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RUMOUR: EA Responsible for No PS3 Cross Game Voice Chat?
Bamelin
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Suprised nobody has started a topic about this, a bunch of boards are going up in flames right now over a rumour that EA is responsible for there not being any cross chat on the PS3 (cutting and pasting from GAF):
The EA boards are pretty funny to look at: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/forums/show/3607.page
No idea if the rumour is true or not but I've always wondered WHAT THE HELL is taking so long in them implementing this feature. Being cockblocked by a big publisher sort of makes sense? But doesn't the PS3 account for a ton of EA's software sales?
lagspike_exe wrote:This is JUST a rumor, take everything you read here with a grain of salt.
The source of the rumors is Super_Secret who claims to be work at Sony Japan (although, not in the FW division). He was right about PS3 Slim, so there may be some (if not, all) truth in this rumor.
http://forums.n4g.com/Cross-game-chat-and-why-its-currently-MIA-m700070.aspxQuote:
I promised you all an update on Cross-Game chat, so here it is.
And you're not going to like it.
As I told you before, Cross-game voice chat has been in the works for a while now. I mentioned last time that it was on target for 3.0 providing that we didn't hit any snags. Well guess what, we hit a snag! An all too familiar snag.
Time for a history lesson.
How many of you remember what it was like before FW 2.4? That's right - no in-game XMB. No custom soundtracks. In-game XMB was the most heavily requested feature at the time and we worked tirelessly in order to get it in (By "we", I mean Sony Japan - as I said before, FW isn't my department). It very nearly didn't happen, you have no idea how difficult it is to backport a feature like that onto a system (the game) that doesn't even know its there, but somehow we managed it. Well, for most titles. There are still the odd few titles out there that don't support in-game XMB ("black" titles).
Custom soundtracks was another one we had working in nearly every title. Obviously it was never going to work in black titles, but about 95% of the titles that worked well with the in-game XMB, had custom sountracks working as well.
So what happened? Why is it that titles HAVE to be developed specifically with custom soundtrack support when it was working more or less just fine?
Is it because Microsoft owns the patent on custom soundtracks in games?
This is something that makes me laugh every time I see one of the less educated ones spouting it off. That's an absolute fabrication. Patents don't matter, Sony as a while infringes upon thousands of patents through the whole company, both hardware and software. If you infringe a patent, you pay royalties to the owner or find a different way of doing the same thing that doesn't infringe. That's it. Microsoft infringes upon all kinds of patents we own but that's up to legal to sort out.
No, the reason we had to drop Custom soundtrack support like that has nothing to do with Microsoft. It does, however, involve a different company. A rather large company.
You see, one of their games happened to fall into the 5% that didn't support in-game custom soundtracks. And they did not like this.
When they found out that a new firmware update was going to suddenly make one of their games look inferior to just about every other game released, they protested. A lot.
They threatened everything, from legal action to dropping support for the PS3 all together.
What could we do? There was almost no way of getting it to work correctly due to the way their game was made (i.e. Poorly) and we certainly couldn't leave a broken implementation in there. That's when the hard decision was made to remove all support for older titles and instead adopt the "opt-in" approach that, to this day, most developers simply ignore. I have to hand this to Microsoft - they did their system right from the beginning and by completely separating it from the developers, they have universal support. Its very unlikely that you'll ever see mandatory support for custom soundtracks in games on our system, I'm afraid.
So yeah, lets nail this on the head: The next time someone starts blaming Microsoft for something the PS3 doesn't have, tell them they're an idiot, they don't know what they're talking about. Are we clear on this? This is a pet peeve of mine because while everyone's happy to go around blaming Microsoft, the real culprits are getting off scott-free. Of course, I can't actually name them directly or, should I get caught, I might even get done for slander (you can never be too careful), but you can figure it out - it's not Activision and they have a poor history with the PS3.
So what has this got to do with Cross-game voice chat?
Guess.
I warned you that we might hit a snag and we did. We've found a couple of titles that just don't like it. Similar to the custom soundtrack fiasco, it can cause lag, crashes, desyncronisation (very very bad when this happens), you name it. It can't be used in these games and it just so happens that some of these games are owned by the same company I've been talking about above.
