Slashdot Mirror
Sony Still Not Happy With 'Home'
1up is reporting on comments made by Sony's Kaz Hirai to the Japanese magazine Famitsu. Hirai states that he personally is still not completely satisfied with the way Sony's ambitious Home project is shaping up. He also talks about the loss of the Monster Hunter franchise to the Wii, the lack of backwards compatibility in the newest version of the PS3, and other weighty holiday issues. "If anything, we believe the delay would have a positive effect. I personally am not satisfied with the current version of Home. This is a very big project for the PS3 and we want to make sure that we deliver to our hearts content. We hope everyone will look forward to its spring release next year."
Home is where the heart is.
And if you're not content with your home, wheres your heart gonna be?
(Hopefully not playing the Wii)
Periwinkle blue?
Can my boys get a pair o' dem shoes?
Citizens of Home are finding their town shrouded in a mysterious vapor, causing residents to question whether or not they will ever actually exist.
Details at 11.
Given that he's the CEO of Sony's gaming division, I guess if he's not happy he is empowered to manage and organize so that he can become happy with it. Whining to the press about it certainly won't make it better.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Sony should probably be unhappy with a wide variety of PS3-related issues.
It's great fun seeing an arrogant bully get kicked square in the nuts and fold like a cheap lawn chair, but the desire to see them fail is all out of my system now. It's important that they succeed.
but I bought my PS3 to play HD games. I really could not care less about Home and I hope to hell that Home doesn't replace the awesome XMB interface.
Obviously, I am not the target audience here, but does a target audience even exist? I honestly do not see what Sony is attempting to achieve with Home other than unnecessarily complicate the on-line experience. I'd rather Sony put the effort into creating some good games, which are in remarkably short supply at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I love my PS3 (and my 360), but Home has zero appeal to me on machine I bought to play Drake's Fortune and Assassin's Creed.
they'd widgetize the whole thing and let their users decide how the place looks.
How is it spin to report what Kaz Hirai himself said?
The summary lists some topics that Hirai discusses and then ends with a verbatim quote. That's not spin.
Which isnt to say Zonk isn't a fanboy or anti-sony, just that this particular story seems fair.
I don't like replying to AC trolls, but tell me... how exactly is this article a bunch of "Zonk hates teh Sony fanboy crap?"
The article summary simply described the contents of a third-party source. There was no blatant negative spin put into the summary or the choice of quote. I was wondering why I hadn't heard much about Home lately. I read the article, and now I know what at least part of the holdup is. Since I don't spend all day trolling gaming blogs and fanboy sites, this was news to me. And for putting a link to this news on Slashdot, I say Thank you, Zonk.
wtf? "Executive thinks unreleased product needs more work before it can be released". Duh?
With your incredible insight I'm sure you can expect an invitation to the Sony board very shortly......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Interestingly enough, the same could be said about you.
I don't understand the mentality either, but it is big in political campaigns as well. Personally I've never been a fan of voting for someone who's platform is based on "I'm better than so and so, because they do ___". It tells me they have nothing to offer but criticism. This however must work on some level otherwise people wouldn't still do it, right?
"Why? Really why is it important to anyone but themselves that they succeed?"
It's important because a very large base of owners will allow companies to keep making games with high development costs. Right now they're doing it primarily on faith.
So how much are you getting paid, or are you this delusional in real life?
Seriously, there is no unbiased source that would claim the PS3's line-up this christmas is anything but pure dogshit in comparison to their competition, and every interesting game (MGS, FFXIII) has been delayed until the PS3's userbase is acceptable.
The PS3 doesn't have "Superior Graphics" unless by better you mean the PS3 runs the same game as the XBox 360 at a dramatically worse frame-rate. Blu-Ray is a waste of money being that you can buy a HD-DVD player for $99 and if it wasn't for the PS3 we wouldn't even care that it existed.
