News Sony's multiplayer farce

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/09/19/Sony_Tony_Hawks_Multiplayer_Snub/

 

The sad thing is, all these new Sony tidbits coming to light no longer make me think, "My God, Sony what are you doing!?"

Now i just ready it and 'accept' it like the Middle East crisis -- essentially, 'Always has, Always will...'

Horrible way to see it but that's how Sony has conditioned me now...

 

No matter what happens the PS3 will sell, but the amount it will is dwindling each press release.

 

Here is what a developer relations rep at one of the PS3 Online middleware partners (Quazal) had to say on another board about this:

So it sounds like you're not getting the full story, and Neversoft might just be indulging in a little scapegoating here. Afterall, Sony and other third parties have already even demonstrated and allowed journalists to play various launch games online.

 

Just like any other media news medium. They will focus on all the bad points of sony and think of something bad about anything and everything.

just waiting for someone to moan about say the power lead. Maybe thats too short or too long.

online multi on Tony hawks is no loss. Its a naff game.

 

Exactly, but how many bad news articles are there regarding the x360 or the Wii? No where near as many...

 

Remember, Nintendo's 3rd party games aren't gonna have online at launch, either. Or at least, thats also how the rumour goes.

Makes those launch games a little less attractive :/

Aggies

 

I dunno, the last couple of weeks haven't been great for the Wii, with the cancellation of it's region free capability and it's stupid UK price which puts it not far below a 360.

 

off topic: Isn't japan classed as region 2, which happens to be the same as the UK? Or is that just when it comes to UMD's?

on topic: One more reason not to get a PS3... So why do i still want one? I won't be able to afford one. Not with my new pc, wii and xbox that i'll be getting (job's going well ) but i still want one...

I didn't know about the new tony hawks game actually. And i don't know what it is about slow motion, but by golly, that looks freaky awesome!

 

Whatever brings in the hits. Of course, there has been good news for PS3 lately, but it's not nearly as interesting to some people. For example - a third party pulling the plug on multiplayer is worth highlighting, but 40 players online in another is not. And so on.

I don't want to victimise the PS3 here, but the blogosphere seems to have embraced a fairly negative agenda when it comes to it, or at least certain high profile blogs, and that's unfortunately feeding out onto sites like this. Ditto with embarassments like this:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/06/05/PS3_hardware_could_be_hobbled/

Internet Journalism - post something controversial, or even just something apparently controversial, and watch it grow. What gets me most is that 9 times out of 10, sites just act as repeaters, without performing any due investigation or analysis of their own, just parroting off the opinion or 'insight' of someone else, without consideration for whether it's accurate or the whole story. Doesn't just go for PS3, of course, but it's been a good example of late in many ways.

 

I would hardly say that controversial news being popular is something limited to internet journalism. If you read the national newspapers you'll find most of the information regarding the next generation format is based on Sony's failings rather than successes. It is interesting to read your points LeapingFrog however I must disagree:

The truth is Sony is expected to get players online, if we wrote a news story about everything a company does 'right' then we would be writing news all the time. It is when Sony (and the related companies) get things wrong that they get themselves in the news.

I appreciate Sony has come in for a rough ride in recent weeks/months but there is good reason for that, a delayed release, the price point, the controversy surrounding blu-ray, the loss of many exclusive titles, the dodgy advertising the list could go on.

 

Thats not much really. I think the £180 price point is very good (considering that the 360 core still needs a memory stick just to save games), and as not many people import then reigion free isn't that much of a biggie. It certainly doesn't affect me or my mates in the slightest.

So the Wii has had two peices of bad press in the last couple of weeks. The 360 had problems after launch, but the PS3 is having problems *before* launch, not to mention the after launch hardware faults.

Even if one developer managed to get 40 online at the same time it isn't exactly ground breaking when PC has had more than that for a long time. The real story here isn't that a developer dropped a pointless multipayer component from a boring game, but that Sony is continuing to loose the support of the big games studios.

