Sony confirms its recently announced network numbers include accounts from both the PlayStation 3 and PSP, but no duplicates; analyst estimates 50 percent of PS3s have gone online.
On Tuesday, Sony made a stir when it announced that its free PlayStation Network had attained 14 million "active users."
The number, revealed to celebrate the PlayStation 3's second birthday, was remarkable, as it appeared to match the 14-million-strong subscriber base for the pay-to-play Xbox Live. Microsoft's online service launched in 2002 and has been a central pillar of its strategy since the Xbox 360 launched in 2005, one year before the PS3.
Three days later, Sony has now clarified what exactly it counts as an active PlayStation Network user. "Seeing as PlayStation Portable does include PlayStation Network services (i.e. games store natively on PSP), yes those numbers do include all PlayStation Network registrations," said a Sony representative.
A couple days ago we reported on a few holiday adverts that are part of a “bigger campaign”.
Today Sony's Senior Vice President of Marketing & PlayStation Network Peter Dille detailed their PlayStation: Entertainment Unleashed ad campaign officially via PS Blog as follows:
This is one of the fun parts of my job, when we get to unveil our TV commercials and give you, our loyal fans, a preview of our spots before they hit the airwaves. This year’s campaign is dubbed “Entertainment Unleashed” and for good reason.
The campaign actually began quietly a few weeks back with three fifteen second “tease” executions. Hopefully, you’ve seen these by now. These initial ads depicted various people catching glimpses and reflections of beautiful PS3 game footage magically appearing ... More »
The new version of YDL was released. I think the most important new feature is that you can now use the memory of the RSX-GPU as a swap partition.
You should notice a great increase of speed while using linux.
The free version can be downloaded in four weeks. For now only owners of YDL.net Enhanced Accounts can access YDL 6.1.
Press Release: AUSTIN, Texas - 19 November 2008 - From the show floor of SuperComputing 2008, booth #1915, Fixstars today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.1 for Apple G4/G5, Sony PLAYSTATION3, PowerStation, and IBM Power Systems. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, YDL v6.1 offers several end-user and development tool improvements over the previous v6.0.
"This marks the final release of Yellow Dog Linux by Terra Soft and the first by Fixstars," states Owen Stampflee, Fixstars Solutions' Director of Engineering, "In my five years with Terra Soft we have made incremental impro... More »
Sony's Director of Hardware Marketing John Koller posted a special second birthday wish for the PlayStation 3 via the PS Blog today as follows:
November 17 is a special date for us at SCEA because, as many of you fans know, it’s when we launched PLAYSTATION 3.
Two years ago today, we delivered our next-generation console, providing consumers with a gaming and home entertainment system unlike anything in the market – the power of the Cell Broadband Engine, out-of-the-box HDMI support for 1080p resolution, and a Blu-ray drive for high-definition movies and expansive games.
The PS3’s launch was also when the Resistance franchise was born, and the original title’s success has spawned a blockbuster sequel with Resistance 2 and a unique PSP installment with the upcoming Resistance: Retribution.
But that’s just what we started with, and PS3 has come a long way since November 17, 2006. If you stood in line the night before ... More »
According to Shae5O9 from the official PS boards, Sony's PlayStation Home is being promoted as one of the PlayStation Network's features to gamers who are creating new PSN accounts.
Many are hoping that this means Sony will stick to their word and release the PlayStation Home Open BETA soon.
Jack Tretton, SCEA president, recently said that the PlayStation Home Open BETA will launch this November.
However, Kazuo Hirai, president and group chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment recently said we will see the "Open BETA by the end of this year" which is slightly contradictory.
Unauthorized hacking of the PSP has been a serious problem for Sony ever since enterprising hackers managed to run unsigned code on the PSP-1000 back in 2005. The ability to revert to an unprotected version of the firmware, and later the ability to install completely custom pirate firmware has enabled some owners to play pirated PSP games downloaded from the Internet.
By some accounts, developers like Ready at Dawn and Capcom have lost more than 50% of their prospective revenues to software piracy. One estimate has software producers losing more than $4 million per week to piracy. In June, SCEE President David Reeves stated that “There is a piracy problem on the PSP. We know about it, we know how it’s done. It sometimes fuels the growth of hardware sales, but on balance we are not happy about it.”
Clearly, defeating piracy is one of the biggest concerns facing designers at Sony. It appears that the company may be planning to take some drastic step... More »
No doubt you’re familiar with the Universal Serial Bus – we ranked it as our top PC innovation of all time. But what do you know about the next version of this ubiquitous interface? USB 2.0 (otherwise known as USB Hi-Speed) boosted the original 12Mbps data rate to 480Mmb/s over eight years ago, and now USB 3.0 (dubbed USB Superspeed) is set to multiply that bandwidth tenfold.
The USB Implementers Forum (led by Intel) released the USB 3.0 spec to hardware partners last week after some reported disputes with AMD and Nvidia (who, afraid Intel would have a jump start in incorporating the tech in chipsets, threatened to develop their own USB standard). But how does this affect you? We dug up some new information about USB 3.0, got our hands on the new connectors, and even took a look inside the new cables.
USB 3.0 will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 Like the upgrade from USB 1.1 to 2.0, the new 3.0 connectors and cables will be physically an... More »
The long-promised PlayStation Home BETA expansion is rolling out soon. How soon? Sony announced today (linked above) that users who download a Home branded PS3 theme from the PS Store will be automatically entered in for possible participation in the ongoing BETA program... similar to what is being done for Japan.
Straight from Home director Jack Buser: Later today, the PLAYSTATION Store will be updated with a PlayStation Home theme. By downloading the theme, users are submitting an application to join the PlayStation Home BETA test community.
We will be using a variety of criteria including activity on the PLAYSTATION Network to determine eligibility for the BETA community. Existing Home BETA users worry not, as your accounts will transfer over to the extended BETA period.
Keep in mind that this all applies to North American folks... More »
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