What a troll man, please get of /. and go read your "news" from Sonydefenseforce.com please, much more suited to trolls like you.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
I'm not talknig about the holiday season, I'm talking about the line-up from now until Q2 2008... and besides the multi-platform stuff, I can't find any really good exclusives for the 360 that I'd really want. Do you know about the limitations of that beloved HD-DVD that u speak so highly of? That stupid movie transformers couldn't even fit HD audio on it with the video. So you pay thousands of dollars for your HDTV and surround sound system with all the bells and whistles just to buy some HD-DVDs that can't support the audio. Sorry, but seems to me like with the advent of organic dye for the blu-rays and the huge 100-200GB capacities of the disc makes HD-DVD worthless. Now I ask YOU how much YOU are getting paid because I know Microsoft has millions of dollars to give away to morons.
"What the fuck are you babbling about? issues? The hardware is rock solid with people playing games and folding at home for months at a time."
Never said a word about the hardware. I own a PS3 (no games, but lots of movies). Their issues are in every single other area, including sales, marketing, and third party support services. They're blowing it. If you don't think they have issues, think again.
"BluRay has won the next gen format war."
They have not. There's at least 18 months left in this silly war, and Sony never wins format wars. I'm buying the new Samsung dual-format player in January because the war is going to continue.
Sony has to outsell the 360 by over 200,000 units every month for until 2012 just to catch up.
Lets see here... brand-spanking new slashdot account (first ever comment is THIS?)... glowing praise of PS3 while dissing all the competitors... "hip" substitution of "u" for "you"...
Looks like a textbook case of astroturfing to me.
Seriously, what's with the extra helping of SonyDefenseForce trolls today? Is the end of the pay period and their crap quotas need to be filled by today or something?
The 2.00 update would be newsworthy if it actually did something that the majority of users cared about. But given the offered changes, I think that the delay of a highly hyped and discussed feature is just as newsworthy (if not more so) than the addition of a few minor tweaks. Do you think also slashdot should post an article every time (insert OS of choice here) releases a minor update?
It's not that Zonk is a fanboy, it's just that he is a terrible poster with nothing interesting to say.
The whole "just wait...You'll see!" attitude of Sony's and their fans is tiring.
First off, "coming soon!" doesn't sell hardware.
Second, there's no guarantee that those big titles will even come out on time, or will even be any good to begin with. Look at 2007. MGS4 - slipped. Home - Slipped. Lair - Probably the most disappointing game of the year.
Even if the upcoming titles come out on time and will be good, it may be literally too little too late. Right now Sony is facing their second holiday season of being dead last. Their current library can't compare to that of the 360's or the Wii's. Sony has tried to address the price issue by creating their 4th(!) console model in under 12 months, but them lobotomized it by removing all PS2 backwards compatibility from it!
Sony is on a slippery precipice. Unless they can get more PS3s and games into peoples' hands, and soon, developers are going to grow tired of waiting and will stop making PS3 exclusive games (or stop developing for the PS3 altogether) at which point, it's game over for the PS3. 2008 is really going to be the PS3's last chance. Blow it, and the PS3 won't survive to see Christmas 2009.
As for blu-ray and hd-dvd movies, the whole market is messed up. Seriously, any idiotic company who thinks customers are going to willing to buy a device that can only play 50% of the movies on the market should just be put out of our miseries. Seriously, who's bright idea was it to make the consumer choose? Despite all the dick-waving that fanboys like you are doing, there's really no difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Both hold HD video and surround sound. Beyond that, you have to be a fanboy, or an engineer who's more interested in technical minutiae than just watching movies.
Most of the market that can even take advantage of these HD formats are just sitting on the sidelines letting the other idiots waste their money and get burned in yet another stupid format war. Seriously, have folks forgotten the mess that still is DVD-R vs. DVD+R? Two formats, doing identical things, but in an incompatible manner, fight for market domination until one company says "why choose?" and comes out with a hybrid drive that handles both. The same will happen for HD video, and when those drives come out, every player that can't play both formats will be instantly obsolete. Which again, just proves how stupid both sides in this "war" are being...
The updatee which installed that annoying little scrolling thing which constantly tells me meaningless gibberish? Yay, let's discuss that.
