Tag Archives | PlayStation 3

Sorry Sony, HBO's Still Beholden to Cable

Posted by Jared Newman on May 25, 2010 at 5:25 pm

When content providers wade into digital distribution, there’s always a catch.

In the case of HBO bringing its hit shows to Sony’s Playstation 3 — starting with True Blood at a date unannounced — that catch is an 11-month delay between cable broadcast and console download. The $2.99 price tag also stings, considering that the Playstation Network’s other on-demand shows cost a dollar each. At least iTunes and Amazon get the same pricing.

Still, the irony is rich in Dow Jones’ report on the story. “Networks like HBO can be beholden to the cable and satellite companies, or they can play wherever the consumers play,” Sony Playstation chief executive Jack Tretton proclaims, as if to ignore the time-delay issue. If there was any doubt that HBO is protecting its relationship with subscription TV providers, HBO’s home entertainment president Henry McGee erases it: The 11-month lag, he explains, is meant to discourage people from dropping their cable and satellite packages.

Maybe that’ll work, but it won’t get me to sign up for cable again. A time-delayed content agreement is better than no content at all, and if I stick to three or four HBO series per year, the pricing works out in my favor. Through cable, HBO is $14 per month. Assuming three show downloads on PS3 with 15 episodes per season at $3, divide by 12 and the monthly cost is $11.25 per month. It’ll just take a little patience to get there.

Add HBO to the PS3’s existing video choices, which include Netflix, MLB.tv, on-demand video and the free legacy version of PlayOn, and the game console becomes a formidable cable alternative.

Just don’t tell HBO.

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MLB.tv Rounds the Bases With PS3 Support

Posted by Jared Newman on April 22, 2010 at 4:47 pm

Starting today, Playstation 3 owners can watch live Major League Baseball in high-definition with an MLB.tv subscription, an offer to which I’ll probably succumb as the season heats up.

With Sony partnership in hand, MLB has basically pulled a Netflix. The service is on at least one device for every screen: There’s the iPhone for mobile phones, the iPad for tablets, the PS3, Roku and Boxee for your television and of course the computer, where it all got started. Clearly, MLB gets the idea that the more devices you’re on, the more enticing your service becomes.

Other sports are catching on. Earlier this week, Boxee got support for streaming National Hockey League games. The NBA is moving a bit slower, offering playoff highlights on Roku boxes, but it’s a start. I’m not sure what the NFL is doing to get live streaming on lots of platforms. I’m hoping the buzz over today’s MLB/PS3 deal will get the other major sports to wake up and realize this is what people want.

That’s not to say MLB’s plan is flawless. Blackout restrictions apply for all games, so you can’t watch your favorite team if you live in the same market. It’s all about the contracts between local broadcasters and the league, but I don’t know a single baseball fan who thinks this is a good idea. Fortunately, I’m a Yankee fan in Los Angeles.

Also, what’s the deal with charging $15 for the MLB iPhone and iPad apps, and then releasing a new app every year costs even more money? None of the other platforms cost a dime, and I’d think the $120 per year MLB.tv subscription would be enough to throw in the apps gratis.

Gripes aside, baseball’s been the blind spot in my quest to be sufficiently entertained without cable. I’ll probably jump on when the $25 monthly price drops below the annual subscription cost.

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Games Bounce Back, and Sony Gets a Killer App

Posted by Jared Newman on April 16, 2010 at 4:08 pm

A couple significant things happened with last month’s North American video game sales figures from NPD: The industry as a whole improved over March 2009, and software sales for Sony’s Playstation 3 dominated the charts.

The overall industry gains aren’t a huge deal to me. Console and software makers will boast to their investors that March 2010 was a year-over-year improvement, but that’s only because sales tanked in 2009. Compared to March 2008, overall video game sales are still in the red, at $1.53 billion this year compared to $1.7 billion two years ago.

More interesting is how Sony took more games in the top 20 than any other console, and led the charts with the blockbuster God of War III. That game sold 1.1 million copies. Looking back at the debuts of other notable PS3 exclusives — Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet — no other game came close. Another Sony exclusive, MLB 10: The Show, also got into the charts last month.

