PlayStation®3 General Discussion

[ebbeyes]

I think the law suit will gain momentum because it branches out to a trend that is developing where features of a product are taken away, I think people will take notice of the wider implications of the outcome of this case. If the worse where to happen, products  should be clearly labled with a on box warning that it 'may not do what it is advertised to do over time'. The fact that you get to choose what features you lose should not be a factor.

I chose to keep the linux feature as I am more interested in development of technology on this platform then online gameplay and after reading in to the 'other os' topic I have become interested in the development effort and started to read through docs and experiment. So far if anything it has proved very insightfull and I have already started to contribute in a small way. It seems quite a few people are doing the same so prospects look good (:

[fleinn]

Pretty much. Regardless, Sony has said and defended that their product may change at any time for any reason, regardless of what the customer bought at the time of the purchase. ..

[ebbeyes]

A very valid point and also where the lines start to blur as there terms and conditions start to clash (maybe the word is nudge) with various laws and ethical considerations. I see the loss of features as a very large consideration of the product and being tucked away in there eula is irresponsible especially as other OS was described the manuals that came with the system. I also seem to recall it being in there advertising? Don't quote me on that though. A reasonable compromise would of been to have been to have a warning in the manual or on the box.

If you look at the conditions behind cigarette sales there have to stick a big hefty warning on top of the box, can you imagine if electronics had a big warning stating "Warning this product may compromise your rights"  It might sound absurd, but the 'erosion' of consumer rights is just a slower and quieter way of removing them. Compromises must be made on both sides and I'm not just referring to Sony .

[fleinn]

Mm. "This product's services may change at any time for whatever reason". Or "by buying this product, you resign your consumer rights when buying a product".

I mean, they used to have the user-agreement in there so that if they changed the product physically, no one would come around afterwards and sue them for damages since it was different to a previous batch. We also knew that parts of the PSN would change. We all understood that - whether they would add or remove PSN services, or bring servers offline if there weren't enough people playing, etc - I don't think anyone really thought that was never going to happen.

Of course - since it was marketed as a media hub, I expected the product to get more codec support, rather than a movie download service /first/. Just as I expected OtherOS to stay, because the box came with that function.

But because of the way Sony works, we really do get these priorities skewed. They keep servers for games running, even though there are a total of 1000 people playing a day. But they won't actually scale the servers, or maintain the service enough so that it won't lag even on the server-side. Which of course explains why there are so few players. In the same way, the codec support is non-existent, even if there are some significant (but easily amended) lacks that really should be addressed. And would make people use the box as a media-hub more as well... subtitle support, a few container formats, timing issues with certain formats. It's very easy fixes that won't take much time or cost much to implement.

But those fall off the plan, in favour of focusing on individual projects that pay off on their own. That's what Sony has done with the Ps3 in the end now. And the end result is a less feature-packed box, with more fractured services on it. And no one seems to catch on to this for some reason, or how damaging that really is to Sony if they want to sell the product.. Which no doubt happens because of SonyHQ's magnificent pre-set standards for profit that projects are supposed to meet.. In the way that they can be selling the PS Store without really having any link to whether or not the games you would buy content on the store for actually works online..

..but whatever.

[Standard_Gamer]

sucks, dont it?

And the fact that they keep using a misleading slogan "It only does everything". I smell corruption at SCEA that wasnt there before while the father was still there. But when daddy leaves, the son has the power to corrupt what his father created.

[andyrome64]

In my opinion, the idea of the PS3 as a media hub is long gone.... the PS3 is just a gaming console... if there was ever a chance to make it something more than that, Sony has missed the boat.

- no flac support

- no ntfs support (buying an external drive and having to search around for utilities to re-format with FAT is ridiculous)

- no OtherOS support

- no DLNA server support (again it's ridiculous that you can copy a file from a PC to the PS3 but not the other way around)

There are just too many limitations to call the PS3 a media hub.

Seriously even the Sony fanbois must admit that the claim that if you have a PS3 you don't need a PC is utterly pathetic... you can't even buy a USB drive and use it on the PS3 if you don't have a PC to reformat it! And let's not even mention the PS3 web browser

[fleinn]

Mm. Just imagine if they took the cost of developing the picture-viewer program, along with the cost of maintaining the individual stores for all the european countries (I mean, they separately submit content for every store, then decide at some point what content will be translated and delayed for yonks - which then means it either is outdated if it's released, or not released at all).... along with the cost of implementing firmware releases to appease the paranoia of SCE's shareholders.... imagine if they took the cost of that and put it into improving divx support, FLAC, mkv, better mp4 container support. Then worked actively on improving the mediaserver function, and tested it so it would work reliably in normal network conditions. They could fix the streaming/buffer issues with playing back films as well - not in the least because it would also improve their video-store (for the ones who are lucky enough to have it, I mean.. as long as they're trying to sell the product, which they presumably are).

...if they did that, how much money would they earn, even before the sales of the boxes, and proceeds from the PSN would be factored in?

No..no - let's not think about that - let's just make First Play exclusive to the UK instead, because Sony Europe can't decide whether to sub it, or create their own local versions first. Seriously, the amount of lost opportunities Sony has had with the ps3.... My god. They're almost as many as the flat out wrong choices that has been made.

But Sony expects publishers to /want/ to publish their content on the PSN after seeing all of this? Or any developers to make an effort to create content on their platform? And in the end Sony decides to sabotage the hobby-developers as well. It's just.. amazing. I simply have a hard time believing that Sony would do all of these things in succession, if they actually wanted to sell their product and eventually earn money on it.