It seems we’ve seen a lot of great concepts from Sony for their PlayStation 3 product line but very little has managed to hit the software virtual shelves. We’ve heard of Sony’s Afrika for the PS3 back at E3 in 2006 and we’re looking at it for 2008’s holiday lineup.
We’ve heard about Sony Home for years as well, but that’s now in some type of beta. It was supposed to be an open beta but that didn’t seem to work out and now it’s closed beta only. Recently they pushed out a firmware update that bricked PlayStation 3 consoles or at least screwed up many of them in varying levels.
Are they just really bad at software development and road map predictions? As a hardware development company they’ve put out some hardcore products, stone cold stable in terms of design and efficiency from the Walk Man to the PS3. Their products are practical in design, for the most part, fairly pretty, stable and function as designed. Yet they come up short on software time and time again.
One of the contributors at 2old2play had some things to say about Sony’s development efforts:
“Having worked at Sony as a Creative Designer two years ago, it doesn’t surprise me that they have still yet to release Home. While there, I was working on their Station Launcher application which was supposed to be released in late 2006. However, the Launcher app is still only in Beta to this day.” (2old2play.com)
In many ways their the anti-Microsoft in their approach and commitments. While Microsoft ships hardware that has what must be a 60% failure rate Sony ships hardware which works fairly well. On the flip side, Microsoft publishes a large quantity of software for all their products and has done very well in the business. Nobody can say it’s 100% perfect but it tends to get better with age or, at least, grow on you.
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@ Black Friday 2012
I was pretty disappointed in how “Black Friday” was handled in Romania. Plenty of retailers increased the price a week before, so that they could do a 40% slash to get the price back to the old value.
@Nintendo Power’s last issue released
It also depends how many people want it. Here’s an example: our major cable provider decided to not renew the contract it had with Discovery Channel. Why? Because just 0.9% of the people watched it.
How many people read “Nintendo Power”?
@Blizzard acquired ‘Project Blackstone‘ domain
It could be a preventive buy, I guess. Still, not really hyped about it, Blizzard lost me since always-online DRM; last game I played from them was Warcraft III and Frozen Throne.
@Dead Island: Riptide banned in Germany
Funny though, there are plenty of games (not just Gears of War) where players blow other human-like character to bits, and those are still available in Germany.
But hey, what do I know, perhaps the baddies in those games bleed green goo …
@QOTW: No.
Not interested to comment on any of the news articles, I just came to ask: “Guess who has two thumbs and got the Wii U before Paul did?”. I did.
@QOTW: Never
Just found out about this podcast and was amused that there was a topic discussed, I just held a speech on in school. Censoring, banning etc. in Germany.
The USK is all right, they just rate the games like any other institue that rates games. The problem is the BPjM (the young protection thing you translated). They decide what gets banned and lands on the index etc. They’re not only after games, but after media in general. They just recently banned Steel Panther’s 1 year old album “Balls Out” for no reason given. Wrote them a mail (respectful, of course) and got no answer whatsoever. So did the German Metal Hammer-magazine. Same answer.
They ban whatever they want to. Sometimes there’s no system behind it. Dishonored came out here completely uncensored, this means I, as Corvo, can decapitate enemies and throw their heads around. Kinda humiliating to the corpse, isn’t it?
If anyone is interested in how cuts on games look like, I recommend http://www.schnittberichte.com
especially the Bulletstorm one.
QOTW: Never.
@QOTW:
Yeah… Nintendo World yes, Nintendo Power NO.
Nintendo World had the “Approved By Nintendo” seal, so, i bought them for a couple of years…