Non-exclusives are a wash: Final Fantasy XIII for PS3 outsold the Xbox 360 version, probably because the series is a Playstation mainstay, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was most popular on the Xbox 360, perhaps because Xbox Live provides a better multiplayer experience, and because there weren’t many other hit action games out for the Xbox 360 last month.

Still, Sony’s got to be thrilled that its heavyweight games are finally going toe-to-toe with the Xbox 360. For game developers, it signals that the console’s ripe for development (see: Activision’s once-harsh words for Sony), and that’s always good for PS3 owners.

Meanwhile, I’m just loving that the PS3-exclusive Heavy Rain stuck around in the top 20 for its second month. Maybe there’s a market for experimental interactive drama after all.

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Sony Shuts Down Linux on Older PS3s

Posted by Jared Newman on March 29, 2010 at 6:44 pm

Video game systems are more like computers than ever, with PC-like power and connectivity to the Web and to other hardware. It’s all wonderful, but it’s causing console makers to draw and redraw lines in the sand on what you’re allowed to do with these powerful machines.

The latest news on this front comes from Sony, with the announcement that it will kill the Playstation 3’s little-known “Install Other OS” feature with a firmware update on April 1. The feature allowed users to install Linux distributions on the PS3 and run “hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use,” according to Sony’s Web page on open platforms for the console, which you can still read.

Sony already stopped including the feature on the PS3 Slim, released in September, but this firmware update will apply to all PS3 models. Spokesman Patrick Seybold said Sony axed the feature due to “security concerns,” but elaborated no further. However, hacker George Hotz, who is best known for his iPhone jailbreaks and who released the first-ever PS3 hack earlier this year, thinks he had something to do with it. He apologized to PS3 Linux users on his blog, saying he “weighed the pros and cons, and considered the possibility of an impact on OtherOS support” before releasing the hack, which could potentially be used to pirate games.

In theory, I like the idea of gaming consoles as open systems, in which users can experiment with the hardware and software without fear of persecution by the console maker. Amazing things can come from user ingenuity, like the Wii Remote-powered interactive whiteboard and a thriving Wii homebrew scene. But companies worry, for good reason, that letting users do whatever they please opens the door to piracy, cheating and other exploits. Microsoft uses that rationale to outlaw modified consoles from Xbox Live, and presumably will require a specially-made partition on external USB storage for the same reason.

Regardless of whose argument you prefer, I think we can all agree that it’s wrong of Sony to remove an advertised feature of the Playstation 3. I wonder if the company did a cost-benefit analysis of locking down the console at the expense of people who bought it based on its open platform support.

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The PSN Problem, Or How Sony Got Scooped By Its Own Customers

Posted by Jared Newman on March 1, 2010 at 4:39 pm

You know things are bad when Sony tells Playstation 3 owners not to turn on their consoles for fear of data loss, but they’re even worse when the warning comes 16 hours, and an entire night, after the company first acknowledged problems with the Playstation Network.

This morning, Sony announced that PS3 consoles, with the exception of the new PS3 Slim, can’t connect with the Playstation Network because of a bug in the system’s clock. What’s worse is that simply turning on the consoles can cause “errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.” As such, Sony advised staying away from the PS3 — unless you’ve got a Slim — until they can fix the problem, hopefully within 24 hours.

As with any tech service outage, it’s appropriate to look at whether the official response was adequate. In this case, Sony’s clearly was not.

Information moves astoundingly fast in the gaming world. I first got wind of the problem at around 4 p.m. PST, reading a Twitter update from Game Informer’s Philip Kollar. His PS3 Trophy information was gone, and he couldn’t play any games. That was two hours before Sony itself acknowledged the problem and said it was looking into it.

Before long, Sony’s customers blew the story open. Reports of internal clock issues were everywhere, mainly stemming from the popular gaming forum NeoGAF. By midnight, one user had posted a detailed FAQ on who was affected, what to do and what’s at risk by turning on your console.

