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California Man Sues Sony Because Killzone: Shadowfall Isn't Really 1080
Sonny Yatsen (603655) writes A California man with nothing better to do has launched a class-action lawsuit against Sony because he claims he was harmed because Killzone: Shadowfall's multiplayer mode doesn't have native 1080p resolution as Sony originally claimed. He now demands 'all economic, monetary, actual, consequential, statutory and compensatory damages' as well as punitive damages from Sony.
as much as I don't care, some game companies need their hands slapped when it comes to false advertising. anyone remember simcity 4 multiplayer?
One one hand, this is a stupid frivolous lawsuit, but on the other hand game publishers have been feeding us so much bullshit and lies that I wish this guy would win just to make a point.
So he should just take it up the rear and not do anything about the company's lies? BOHICA! I'm glad he's suing. Let him represent the rest of us. Hopefully, companies will learn that they can't get away with this BS.
I'm for it. Blatant false advertizing needs to be punished and this is the route that's available to him.
what is 1080p? 1080p means there will be 1920x1080 pixels on a screen scanned top to bottom every frame. That is it. 960x1080 presented at 1920x1080 is 1080p. This still happens on TV all the time. 960x720 as 1280x720 is regularly used on TV. Its still 720p.
In all seriousness.... what kind of society have we become when we sue over something so meaningless?
The guy just wants his $50 back because the graphics in the game aren't as good as advertised. Frankly, that's actually a reasonable request. You tell someone the game will perform some technical feat, and it doesn't, no shit the customer wants a refund.
Killzone's multiplayer mode actually outputs natively in 960x1080 resolution, half of the 1920x1080 standard for "1080p." To output full 1080p graphics, this source image is fixed with a "temporal upscale" that fills in gaps with a horizontal interlace made up of pixels from the previous frame. The result is graphical performance that the lawsuit (and many reviews) call "blurry to the point of distraction."
Sony and developer Guerrilla Games addressed these complaints in a blog post at the time, laying out the details of this "temporal projection" pixel filling and arguing that it indeed provides "subjectively similar results" to native 1080p rendering. Ladore's lawsuit isn't satisfied by this argument. "While this reconstruction technique might be novel, it is decidedly not the 'native 1080p' Sony promised," the complaint argues.
- so every second line consists of pixels from previous frames, but those are still pixels that are not the same as the ones in the current frame, the output has all of the 1920x1080 pixels in it, it's not like 2 lines of pixels are just 1 line stretched vertically. Technically Sony should win this.
Practically I hate the 1080p standard. Whatever happened to 1920x1200? When I need another monitor for the office, I always look for these, they are harder to come by nowadays.
You can't handle the truth.
That's a serious first world problem he's got there.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
.... Awwww, do I even need a reason?
If I sprain my ankle, while I'm robbing your place.
If I hurt my knuckles, when I punch you in the face!
I'm gonna sue, sue, yes I'm gonna sue!
Sue, sue, yeah, that's what I'm gonna do!
I'm gonna sue, sue, yes I'm gonna sue!
Sue, sue, I might even sue you! Ugh!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Kind of a trollish headline, but both Sony and Microsoft have advertised 1080p as one of this generations' primary selling points - how is their continued inability to deliver upon this not false advertising, and how else are we to change their behavior if not through legal action? (Please don't say "boycott".)
I too am sick of companies getting away with false advertizing of all kinds. (This wouldn't be a problem if it was simply a failure to develop according to plan, but they also advertize their resolution on the box.)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I don't get what the .gif is supposed to mean. Are you trying to reference an image? Why didn't you hyperlink to it?
Fucking puerile moron.
Boy, that escalated quickly!
.jpg :)
He now demands 'all economic, monetary, actual, consequential, statutory and compensatory damages' as well as punitive damages from Sony.
In other words, he wants to claim damages of absolutely nothing, and for that figure to be trebled. Thankfully for Sony, three times nothing is still nothing.
The game does run at 1080P in single player, the issue is that the game does not run at true 1080P in multi player.
I don't really see the issue myself, as much as I dislike Sony they probably should win this one.
Besides the whole issue will probably disappear in a couple of patches.... (everything is in beta these days.)
What is this garbage? Make all games 1920x1080, 60 fps, low latency. The hardware is powerful enough to make even good-looking games with these specs if you want to.
I don't get what the .gif is supposed to mean. Are you trying to reference an image? Why didn't you hyperlink to it?
Fucking puerile moron.
Boy, that escalated quickly!
.jpg :)
Whatever... I learned a new word today! puerile.png FTW.
Does YIFY work for Sony?
Modern consoles still can't output a 1920x1080 image? Odd. The graphics card in my PC was pumping out 2560x1440 years ago.
with the PS3 and all that, with only a few 2D games making the 1080p mark and the rampant fanboys that preach how true HD their upscaled games are.
