PlayStation 3 Firmware 2.80 Hidden Change

Strange how Sony never releases a full change log. ps3attitude.com found out one new thing.


The first change comes via the new Text Chat feature that launched with the last upgrade. Instead of a meagre 32 character limit for each line of text, you can now type – wait for it – 64 whole characters on every line!


Good that it includes more characters, anyone else find any "hidden" features?

The Agent is a 1970’s Espionage Game

"It’s a completely different storyline, there is completely different character development. It’s a game about espionage, set in the 1970s. GTA is obviously more about an urban experience, a typically rags to riches experience. Very, very different storylines, very different character development. It’s going to be very fresh for gamers."


It’s not much Info to go on, but at least it’s something. Sounds like the game could be pretty far off though.

Interview article

G4TV: God of War III Demo Full Preview

This is the same demo that was shown at E3, but this is the whole demo. They cut it short at E3. So you can just skip to the 6:00 minute mark.

Be forewarned it’s extremely gory, so it’s not for the weak at heart. A guys heads gets ripped off in extreme detail. Man this mans looks epic! Must have it.

Video Game - E3 2009 - Game Previews

Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick says they ‘might have to stop supporting Sony’.

Bobby Kotick has warned that Sony risks losing support of the mega publisher unless it decides to issue a price cut for the PlayStation 3.

“They have to cut the price, because if they don’t, the attach rates [the number of games each console owner buys] are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony,” Kotick told the Times Online.

When prompted as to when the firm may consider dropping support for Sony, the executive added: “When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console — and the PSP [portable] too.”

“Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation,” he said.

Kotick went on to say that his company forked out $500 million to Sony in royalties and other goods back in 2008, which he said “probably still worked out at 400 percent of the profit they made”.



Shortly after this statement their stock drop 1.18% costing them over a billion dollars. Hmm..

For the first quarter ‘09 Ubisoft posted 15% of sales were for 360 and PS3. Namco reportedly made more on Sony’s systems combined than the Xbox for fiscal year ‘08-’09.

Playstation 3 - 3.273 million, Playstation 2 – 4.630 million units sold,PSP – 4.202 million units sold ,Xbox 360 – 2.704 million units sold) .

Sales of MGS4 boosted Konami’s profits for 2 quarters on a system that was the highest priced and boosted the sales of the PS3 over the 360 for 2 months. So is the XBox brand really more profitable than the Playstation at this point? I don’t think so.

Myth: Game Development Budgets

CNBC reiterates a common development budget myth during an interview with Ubisoft:

Games for the Wii typically cost much less to create, due to the system’s less than cutting-edge components

Wrong. Games for the Wii generally require smaller budgets because they are simpler games.

God of War 2 used a huge development budget on the PS2, which is even older, lower-spec technology than the Wii, but the game used massive quantities of high quality art and animation assets. Something like Mario Party of Wii Play use far less art and animation assets and far simpler game logic despite the fact that the Wii can handle more complex art assets and game logic than the PS2.

Secondly, PS3/360/Wii cross platform titles like Guitar Hero or Call of Duty, probably share most of the man hours of development effort across the different platforms. The PS3/360 versions probably require slightly more because they have richer feature sets and the higher quality art assets do require more labor to create, but overall I suspect that most of the development efforts are well shared.

The audiences that buy fancier hardware generally demand fancier software, but the fancier hardware itself doesn’t generally require more man hours of development given that the complexity of the game is held constant.