That’s exactly what Sony should’ve done. Instead, the company sat on the issue until Monday morning, when spokesman Patrick Seybold posted a sterile message explaining the errors. The warning to PS3 Fat owners was buried in his blog post. That was the last we heard from Sony. Among the perfectly valid questions that were unanswered: How will a fix will be delivered to people who can’t go online? What other data is at risk of being lost? Will people get their trophies back?

Kotaku’s reporting that consoles are now coming back to life (but no word from Sony, mind you). Sony still has some explaining to do, and gamers deserve an apology not just for the outage itself, but for being kept in the dark.

Update: Sony’s made it official that service is back, that a non-existent leap year was to blame, and that the problem resolved itself once system clocks hit March 1.

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Synergy! PSP Minis on Your PS3

Posted by Jared Newman on December 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm

Sony’s PSP may be threatened by the iPhone and woefully behind the Nintendo DS in sales, but it’s the only handheld gaming device that has a console big brother and genuinely plays nicely with it, letting you stream movies and original Playstation games from the Playstation 3. That bond will strengthen later this month, when Sony brings PSP Minis to the PS3.

PSP Minis are a collection of cheap, small-scale games that debuted for the handheld in October. Many are ports of existing iPhone games, but unfortunately they’re more expensive, partly because they require an ESRB rating. Come December 17, an optional PS3 firmware update will turn on the emulator for PSP Minis, letting users play the games on both devices for no extra cost.

Sony’s way ahead of the curve on this idea, not only trumping Apple and Nintendo, but Microsoft as well. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has talked about the “three screens” of PC, mobile and television, but so far that vision hasn’t applied to gaming. Yes, you can purchase movies through the Zune Marketplace and watch them on either device, but the ZuneHD’s entry into gaming has been rather timid with just a handful of Microsoft-made, ad-supported games, and no talk of support on the Xbox 360. Earlier this year, it was rumored that Microsoft would release a gaming handheld that could transfer games from the Xbox 360, but that report hasn’t panned out.

I’ve come down hard on Sony in the past — the company is content to ignore the iPhone as it hovers in the PSP’s blind spot — but treating the PSP and PS3 as siblings in more than just branding is a good idea. More of this, please.

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Game Console Buying Guide 2009: How to Choose Wisely

Posted by Jared Newman on December 1, 2009 at 8:56 am

I’ll talk about video games to anyone who can stand to listen, but I’m always surprised when someone asks me which of the three current home consoles is the best. Choosing a video game system isn’t about superiority — sorry fanboys — it’s about having fun with your $300 to $500 investment instead of using it as a dust magnet. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all cutting prices, it’s a pretty good time to talk about buying a Playstation 3, an Xbox 360 or a Wii. And now that I’ve got all three in my living room, I feel pretty comfortable helping you through it.

For the sake of getting everyone up to speed, let’s start with an overview of each system.

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Coming Soon: An Education in LittleBigPlanet

Posted by Jared Newman on November 23, 2009 at 5:38 pm

The Entertainment Software Association is jumping for joy today over President Barack Obama’s acceptance of video games as an educational tool. As part of a bigger plan to boost education in science, technology, engineering and math, two game design competitions were announced, and the results will be used in classrooms, libraries and community organizations.

One of the contests will challenge game designers to create levels in last year’s Playstation 3 exclusive LittleBigPlanet, stressing science and math. The winning levels will be distributed for free, as all LBP levels are, and Sony will also donate 1,000 PS3s, along with the game, to libraries and community groups in low-income areas.

The other contest is a straight-up math and science-themed game design competition. Speaking to Kotaku, ESA President and CEO Michael Gallagher said the games could reach school classrooms by next fall. He beamed that today is a “very, very good day” for the gaming industry and “a significant leap into maturity and toward acceptance.”

This might sound silly, but I’m hoping that whatever comes out of these contests isn’t overtly educational, because that concept is neither new nor exciting. I played Number Munchers in elementary school, and while I was happy to be gaming instead of solving problems on paper, deep down I’d rather have been playing Pac-Man, or better yet, Super Mario Bros. Fast forward 20 years, and you’ve got the “Heating Plastics” game at the Nobel Prize’s Web site, which I could barely sit through long enough to find out how to play. It’s like chloroform.

