[mdg1019]

Would you rather they didn't update it?

This has got to be one of the dumbest blogs I've ever read.

How do people like this even get a job in the first place.

What a moron.

[skyknyt]

"There are an excessive amount of patches when compared to the competition. To me that says that Sony shipped an unfinished product. Sony isn't releasing a plethora of patches because it is reading it's users' minds, Sony is releasing the patches because it is trying to catch up to the competition."

This is kind of nonsense, don't you think? Their patches aren't big changes designed to "fix" the system, they are iterative changes designes to expand functionality. Are you saying that Sony should have foreseen the popular codecs for 2009 back when they released the system?

Matt's complaint seems to be: "Do these iterative patches really require a press release to go out to the gaming media? Does anyone care enough that version 3 of Divx is now supported rather than version 2 that we should see a new story on it?"

I think it says more of the gaming media that we'll GET a new story on the press release, rather than on Sony for issuing them. I can't fault Sony for telling people to log in to PSN and get an update, but it does seem silly of the gaming media to release tons of news stories covering the "event."

[danfry]

This guy's a freakin moron. ANOTHER SONY BASHER. This article is utter nonsense. I just don't know where to start ripping it apart. Again full of inaccuracies - just like the others.
I only signed up to this site to say what utter crap this article is. I will then be removing my membership. This article was designed to do exactly that. To get people to sign up so that they could bitch about this POOR ARTICLE.

[mattpeckham]

skyknyt said:

Matt's complaint seems to be: "Do these iterative patches really require a press release to go out to the gaming media? Does anyone care enough that version 3 of Divx is now supported rather than version 2 that we should see a new story on it?"

I think it says more of the gaming media that we'll GET a new story on the press release, rather than on Sony for issuing them. I can't fault Sony for telling people to log in to PSN and get an update, but it does seem silly of the gaming media to release tons of news stories covering the "event."

Yeah skyknty, you got it, though I'd still like to see Sony shoehorn some of this stuff into bigger, more meaningful, less frequent updates.

[danfry]

HEY EVERYBODY WHO IS PISSED AT THIS ARTICLE *

REMOVE YOUR MEMBERSHIPS TO THIS SITE IF YOU THINK THIS ARTICLE SUCKS!!!!


IT'S JUST A CON TO GET YOUR DEATILS... REMOVE YOUR MEMBERSHIP


WE ARE ALL BEING TAKEN FOR A RIDE

[bjbj]

I am not upset at all about how often Sony releases updates for the PS3. Some of them don't seem like big news, but I don't think Sony really treats them that way. They put out a press release to inform people what they are adding or fixing, then we have the option of reading it if we want. The only thing I would like changed is for these updates to be downloadable in the background and then installed at our convenience. Some of these downloads can take a long time so it would be nice to be able to still use our Playstations when they are downloading. But if they have an update or a fix that's been thoroughly tested, I don't care how often they push them out.

[pinion1000]

I hate blogs. Aside from fucntioning as an online diary and a few other things, i've never found them to be constructive, at least in a professional ligitimate form. this is more of a "this is what I think" column, with a huge emphasis on "I". There's a huge difference in the things my GF and i read, for example, my GF likes with to read Perezhilton/Dlisted type blogs, i don't. however, there seems to be this great idea of merging what used to be straight-to-the-point-about-all-things-technology informative media, with blogging. frankly, and with all respect, i really dont care what you think about the facts, just show me the facts i'll make my own assumptions, i thought thats what media was originally anyways. regarding what you're descriving as getting old, and with some references you made within your piece; times have changed my friend, and we no longer live in an era where everything we buy is static. we now buy potential. beta testing will NEVER weed out all bugs to any product, nor can it be expected that a product be released with all pontentially usable options enabled or bugs fixed. as far as the fierce competition there always has been in the console business, as with any business, sometimes things have to roll out for a brand to remain relevant, bugs and all. even then, theres no guarantee that it will be relevant. the release of a product like a console is directly linked to the release of its like competitors. it maybe be gaming to us, but deep down it's stricly business for microsoft, sony and nintendo. the fact that fixes, patches and features are "constantly" rolled out by sony may be getting old to you or some, yet it's still stricly business to sony. i happen to like that all three companies are out to my attention, because thats all thats really happening at the moment. and to the advertising money generated by these types of "shock and awe" formats; thanks again for trying to creep up on the things i read. i've yet to click on any ads or have been compelled to visit a site due to online advertising, i would advise the same to everyone. that's "what i think."

