCE's extensive game platform knowledge and experience, SCE will provide users with unparalleled cloud entertainment experiences," explained SCE overlord Andrew House.
"SCE will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service that allows users to instantly enjoy a broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices."
The obvious conclusion to take from this would be the migration of existing and planned PlayStation content to Gaikai infrastructure, representing an enticing opportunity: state-of-the-art titles in combination with an enormous back catalogue running on an ever-expanding range of streaming devices. Kotaku ran with a great headline on this story yesterday: You May Already Own PlayStation 4.
To a certain extent, we've already had a preview of just how cool cloud streaming the latest games can be: on Digital Foundry at Eurogamer, we've already suggested that OnLive running on an Xperia Play smartphone offers something approaching a true next-gen handheld experience: latency is still an issue but downscaling an HD image onto a smaller, mobile mobile screen solves many of the image quality issues that have blighted cloud gameplay thus far, and the overall effect can be very impressive. It's a taste of the future, and improvements to infrastructure in combination with server-side technological advances are almost certain to turn what is currently a great tech demo into a viable cross-device gaming platform.
Sony's Xperia Play smartphone runs OnLive very well indeed, the smaller screen resolving many of the image quality issues. Latency is still an issue but it is a tantalising glimpse of the future of streaming gameplay.
Looking at things from a more short-term perspective, there's already been some talk that we could see Gaikai tech implemented to supply playable demos. While this is a possibility (running PC versions on the existing Gaikai network), there's a strong chance that developers and publishers wouldn't want to see their console games represented on the PlayStation Network in this way - perhaps it would be better to use streaming tech to get demos seen by a new audience, one perhaps not so concerned with matters like input lag or video quality - things that are noticed by the core audience.
I would hope that Sony would take a more measured approach in how Gaikai is deployed, especially as there are major technological issues to overcome in integrating the technology into the PlayStation Network. Gaikai's chosen infrastructure uses a completely different hardware architecture to any PlayStation platform, past or present. Sony has traditionally created its own gaming hardware, while David Perry's outfit uses server farms based on Intel processors and NVIDIA graphics cores.
"Streaming existing PlayStation content over Gaikai can't happen overnight - the cloud infrastructure runs on fundamentally different architecture - Sony will need time to adapt."
The obvious solution would be to roll-out a mass of back-compat PlayStation 3s to the Gaikai datacentres, perhaps utilising a variation of Sony's Remote Play technology to get everything integrated fairly easily. Unfortunately, this wouldn't produce very good results: even when using a local network, Remote Play is very laggy, and factoring in the internet would reduce a sub-optimal experience to a borderline unplayable one on any fast-action game. This approach would fly in the face of all the hard work Gaikai has done in making cloud gaming work, and to be frank, Sony could do it themselves without forking out $380m for the privilege. It's the know-how, tech and infrastructure that Sony has paid for.
The basics of "how cloud works" in providing a playable experience are fairly straightforward: the idea is to get close to current ...by Published on July 4th, 2012 01:10- Categories:
- PS3 News
Free-to-play is not necessarily a dangerous monster stalking the innocent gamer. But at times it feels like it could be.
Digging through the transcript of a 2011 stockholder meeting,Xbox360Achievements discovered the following comments from EA CEO John Riccitiello:
“When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time,” he stated.
“So essentially what ends up happening, and the reason the play-first, pay-later model works nicely, is a consumer gets engaged in a property. They may spend ten, twenty, thirty, fifty hours in a game. And then, when they’re deep into a game, they’re well invested in it.
“At that point in time the commitment can be pretty high. It’s a great model and it represents a substantially better future for the industry.”
EA today said that it believes it is on the road to being a 100 per cent digital publisher.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/when-...-reload/098915 ...- Search DCEmu
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Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita