Background patching for PS3: Rumour or reality?

Hello there. I hope that you're here to roam through the internet, to attempt to soak up as much gaming information and commentary as your brain will allow before you forget how to eat soup or wash.

But there may be another reason, in fact. If you're a PS3 gamer, you might well be here for one very simple reason: you can't actually play your PS3 right now. It's updating. Again.

Gamers new to this generation don't know they're born, with their shiny HD graphics, their particle effects and their universal online capabilities. In my day, we had a cartridge, a dark room and a high score to beat. But one way in which gaming has definitely gone backwards is in its laborious and time-consuming insistence on patching every damn time we turn our console on.

PS3 owners are certainly the most-blighted by this irritating new phenomenon. Barely a day goes by in which I'm not patching the thing or one of the games I want to play. The other day I felt like playing Burnout Paradise - big mistake, even bigger mandatory download. How on Earth Criterion felt they needed to add another 385MB to my hard drive, I'll never know. I backed out of the menu and have been avoiding one of my favourite racers ever since. It's gotten to the point where I have to insert a disc which I haven't played in a while just to check that I don't require an epic, internet-breaking download the next time I actually want to fire it up.

It shouldn't be this way. I should be able to game on my own terms, not be dictated to by a little (well, large) black box about when I install what. And, for the love of all that is holy, games developers need to learn how to release a polished, perfect game from day one, not rely on epically large, hard disk-stuffing updates in order to keep glitches at bay.

What about the (still significant) proportion of HD gamers without readily-available internet access on their console? It's not fair to release your latest run 'n' gun 'n' race 'n' pimp title full of glitches and game-breaking problems and expect the internetless-minority to just put up with it. Two to three years of development producing games which are immediately patched upon release just smacks of a poor attention to detail and a lazy development studio.

That's why I hope that the recent rumours of background patching on PS3 are true. It's about time. Time-poor gamers can't afford to lose even half an hour to install a bunch of 'updates' which, nine times out of ten, are simply security patches built to lock out the active minority trying to tap into the system. If I had all the time back that I'd been waiting for patches, well, I might have found the time to slog through Final Fantasy XIII.

I know, I know. That would have been an equally wasteful  use of the time. But it would be on my terms - and that's what Sony needs to realise - a games console is built to provide entertainment for the gamer, on demand. That's why if background patching is no more than a rumour, I implore the Playstation people to make it a reality.

Why Sony was right to remove 'Other OS' from its PS3

Notice anything new about your PS3 the last time you updated it? Probably not. In all likeliness, you watched a long download process, followed by an install bar, when all you really wanted to do was play Modern Theft Hero 6.

 Well, those of you who had Linux, the freeware operating system, running on your PS3 will have noticed that it, er, doesn’t work.

That’s old news now, though. Literally tens of people were outraged at this turn of events, obviously, the rampant popularity of PS3-Linux systems being what they are. Almost every Playstation owner has, at some point, thanked the gods of gaming that their console of choice can run an obscure OS with a large amount of effort and a lot of hassle.

 Well, maybe not. But every PS3 owner certainly should be interested. After all, they might be entitled to a free refund.

  The news surfaced this week that Amazon, the internet shopping giant, gave a European PS3-purchasing customer a 20% refund to make up for the lack of a Linux-install option on the console. Legally, they argued, the customer had a right to a refund or substitute (in this instance: cash) because Sony broke EU law, as the console no longer operated completely as advertised. They didn’t ask for the PS3 back, just gave them £84. And this was a 60GB PS3 owner – not exactly a fresh buyer.

This has massive repercussions for Sony, obviously. I severely doubt that Amazon are going to hand out cash reimbursements without asking the games company for a cheque in return, or that they would do so if it wasn’t completely legally necessary.

 This is obviously a huge problem for Sony at a time when the PS3 is beginning to regain momentum. Personally, though, I think it’s ridiculous.

 The Linux install option was a very, very underused feature. That isn’t the reason – if even one gamer enjoys a console’s feature, then removing it shouldn’t be done unless absolutely necessary. I love being able to move the PS logo from horizontal to vertical, for example – but even if I’m the only one, I don’t want to see it go.

The thing is though, the removal of the OS is actually necessary. The reason Sony removed Linux is because a cocky forum-dweller somewhere on the depths of the internet (read: in his bedroom) brazenly revealed that he had circumvented the PS3’s beefy piracy restrictions.

 I’m not some fascist, fat-cat-loving money man (hello, New Labour), but sometimes, the actions of big business can be justified.

Piracy is massive because it’s so easy. I download things that in reality, I should probably pay for. You probably have. It’s everywhere. I don’t judge these people, nor the many many individuals whom I’ve met playing on DS R4 cards. If the option is there, it’s hard to resist. If I could download a Ferrari, despite the fact that it’s sort of hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars/Hungarian forints' worth of theft, I’d do it.

But this is different. Outrightly attempting to break a console’s security for the sake of free games is a bit wrong, and was only going to end up with one result: the loss of the feature forever.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and really, both Sony and the pirate are at fault in some way, but the bottom line is that anyone who does want Linux on the PS3 can’t have it, Sony might have to destroy its profit margins to reimburse Amazon customers (and maybe more), and we still can’t play pirated games. If this situation really does get out of hand, we might not even get legal Playstation games any more. The losses for Sony – a company not exactly flush with revenue at the moment – could be devastating. Lose-lose-lose.

 Maybe after the dust of this new scandal settles, the next bedroom console-cracker might think twice before attempting to break some console security. And in a roundabout way, that would benefit us all – the developers who make those games that pirates steal, the publishers who depend on them, and the hacks like myself who write about the industry.

 For now, though, go claim your £84 refund if you’re an EU Amazon PS3 customer. After all, no-one can resist free stuff, can they?

Copy That...

First of all, apologies for the lack of activity recently; without regaling eager gamer-readers with the intricacies of my personal life, it’s been hectic.

It seems I’m not the only one who’s been busy though, nor the only one in need of making an apology.

It seems that Sony fans everywhere should be extending the olive branches right now – Playstation Move, the new motion controller from Sony, is a real Wii-too effort.

Nintendo fans everywhere are – quite fairly – lording it over their Sony counterparts, partly from the smug realisation that their downtrodden Ninty had fought back to literally and metaphorically lead the pack, in sales and ideas, partly out of anger from being so blatantly copied. Should Sony find runaway success with Move, Nintendo might well feel a little hard-done by.

The games industry, though, is above such petty squabbles. The fact is that Nintendo’s move towards motion has just taken one step closer to being the gaming standard. Will traditional button-based pads remain come PS4? Probably, but for the foreseeable future, if you aren’t up for arm-waving, you’ll be waiving your chance to play some key titles. Rumours of a motion-based Uncharted 3, a waggle-infused Heavy Rain add-on and even some sort of integration into the ever-delayed Gran Turismo 5 are flying around almost as readily as limbs in a sports-based set of mini-games, one of which has already been announced as a launch title for Sony’s wagglesticks (wonder where they got that idea, too?).

Gamers need to be ready to embrace motion, because it’s where the games industry wants to go next. Even Microsoft’s ‘big new idea’, Natal, is based on the idea of limb-flailery in the extreme. It may use a sophisticated camera to track your movements rather than any sort of controller, but the end result is the same – jumping about to kill, explore, score and kill again. All the usual gaming objectives can be accomplished.

The thing is, many gamers aren’t ready. For every gamer out there who wants to literally punch the air to make a kill or hit a home run, there is at least one who wants to stab X, eat crisps and gawk at the telly from the comfort of their sofa. If the ratio is even 1:1, that creates a dangerous split in the demographics. Yes, for now, Sony will still serve up great button-based titles – but what if Move doubles PS3 sales? Roughly speaking, that would mean that roughly half are still traditional gamers – but you can bet that motion would be crowbarred into every title, regardless of the large contingent who aren’t interested.

This is the real issue. It seems that no one actually wants to serve the traditional gamer any more. Why spend a hundred million pounds making a GTA V when you can knock up a motion mini-game collection for 3% of the development cost but 50% of the revenue?

The Xbox 360 and PS3 have so far amassed sales of 71 million consoles, combined, since the beginning of this generation without any kind of motion controller being available on either system. Never mind that this is actually more than Wii’s 69 million, but it’s pretty clear that the traditional gamer is still a market worth paying attention to.

Sony might find some success by mimicking Nintendo’s little white box, and Microsoft with their quirkier new camera, and I wish them luck, but they would do well not to Move too far from those gamers that bought ten million copies of Modern Warfare 2. Hopefully losing standard game-pads forever will be one motion gamers won’t carry.