Tag Archives | Sony

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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Sony Getting the Antitrust Eye Over Optical Drives

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 26, 2009 at 1:22 pm

It’s not quite clear why it is happening, but Sony disclosed Monday that its Optiarc division in the US is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible antitrust violations. Sony Optiarc is one of the larger manufacturers of optical drives, including DVD and Blu-ray.

The DOJ is not the only government agency worldwide looking into Sony’s practices: other countries are apparently also requesting information as part of a wider investigation into the industry. It is unknown whether any other companies may have received requests for information.

An educated guess would lead to the investigation centering around price-fixing. While it’s not known, Blu-ray prices have remained high even though the technology has now been commercially available for over three years, and its competitor HD DVD has been gone for nearly two-thirds of that time.

Then again, it could have nothing to do with Blu-ray. Fact is we just don’t know much at this point. More on this as we get it…

(Hat tip: IDG)

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Playstation 3 Gets Netflix. What About the Wii?

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

Starting 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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Note to Rude Gamers: You Don’t Have the Right

Posted by Jared Newman on October 2, 2009 at 3:36 pm

I got a chuckle today reading about the failed lawsuit of Playstation 3 owner Erik Estavillo, who tried to sue Sony after getting banned from the Playstation Network for bad behavior.

If you’ve ever played a competitive online game, you know the type: Loud-mouthed, cussing, insulting, maybe even racist, sexist or homophobic. It’s not clear which of those offenses Estavillo committed while playing Resistance: Fall of Man, but it was apparently bad enough that Sony kicked him off the entire Playstation Network.

A few months ago, Estavillo sued Sony for $55,000 and asked that the company be enjoined from banning other players, on grounds that his right to free speech in a public forum was violated. He added that his agoraphobia (social anxiety) precludes him from socializing in public, so PSN was his only outlet. Estavillo further claimed that Sony effectively stole his pre-paid Playstation Store points.

Too bad. Game Politics reports that a judge has dismissed the case, ruling that a First Amendment claim isn’t plausible. After all, it’s Sony’s private network, and when you sign on, you agree to Sony’s rules. If there’s any question that PSN is like a public place, the tech law blog of Eric Goldman further notes that Sony’s network wasn’t considered a “company town,” because it doesn’t take on any functions of a municipality, virtual or otherwise. PSN is an entertainment venue, not a public service.

The bottom line is, you don’t have First Amendment rights in online gaming. You do have a responsibility to be courteous to those around you. For all the times that people ignore those principles in Resistance, Halo or Gears of War, I’ve got to pump my fist for the minor victories.

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Sony Prototype Powers TV Wirelessly

Posted by David Worthington on October 2, 2009 at 2:32 pm

AC Scream During the 1890’s, inventor Nikola Tesla toyed with the possibility of transferring electricity (safely) through the air. Tesla’s vision has become reality in laboratories within the past decade, and today, the IDG News Service is reporting that Sony has devised a wireless prototype to power its television sets.

The technology, called magnetic resonance, achieves power transfer by feeding energy from a power supply into a coil of wires to produce a magnetic field. A current is transferred when a secondary cool falls within that field. Sony used the technique to send 100 volts of electricity 50 centimeters to “plug in” a wireless 22-inch television set.

Other metallic devices that fall within the field will not become significantly electrified, according to the company. The range can be extended to 80 cm with passive relay units, according to IDG.

Sony’s power system is hardly unique. In 2007, a team of MIT researchers was able to power a light bulb from as far as 7 feet away by using magnetic resonance. But there was considerable energy loss with only 40 percent efficiency.

The research was spun off into company called WiTricity, and it is planning a commercial rollout of the technology – once it is refined. If Sony’s experiment is any indication, those refinements could take awhile.

Sony is also tackling the efficiency issue. While its prototype was 80 percent efficient, additional energy loss occurred after the transmission was made to the secondary coil. One quarter of the original 80 watts was lost.

With further improvements, the energy loss could become more acceptable, but I don’t believe in wasting electricity (and potentially increasing carbon emissions) for aesthetics. If the technology could be used to eliminate the need for toxic batteries to power portable devices, Sony could be onto something. For now, though, a power cord does the job just fine for televisions.

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Sony Stumbles With Blu-ray to PSP Copy

Posted by Jared Newman on October 1, 2009 at 12:41 pm

Starting in November, Sony will revert to its old, closed-system ways by packing a PSP-ready digital copy on its Blu-ray discs.

The reasoning is obvious: If you’re an owner of one device, you’ve got a reason to pick up the other. Why buy an iPod for video when the PSP gives you a chunk of your Blu-ray collection in digital form?

Here’s the problem: Of the two Blu-ray films that Sony Pictures will launch with a PSP-ready copy, only one will include a separate digital copy on DVD, playable on your PC, according to Home Media Magazine. So while Sony is offering the full range of choices for people who buy The Ugly Truth, those who purchase Godzilla won’t get a digital copy unless they have both a Playstation 3 and a PSP.

Sony calls this a “multi-platform” solution, but the only platforms being supported are Sony’s. To me, that seems like a backwards step for the company, which in May was professing its newfound love for open systems. Here’s what Sony chief executive Howard Stringer told Nikkei Electronics Asia in an interview:

“There was a time when it made sense to divide the market with closed technology, and monopolize a divided market, but that’s just not an effective strategy any more. In the Internet universe, there are millions of stars – millions of options that have been created through open technology.”

Indeed, Sony is turning a new leaf in some ways, such as its support for the open ePub format in its e-readers. But the Blu-ray promotion sends a mixed message: We want our hardware to support lots of media, but our media will only work with our hardware.

For perspective, see how Disney’s digital copies are available as a download in either Windows Media or iTunes format, whatever the customer chooses. I’m not sure that Sony could offer those proprietary formats through its competing Playstation Network, but by removing PC-ready digital copies, the company is headed down the wrong path.

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Sony’s PSP Go is Go

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 1, 2009 at 9:53 am

PSP Go

Sony’s new $250 PSP Go gaming handheld debuts today. With its slide-out control pad, it’s the first PSP that’s truly pocketable (closed, it looks and feels a little like a BlackBerry Storm). It’s also dumped the tiny UMD optical disc drive of early PSP models, making it the first digital gaming portable from Sony or anyone else. It’s got 16GB of built-in memory for games, movies, and music, plus an M2 Micro slot (yes, another proprietary Sony format) for additional storage. Simultaneous with its release, Sony is introducing PSP Minis–cheaper, simpler, more casual games not unlike much of the stuff on Apple’s App Store. In short, it’s still a PSP, but one which reflects some of the trends in pocket-sized devices set off by the iPhone and ipod Touch.

I got a little hands-on time with a PSP Go earlier this week (there it is in the photo hanging out with my iPhone). Sony has a hundred games ready for launch, but the PSP isn’t a full-blown platform for third-party apps of all sorts. Still, it’s a pretty versatile device for a handheld gaming console: It provides access to movie and music downloads and even comes with Skype preinstalled.

Even though the PSP Go makes no pretenses to be a direct competitor to the iPhone and iPod Touch, it’s impossible–for me, at least–to think about it without thinking about how it compares. It remains gaming-centric (even though almost all of Apple’s marketing for the iPod Touch plays up games, it’s really a general-purpose computing device). And its single biggest asset is probably that it has the luxury of being designed to play games well, with a full complement of traditional gamepad buttons and an analog joystick.

Apple’s a company who only grudgingly puts even a single button on its handhelds, so it’s never going to pack a device with special-purpose controls in the way Sony has done. And as good as the best games for the iPhone/Touch are, there are plenty of titles–ones as mundane as Ms. Pac-Man–for which touch is not the most satisfactory means of input.

Apple certainly sees the PSP (and Nintendo DS) as competing with the Touch: As my colleague Jared Newman pointed out, Phil Schiller spent a sizable portion of the company’s recent music-themed event snarking at Sony and Nintendo for everything from the size of their libraries to the cost of their games. On a higher level, we’re going to see a battle play out between specialized devices like the PSP Go and Swiss Army Knives like the iPod Touch. It’s going to be fun to watch–and even though the PSP Go’s improvements are all evolutionary, they help to gird Sony for the war.

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Gaming in Theaters Sounds Cool, Won’t Be Easy

Posted by Jared Newman on September 30, 2009 at 11:51 am

As a gamer, I’m enamored with the idea of playing a shoot-em-up on a 50-foot screen, surrounded by Dolby audio. And I can’t be the only one.

Unfortunately, these incidents are rare, but on Monday and Tuesday, the stars will align, and Sony will let people in four U.S. theaters try the upcoming (and universally lauded) Uncharted 2: Among Thieves for the Playstation 3.

If you don’t happen to live in Rosemont, Ill., Bellvue, Wash., San Francisco or Thousand Oaks, Calif., there’s good news: In a Reuters interview, Mike Fidler, Sony’s senior vice president of Digital Cinema Solutions and Services, suggests that this isn’t a one-off thing. In explaining that he wants more theaters to go digital, Fidler said that gaming “will be an important part of that equation.”

From Fidler’s remarks, it’s easy to dream up gaming nights, or perhaps the ability to rent out a theater for an evening of Killzone 2. A Canadian chain already does this during off-peak times, for the totally reasonable price of $169 for two hours and up to 12 people (a movie ticket doesn’t cost that much less at that rate).

Not to be a party pooper, but I see a major roadblock here. The best big-screen games — shooters and racing games — can at most be enjoyed by four people at a time, and even splitting the screen reduces the coolness factor. Given that a movie theater is designed to entertain lots of people, you’d be looking at minimal playing time with any more than a dozen participants. And let’s face it, most games aren’t that fun to watch from the sidelines.

If Sony does get the Playstation 3 into more theaters, I’m sure the Uncharted 2 event won’t be the last of its kind, but for most of us, I have a feeling that any significant gaming time in a theater will remain a fantasy.

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Sony: No UMD Transfers for PSP Go

Posted by Jared Newman on September 25, 2009 at 2:02 pm

Those who want in on Sony’s download-only PSP Go will have to leave their disc-based games behind, as there won’t be any way to convert games from UMD to digital form.

Delivering the bad news to Kotaku, Sony said that “due to legal and technical reasons we will not be offering the program at this time.” Sony didn’t elaborate on its reasons, but I can take a crack at it:

When Sony announced the PSP Go at E3 this year, John Koller, Sony’s hardware marketing director, said that a “good will program” to convert UMDs would be announced soon. There was speculation that retailers would convert UMD games through kiosks at their stores.

That sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s a nightmare. If a store such as Gamestop kept the UMDs after every conversion, it wouldn’t take long before stores become overwhelmed with used PSP games. The value of those games would plummet, forcing Gamestop to lower its prices, which I’m sure it doesn’t want to do.

Then, there are the game publishers, who’d have to agree on letting their UMD-based games get copied into digital form. That’s messy enough from a legal standpoint, but it has no benefits as a business proposition. Unless Sony planned to pay publishers for their cooperation, digital conversion would only amount to a lost sale, with retailers selling the used UMD copies instead of new ones (at greatly reduced prices, mind you).

In the end, I doubt there was enough “good will” from all parties involved to push a conversion program through. I’m reminded of how Sony once promised that the Playstation 3 would be backwards compatible with Playstation 2 games, only to have that support erode steadily over the years.

Adding insult to injury for U.S. customers, there’s a rewards program in Europe where existing PSP owners will get three free games for buying and registering their PSP Go. That program won’t come stateside, as a Sony representative explained that the U.S. has a “dual platform strategy.” In other words, don’t upgrade.

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Good: ESRB Pre-Loads PSP Go With a Ratings Guide

Posted by Jared Newman on September 18, 2009 at 4:19 pm

pspgoratings Let’s just assume for a minute that it’s an ideal world, where parents keep a watchful eye on the video games their kids are playing.

If that’s the case, it’s great news that Sony plans to load a video game ratings guide directly onto the PSP, through a partnership with the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

The guide explains the meaning behind ESRB ratings, along with movie ratings from the MPAA. It also provides a walkthrough for setting up parental controls on the PSP Go.

While it’d be great to see this functionality on all gaming consoles, it’s especially important to the PSP Go. The handheld gaming device, coming October 1, doesn’t support physical media, so every bit of content is downloaded directly onto the console.

That means no game boxes, unless you plan to buy download vouchers from Gamestop. While resources such as WhatTheyPlay, Gaming With Children and the ESRB’s own Web site are already available to parents who actively get involved with their kids’ gaming, the rating on the box remains the most convenient way of knowing what games are appropriate.

Packing a ratings guide onto the PSP Go isn’t just useful to parents, it’s a clever move by the games industry to head off inevitable criticism. Once politicians and other video game alarmists realize the box has gone away, they’ll target the PSP Go for providing easy access to explicit materials. When that happens, Sony and the ESRB can point to this ratings guide and say they did the best they could.

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