So we're in a predicament: Cross-game chat is useless if only certain games support it. It's not too bad if its just the odd one that doesn't like it, but at this rate we'd have to drop support for the ENTIRE back catalogue, which would (As I said) make the whole thing useless.
Furthermore, we can't rely on developers to implement direct support for it. It didn't work with Custom Soundtracks, so why would it work here?
So right now, we're trying every little trick in the book to find a solution that works for everyone, but don't hold your breath on this one, so far it looks like the best you're going to get is a gimped implementation of it that only works with a handful of new games.
Now as I said, FW isn't actually my department and even I'm not supposed to know some of this stuff, but this is actually where we are right now. It sucks majorly, but there you have it. Depending on the end result, it could come in FW 3.1 or it could come in FW 4.0, hell it might not even come at all but rest assured they are working very hard on it. And if it doesn't come, you know who to blame.
Quote:
<snip..>No, the reason we had to drop Custom soundtrack support like that has nothing to do with Microsoft. It does, however, involve a different company. A rather large company.
You see, one of their games happened to fall into the 5% that didn't support in-game custom soundtracks. And they did not like this.
When they found out that a new firmware update was going to suddenly make one of their games look inferior to just about every other game released, they protested. A lot.
They threatened everything, from legal action to dropping support for the PS3 all together.
What could we do? There was almost no way of getting it to work correctly due to the way their game was made (i.e. Poorly) and we certainly couldn't leave a broken implementation in there. That's when the hard decision was made to remove all support for older titles and instead adopt the "opt-in" approach that, to this day, most developers simply ignore. I have to hand this to Microsoft - they did their system right from the beginning and by completely separating it from the developers, they have universal support. Its very unlikely that you'll ever see mandatory support for custom soundtracks in games on our system, I'm afraid.
So yeah, lets nail this on the head: The next time someone starts blaming Microsoft for something the PS3 doesn't have, tell them they're an idiot, they don't know what they're talking about. Are we clear on this? This is a pet peeve of mine because while everyone's happy to go around blaming Microsoft, the real culprits are getting off scott-free. Of course, I can't actually name them directly or, should I get caught, I might even get done for slander (you can never be too careful), but you can figure it out - it's not Activision and they have a poor history with the PS3.
But, then, he changes his attitude, and drops a post with a "hint" of the company's name:
Quote:
It's not Activision. It's not Ubisoft. It's not Capcom. It's not Insomniac. It's not Konami. It's not Take 2. It's not Midway. It's not Squaresoft. are wE All getting the picture yet? One point I want to reiterate - there's a difference between the games that didn't work with in-game XMB and the games that DID work with in-game XMB but DIDN'T work well with custom soundtracks, so stop picking out the ones that simply didn't do in-game XMB. Also, it wasn't just ONE game that caused this, either. Although one title does come to mind and it wasn't even what you or I would call a "Big" game. I'll give you a hint: HPatOofP.
The only game who's acronym is HPatOofP is Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, published by Electronic Arts.
The EA boards are pretty funny to look at: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/forums/show/3607.page
No idea if the rumour is true or not but I've always wondered WHAT THE HELL is taking so long in them implementing this feature. Being cockblocked by a big publisher sort of makes sense? But doesn't the PS3 account for a ton of EA's software sales?
Bamelin on
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It is pretty amateurish. "Oh I won't directly tell you because that might get me in trouble but I'll just be really freaking obvious about it, I'm sure management won't call me out on THAT when it hits the fan."
I'm also leaning towards not quite credible. This approach doesn't stand up with anyone, certainly wouldn't in any legal sense (unless you had an absolutely incredible lawyer maybe), and reads as someone who thinks they're clever in knowing how to "game the system" but they really aren't.
It really wouldn't surprise me to be honest ...
Do 360 users really do it that often?
Without knowing what other "predictions" the op made, I'd still call it bullshit. The slim was being predicted long before it even went into production.
It sounds plausible, but then the best conspiracy theories always do.
Do I think it's possible? Yep.
Does it matter? Maybe. It's a hell of a precident, one that doesn't bode well for a hardware company.
Yeah, pretty much everyone on Xbox uses it.
Me and all my friends are almost constantly in a Xbox Live party (cross game voice chat, in case you didn't know), it's better than in-game chat for when we're playing together, and when we're not, well, we can still talk to each other.
EDIT: Also, I seriously doubt the credibility of this source, the way it's posted is way too obvious for what would get a person fired if released, and while EA has done some pretty stupid things in the past (and well, it's EA), they wouldn't do this.
I think.
Yes. Though more commonly, my friends and I are both playing the same single player game concurrently, conversing as we go.
Do/did this a quite a bit for Fable 2, actually.
I also tend to just have an external XBL party going on while we all play the same game without having to hear all the stupid 14 year olds.
Basically 4 of us party up form the dashboard then party up in Halo, yet our voice chat is completely separate.
EDIT: Gah, beated...and less long-windedly too :P
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
It's a big help when you can just get a party together and then join up into one game. Rather than just sending invites out to everyone and waiting for a response people can just pop in and go "can't play now" or "gimme a second" and just stay in the party.
I really don't even use the normal "in-game" chat anymore, even if it's 1v1 on something like Madden I create a party to chat (with friends, not strangers)
Heck, it's in heavy use even on the PC side, although admittedly in Steam it tends to be more in-game messaging rather than voice, but voice is available as well.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
How would they know who he is though?
Even if it is obvious and fireable how are they going to figure out who it is (assuming it's a real "leak")
Yeah, what he said.
Until actual evidence comes up, this sort of thing needs constant reinforcement that it's simply a rumor. And for fuck's sake, the guy who wrote it said, "It's not these companies." Someone is just looking to troll angry game nerds.
If it isn't then you can too, at Sony and/or Activision.
First of all, if EA pulled their games from the PS3 because their games didn't support in-game soundtrack or cross-game voice chat they would look horrible by doing it, and they would, you know, lose all the sales that are the reason they do the whole releasing games thing.
Secondly Sony would have no problem improving their platform and bringing in more customers if it meant cutting off a publisher especially when they would look so damn good doing it.
If EA ever pulled games for this stupid of a reason, they would look like a horrible, awful evil company, they would lose massive sales and PR, Sony would gain massive PR and probably a few sales, and they both know this. If EA ever said "Take a feature out so we won't look bad or we won't publish games on the PS3!" Sony would make it known to the world, release the feature, and EA would be royally fucked 'till they recanted.
But that's not what the rumor is saying is happening. They're saying that the feature wouldn't work in the game, not that it would break anything.
Well, Microsoft had to bend to EA to get it's games online, so it wouldn't be the first time a company gave in to them.
Sure, but I would contend that online is a pretty big deal that changes the nature of the game, where as custom soundtrack, while oft-requested, is something cool that very, very few people would take into account while buying a game.
But here's the thing: big corporations can and have done stupid crippling things before. Remember when Nintendo told Square to go fuck themselves when they moved FF7 to the PSX? Boy, that worked well. But they did it anyway, because they thought they had the power to do that. EA is the second-largest third-party games publisher, and as such has a great deal of influence. Would EA lose sales if they stopped making PS3 games? Sure. But Sony would also lose sales when suddenly the next Madden wasn't available for their console.
Besides, the perception of a game company has little or no impact on its greater sales. At the height of its perceived dickhood, EA was the top-selling third-party by far. Now that they've moderated and improved their image... they've sold less. A lot less. Long story short, we video game forum whiners are a vast minority. Besides, EA's losses are mounting so fast, in fact, it could inspire execs to make rash moves like the one described here.
Not to mention that Sony, for all its bragging, isn't one to air dirty laundry about companies it works with. It's bad for business. Actually it's very rare for Japanese companies to publicly gripe about their inner workings. Also, remember when Bobby Kotick threatened to pull Activision's PS3 support if they didn't lower the console price? Sony's answer was silence.
Am I arguing that this leak is true? No, I'm pretty skeptical myself. I'm just saying that this kind of scenario is far from unthinkable.
So I guess that's that. Somebody has a stupid sense of humor, and a lot of people are gullible.
Then again, do you expect big companies to admit to an internal kerfuffle like this publicly?
Though it really does seem unlikely.