 

I'm presenting my point of view as a gamer. I like to see the good and the bad news. Lots of things interest me as a gamer, not just when a screw-up happens. Only reporting on the screw-ups colours your perception and lends the impression (for the reader and the journalist) that things are worse than they actually are. And I certainly stick by my comments that people shouldn't engage in typical copy-and-paste internet journalism - you should look for opportunities to contribute something more to the story. This story would be a good one to investigate, for example, but we just get a repetition of the original.

What many exclusives has that been, then? (And please don't count Assassin's Creed among them - anyone expecting Ubi-soft to make a game exclusive to one platform is pretty naive.)

This is kind of what I mean. All of this is engendering a perception worse than reality - a storm in a teacup, in most regards. Barring the actually important things like price or release.

Sure, but we haven't seen many console games with 40 players online. Live hasn't offered that much at all. Its premiere online experience this winter (Gears of War) is 8 players only, for example.

That's a very big exaggeration. First, the suggestion that Sony is losing support of big name studios as a trend (?) and second that they're losing the support of Neversoft in the first place. Neversoft is still supporting PS3, they simply do not have the time/tools/inclination to make their launch game online. Other developers do. And you can be sure the next Tony Hawks game will be online on PS3.

It's interesting, also, that the news that Wii wouldn't have any third party online games at all this year wasn't as widely reported, and I don't think Bit-tech picked up on it. But news of one PS3 game not being online gets a much higher profile and greeted as a farce. I don't want to seem like I'm just moaning and moaning, but I think it's indicative of the general trend in reporting and the approach taken a lot of the time.

 

"Did you expect things to go this badly for Sony?"

yes.

 

Not really. I've personally never really cared for online play for console games, and I'm sure I'm not alone. You can't really have four people gathered around a keyboard, and you tend to lose tha interpersonal experience if you and your three friends are all playing online instead of in the same room.

So, Sony is more screwed than ever. How unsurprising.

 

I would call not supporting one of the key features of next gen console gaming "a lack of support". They lost the exclusivity of FF and Asassins Creed to name the first two off my head. Loosing support doens't mean that they loose the devs entirely (which wasn't what I said if you cared to take a less black and white view). When even some of your big name exclusive titles migrate to multiplatform releases you know you are in trouble. MS hasn't had that kind of trouble with the xbox and has gained the rights to the only games on the PS3 that interested me.

 

The FF main series is exclusive to PS3. Last generation we already had FFXI and FF:CC on platforms other than Playstation. Nothing has changed in that regard.

And as I said, Assassin's Creed was never truly exclusive to PS3. Ubi-soft just don't do exclusives, at least with their bigger games.

BS, if you'd care to pay attention. Only today Ninja Gaiden has been announced for PS3. That was one of Microsoft's biggest exclusives last generation, so this is a major kick in the nads for them. Next up: Oblivion. (Hasn't been confirmed just yet, but it will be very soon, just wait and see ).

In fact, I'd go as far to say that MS is losing more of their higher profile exclusives than Sony is. I can't think of any of the big Playstation exclusives that Microsoft has gotten their hands on yet.

 

I dont want to seem offensive and please dont take me that way because i wholeheartedly agree;

but its kinda abit "iffy" that the writers here hate Sony so much. It kinda influences others into this hate frame of mind and although i hate sony as much as you guys (just lookup some of my posts) its kinda worrying for a site that i guess...is suppose to be impartial(are you?) slag them off so much?

Sorry perhaps im arguing for the sake of arguing but just something that crossed my mind...im going to get flamed now arnt i?

p.s
I think sony is the devil btw.

 

I can see where you're coming from, but with the ever-growing list of cock-ups they keep making, is it any wonder that people are losing faith and slagging them off? I guess it's difficult to be impartial when every other day there's a new story, detailing what they've done wrong. You know, I'm actually getting bored of hearing about their misfortune...it just causes arguments between the haters and the fanboys.

Head over to any of the Sony fan-based sites though and you'll see the other end of the spectrum - they actually manage to turn bad news into good news (like the Sony fanboys here @ bt...you know who you are!)