They're referring to a well-known reaction gif, but can't be arsed to actually provide a link to the file. It's laziness, not puerility.
These companies shouldn't be allowed to advertise whatever they want and not hold to it.
Hope Sony finally learns a lesson.
Essentially (as many others have already pointed out), they gave him a 1080i game - possibly at a crappier framerate than even real 1080i - while advertising 1080p.
It would be interesting to see how this pans out as I'm guessing this is pretty common for many games, and not just Killzone
People with functioning brains will remember CRT monitors measured in inches, hard drives measured in 1000 instead of 1024 kbytes, 4G phones that weren't. Nothing happened to them, and nothing will happen in this instance. The judge will rule: It's common advertising, all vendors do it, and people understand what it means, so worrying about it is being pedantic.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
It's not hard to find.webp
If he wins, his lawyers will be paid in dollars, his compensation will be in the form of vouchers for some 3rd rate games.
Namely the "no refunds EVAR" on games that retailers seem to take. Even if it doesn't work, oh well too bad it's software so you can't have your money back. It really shouldn't be allowed. Anything else you can take back if there's a problem, but not software because "Oh you might be an evil pirate!"
Most folks watch cable TV thinking it's a pretty good picture. Watch some OTA (over the air) TV and see what you are missing. Sony probably figured that nobody would even notice.
Really? First match.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... we all know that Sony's terms and conditions are not so in favour of the consumer, you basically have to agree that they still own the OS in your Playstation, and everybody remember that they canceled Linux support, and discontinued the great functionality of the 'fat' PS3. Removed was two USB ports, SD and CF slots, SA-CD compatbility and more.
And when you own a Playstation, you must endure a lot of updates all the time, mostly because Sony needs to protect their OS. Playstation is thus for the professional gamer, who plays his games many times a week, while the occational gamer only would be frustrated because every time he fires up his console, there's a several GB update of the game, and possibly of the OS as well. The games are expencive, and usually have great graphics, by all means.
When Sony has all these terms and conditions and everything, and they protect their system to the point of annoyance of the customers, even if you never intended to break in to the console and install Linux, it is just fair that the book is thrown at Sony, when they fail to deliver the content, exactly as stated on the box.
Despite many annoyances, Playstation's strength, usually is professionality and nice graphics, which is why many still stick with Playstation, instead of just buying a powerful PC, for games, so it seems that this lawsuit is a winnable case. Let's root for the little man, which even a law student or something with spare time on his hands, is compared to Sony.
I like that resolution, too. Reasonable balance between not enough room and dealing with all of the font/scaling issues of the higher-resolution monitors. One of my compadres chose the lower resolution of two high-resolution monitors because the higher just didn't look right in side-by-side comparison. Besides, I look at the monitor much more than the TV, so it should have "more", too.
I recently picked up a Dell U2412M, and may order another to keep as a spare.
Yeah? And the meme of referencing an animated gif with an incorrect file name and no working hyperlink is fucking stupid, and people like you do nothing but contribute to the idiocracy in this country. It's gotten so bad, the god damn eurotrash insult us on this site with impunity while I get down-modded when I respond
Video games are also an adults' hobby these days.
Video games are just as susceptible to race-to-the-bottom style bullet-pointing as any other product, perhaps even more so. The budget for these projects is huge, so the audience is expected to be huge. That means the expectations are that it must be 1080p+ and support 7.1 sound, and that's on top of the vetting process the games go through at Sony/Microsoft (which say things like it must have antialiasing, can't even display a black screen for too long, etc..). On top of that, we expect the graphics to be "awesome" -- certainly more awesome than the last generation of consoles that were well-understood (because they had been around for nearly a decade) and well-optimized as a result.
So when the pressure is on, you start being "creative". In my case (and many PS3 games after) it was implementing alternative anti-aliasing (much like MLAA) on PS3's SPUs. For certain games on Xbox 360 it was rendering to a smaller render target and upscaling because it lacked enough fast memory to do antialiasing on larger render targets. And that's just to satisfy one of the aforementioned bullet points.
New generation of consoles, same requirements and pressures, same style of thinking.
There's a lot of techniques used to pull off good looking games on modest hardware. (And yes, the new generation of consoles are modest hardware.) Sometimes they're well-used. Sometimes they're not.
In this case is the output poor quality? Certainly. Is it 1080p output? At the very end, yes. That's no more false advertising than AMD choosing to name their processors in a suggestive fashion to compete with Pentium 4's higher clock speeds, putting critics' raves on advertisements for bad movies, or buying hamburger patties at McDonald's that contain a high percentage of vegetable byproduct fillers.