Remember in the early 90s when everyone thought online shops would be virtual 3D things where you walk through virtual 3D stores, put virtual 3D goods into your virtual 3D basket, then virtually carry your 3D basket to a virtual 3D cash register and virtually paid virtual 3D money?
That's Home, except for online communities and videogame matchmaking instead of online shopping.
Instead of a linear list of buddies you can chat with, invite to games or otherwise interact, you get a virtual 3D home with virtual furniture (that you actually buy with real money). You can then walk around with your buddies, go to movie theatres or play games. It's all very weird, 90s-ish, and a bit dumb.
I suggest you try actually playing with a Wii. One of the main complaints people have is that you don't have to get up to play.
...I will urinate myself while convulsing with laughter if a new blade appears on xbox live offering a very, very similar virtual environment. Well at least they have the servers to run such a venture.
The main reason why TimeBomb360 has more games than PS3 is because they dumped XBox1. Most of the game publishers had to move on to the TimeBomb360, while they could still release PS2 games for PS3 (thanks to it's high percentage of backwards compatibility). By removing the backwards compatibility in the latest 40GB PS3, Sony is encouraging more game publishers to release PS3 versions.
You are comparing Blu-ray/HD-DVD against DVD-R/DVD+R, but they are not identical. Blu-ray offers substantially more storage space per layer than HD-DVD while DVD-R/DVD+R did not. What's this has got to do with 'Home' anyway?
Microsoft's move from Xbox to the 360 has nothing to do with the number of games. Developers knew well in advance that the 360 was going to be coming out, and had plenty of time to transition over as they saw fit. Even after the 360 came out, there were still a handful of Xbox games that came out afterwards. In addition, Playstation developers had even MORE time. Sony delayed the launch of the PS3 by 6 months for US and Japan, which most people assumed would have been used by the developers to work out any problems left in their launch titles, which are always under an extreme deadline. That didn't happen. In addition, several PS3 titles slipped several months - including Lair - and yet these delays seem to have done nothing for the final product.
As for the lobotomized 40GB PS3, removing backwards compatibility just makes the jump from PS2 to PS3 that more daunting. A lot of PS2 owners don't want to get rid of their PS2 games, but also think $500 is too expensive for a "partially compatible" PS3. As for developers, what do you think they're going to do when they look at the sales numbers, see that the PS2 is STILL outselling the PS3 in terms of hardware AND software, realize they could bang out a PS2 game fairly quickly, or struggle to produce a PS3 game that won't sell? Either that, or the same developers will notice that both the 360 and Wii are outselling the PS3 by a large margin, have better attach rates (more titles sold per console) and decide that the PS3 probably isn't the best choice for focusing their next-gen efforts on.
Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD hold a full length feature movie in HD, with multiple soundtracks in surround sound, and have space left over for various sundry extras, all on one side of one disc. Therefore, from the point of view of the home video consumer, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray ARE IDENTICAL. Disc size does not matter here. Sure, when you're dealing with, say, TV programs, more space could mean more episodes per disc, and less discs on the shelf. But as we've seen with plain-old-DVD, studios RARELY used up an entire single-layered DVD, much less a dual-layered one. Do you really think things will change with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray?
Even if you really are a true size-queen, there are already multi-layer HD-DVDs under development which basically match Blu-Ray's sizes. Big whoop. The size issue will mainly be interesting to computer users, but with PC based burnable drives still costing close to $1000, not to mention the stupid format war, it'll be awhile before we see people making backups using these formats.
Sony's HOME project is their attempt at creating a seamless online world which will help players create and join online game sessions, as well as just hang out and socialize. Sony hyped HOME a lot during last year's E3, and the months leading up to their first public beta last summer. HOME was supposed to have gone live late last month, but then got delayed - like so many other PS3-related items - until next April or so. Honestly, until April, the PS3 is incomplete. It lacks its true controller - the DS3 (due in the US in April 2008) and its current online network is basically just a place holder for HOME (also due in April 2008).