Games are certainly capable of hiding their educational qualities. If you play an RPG, you’ll pick up resource management skills. If you play a strategy game, you’ll deal with conflicting and complicated decisions. Play Portal or World of Goo and you’ll learn a thing or two about physics. I don’t think math and science skills are impossible to bake into game types that kids really want to be playing. The trick is to mask it, otherwise it’s just another educational game the kid will forget once he or she is back home with the Wii.

So yes, games industry, today is an important day. Don’t blow it.

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No Netflix for Xbox Live-Averse

Posted by Jared Newman on October 27, 2009 at 4:06 pm

Xbox_NetflixThe Playstation 3’s upcoming support for Netflix isn’t enough to shake Microsoft, which will still require an Xbox Live Gold subscription to stream Netflix movies through the console.

IGN confirmed that Microsoft won’t offer Netflix streaming to users of the free Xbox Live Silver service, a bare-bones offering that doesn’t include online play, among other features. A Gold subscription costs $50 per year, while access to the Playstation Network has always been free, though both consoles require you to have a Netflix subscription as well.

The official line from Microsoft is that Xbox Live is “a generation ahead of the competition” despite the extra costs. A company representative cited Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm support, which are coming soon, along with Netflix and the quiz show 1 vs. 100.

This argument seems to validate what I’ve said before, that Microsoft really wants to build a case for Xbox Live even if you don’t play too many games online. Multiplayer remains the best reason to grab an Xbox Live Gold subscription, but it’s not for everyone. Once Microsoft reaches for the casual crowd with Project Natal, other lures will be necessary.

None of Microsoft’s non-gaming incentives stand on their own, but when combined, Xbox Live Gold becomes attractive, and Netflix is a piece of the puzzle. That’s why the Microsoft representative used the phrase “best value in home entertainment” when referring to Xbox Live Gold as a whole. Microsoft can’t afford to diminish that value, even if parts of the service can be had for free elsewhere.

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Playstation 3 Gets Netflix. What About the Wii?

Posted by Jared Newman on October 26, 2009 at 1:15 pm

netflixps3Starting next month, the Playstation 3 will be able to stream Netflix Instant Watch movies, and just like that, the Xbox 360 and Netflix are no longer an exclusive couple. But does this open relationship signal a similar offering for Nintendo’s Wii? Doubtful, for now at least.

The details thus far: PS3 owners will be able to order a free Blu-ray disc from Netflix that taps the Internet through BD-Live. This connects you to the streaming content through your Instant Queue or directly from Netflix’s Web site. The ship date for these magical discs wasn’t announced, but you can now sign-up for an alert. It’s not the ideal solution, but Sony and Netflix use the word “initially” when describing the process, so maybe a firmware update can fix this.

I’m wondering about the Wii because in June, Netflix surveyed some users on whether they’d like to see disc-assisted streaming on Nintendo’s console, just as Netflix conducted at least two similar surveys for Playstation 3 owners. The curious thing is that the Wii doesn’t have a Blu-ray player, and therefore, no BD-Live access, but I imagine something similar could be worked up with a regular game disc.

That’s assuming there’s enough interest in Netflix for the Wii to begin with. I don’t see why people wouldn’t want it, especially if they don’t already have another capable set-top box handy. But Nintendo might not love the idea, as its console has avoided multimedia features like the plague. Nintendo has been building a video channel in Japan, even adding Hollywood movies last June, but there hasn’t been any word that the “Minna no Theater Wii” (”Everyone’s Theater Wii”) will be available elsewhere.

If Nintendo does ever bring its video channel here, it’ll make Netflix look like a glaring omission, but right now, its absence bolsters the Wii’s posture as a straight-up gaming console, one that looks ever more different from both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.

Update: For the record, Netflix told Joystiq that “the Wii represents a great opportunity given the size of its installed base, but we have nothing specific to say about it at this point.”

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