This isn't really a technical issue, though. Someone bought a product, found it didn't work for him, and wasn't able to return it. He agreed to those stipulations when he bought it through some sort of nearly implicit but legally binding contract, and now he's not happy that he agreed. He's now trying to get around anti-consumer mechanisms by seeing if he can leverage a false advertising claim which I don't see how he'll succeed in.
Really, I hope he fails to nail them on the false advertising claim, but somehow miraculously manages to bring sanity to consumer software licensing or other shrinkwrapped products.
Yeah? And the meme of referencing an animated gif with an incorrect file name and no working hyperlink is fucking stupid, and people like you do nothing but contribute to the idiocracy in this country. It's gotten so bad, the god damn eurotrash insult us on this site with impunity while I get down-modded when I respond
Eurotrash? Dude, even the igloo-dwelling, beaver hunting, poutine eating canadians are making fun of you.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Look at the original post. It is a class-action.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
$550 is the most expensive item on Google Shopping for "Killzone Shadowfall" - a PS4 bundle with the game included.
I'll even throw in $20.20, for two hours of his time playing before he realized the problem, at President Obama's desired $10.10/hour minimum wage.
If he didn't notice in the first two hours, then obviously it can't matter that much. And if he's filing this lawsuit, then he's someone that shouldn't be earning more than minimum wage...
Anybody commenting on this story without understanding modern rendering algorithms should just bow out. Let me cut to the chase. Interlacing is when you refresh only half of the pixels on a display each frame. That looks okay for some content. What Guerrilla did with KZ:S is a new form of temporal reprojection that allowed them to estimate with high accuracy what half of the pixels should be. This is done by knowing the exact velocity of each pixel on screen and assuming that a pixel has a lot of coherence from frame to frame. They use the current frame and the previous two frames as input to this algorithm. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you should stop running your mouth. The game outputs 1080p, but it uses computational wizardry to double the frame rate. No matter what, you are getting 1920x1080 natively at 30 FPS, but they use temporal coherence to double the frame rate by only rendering half of the pixels explicitly per 60Hz frame. And this gives you all of the benefits of running their game logic at 60Hz.
The single player game doesn't do this. It's just 1080p with an (optionally) unlocked frame rate. Finally, the plaintiff cites "blurriness", but this algorithm works flawlessly for still images. Where it struggles the most is with fast motion, where *motion blur* is added to the image anyway, masking any artifacts. Even if it wasn't, you'd get ghosting from the pixels being refreshed on your LCD. The plaintiff has no objective comparison to say that it looks inferior to a "native" 1080p version of itself. But if that game ran at half the frame rate, I think the plaintiff would still prefer this new "trick" to double the frame rate with marginal image quality loss.
If I ask a grocer for 2kg of potatoes, and he gives me 1kg of potatoes and charges me for 2kg, I think I have a right to complain. Why do we let computer people get away with that sort of nonsense?
In fact, if Microsoft made a table with 64GB of disk space, but it only made 23GB of that available to the user, you'd all complain about that:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
The I stands for interlaced, where the p stands for progressive.
Interlaced video simply looks like ass on crisp displays.
They need to be fined for false marketing here.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
In the Playstation Network Terms of Service, people who agree to use the online system waive their ability to participate in class action lawsuits (last time I looked, it was section 14). You could submit a letter with some legal information to keep your right, but had only 30 days to do it.
Most people likely did not bother, so most of the people affected have a high chance of not being able to actually participate in the lawsuit.
The description in the OP is pretty harsh in saying he's claiming he was harmed by this. I doubt that very much, but indeed this is false advertising and we won't put up with it.
Of course, have you noticed that we all take issues with our video games ultra seriously, like it's a super big deal man, but if shit goes totally sideways for some people locked in their country with bombs raining from overhead, or starving to death, or having acid sprayed at them for wanting to *LEARN*, or cutting themselves picking up sharp metal objects out of trash at age 6 for a meal every day, well that's unfortunate and maybe we should go play some video games to make ourselves feel better.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
The original Xbox even had marginal support for 720p. When the 360 came out, I was so excited to finally have a device that could make use of my extremely expensive 1080p screen... but alas, the majority of games were only 720p. They did look very pretty in their own right... but on a nine-foot wide screen, the jaggies are pretty noticeable. The only games that got 1080p were kids games that required minimal processing power... and pretty sure most kids couldn't give a flying fuck that they were actually getting the full 1080p.
So then the PS4 and Xbox One come along. Surely, with the average three year old gaming PC being easily able to play games in 1080p with moderate graphical quality, these snazzy next gen consoles will FINALLY support the HD standard that came out A DECADE AGO, right?
Noop. And now the PC MASTERRACE fanboys have that much more to gloat over.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!