[mattpeckham]

pinion1000 said:

I hate blogs.

Hey, I hate blogs too! :D

Quote

regarding what you're descriving as getting old, and with some references you made within your piece; times have changed my friend, and we no longer live in an era where everything we buy is static. we now buy potential. beta testing will NEVER weed out all bugs to any product, nor can it be expected that a product be released with all pontentially usable options enabled or bugs fixed.

Right, I just wish Sony followed a slightly more conservative update model.

As for the "we now buy potential" point, however, we flatly disagree. See Stardock's Gamer Bill of Rights (links to PDF), point #2, to which I subscribe religiously ("Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state").

[EatingPie]

mattpeckham said:

So asking questions is off limits now, too? Typing "Should Microsoft Charge for Xbox Live?" is tantamount to bashing Microsoft? Come on guys, don't play to the stereotype. Tell me I'm nuts with a reasonable argument and I'll listen carefully, but type "you're ridiculous (insert console)-hater" and who do you expect to persuade?

If you scroll up and re-read my statement, you will see (a) I did not accuse of being a Sony hater, and (b) I gave a reasonable argument against your article. And I'm not alone in that.


But you ignored my -- and several others' -- reasoned criticism of your article to simply respond to the flames? How about addressing the good comments above?


The point releases have added tons of features, piecemeal over time, sure, but it's a much more powerful system than it started. Everyone does point releases similarly, including every major OS company, and the 360. Your lack of understanding of codecs suggests that you really don't have justification to complain about this feature, since you have no idea if it's a powerful addition or not.

These were all elements in your article, and they really are not legitimate complaints. So I guess the answer is a resonding NO, the updates are not getting old! :-)


-Pie

[mattpeckham]

EatingPie said:

>

Quote

If you scroll up and re-read my statement, you will see (a) I did not accuse of being a Sony hater, and (b) I gave a reasonable argument against your article. And I'm not alone in that.

Sorry Pie, I didn't mean you specifically.

Quote

The point releases have added tons of features, piecemeal over time, sure, but it's a much more powerful system than it started. Everyone does point releases similarly, including every major OS company, and the 360. Your lack of understanding of codecs suggests that you really don't have justification to complain about this feature, since you have no idea if it's a powerful addition or not.

And no one else has offered a defense of "DivX ;-) 3.11" that's led me to believe otherwise. Be careful what you assume someone does or doesn't know based on a single, candid, topically narrow admission. DivX ;-) 3.11 doesn't equal DivX, as you surely know.

[pinion1000]

am is suppose to take that bill of rights seriously?

not only does it not apply to consoles, since i'm assuming you want me so assume you read it in its entirety ( of which i doubt you did) but they only mention consoles once in this overbloated 33 page whinefest called the gamers bill of rights. consoles will be subjected to the equivalent of ports...... who wants that right?. it also states that development of games is to be aimed strickly for windows pc's only. which that in itself brings a whole can of worms. tried playing the topshelf games with year old hardware lately? didn't think so.

i'll stick to firmware update improvements thank you very much. and i'll let developers gain experience sucking the most they can out of the same hardware year after year. instead of them cutting corners and having me spend money on hardware because their inefficient code isnt optimized to run on not-so-old hardware.

[mattpeckham]

pinion1000 said:

am is suppose to take that bill of rights seriously?

Of course you are.

Quote

not only does it not apply to consoles, since i'm assuming you want me so assume you read it in its entirety ( of which i doubt you did) but they only mention consoles once in this overbloated 33 page whinefest called the gamers bill of rights. consoles will be subjected to the equivalent of ports...... who wants that right?. it also states that development of games is to be aimed strickly for windows pc's only. which that in itself brings a whole can of worms. tried playing the topshelf games with year old hardware lately? didn't think so.

The single "right" I referenced, if not every other I pointedly didn't, applies perfectly to consoles. And I'm surprised you'd actually defend glitches and bugs, as if they're somehow "features" we're supposed to celebrate in one medium but not another.

Quote

i'll stick to firmware update improvements thank you very much. and i'll let developers gain experience sucking the most they can out of the same hardware year after year. instead of them cutting corners and having me spend money on hardware because their inefficient code isnt optimized to run on not-so-old hardware.

I'll stick to firmware improvements too, thank you very much, which if you read my post carefully, you'd notice I in fact praised. I'm asking for less frequent and more substantive updates. That's all.

[Pacman22]

Matt, I must say that I respect "your opinion" a lot more, now that I see you actually engage in the debates that your blogs incite. This is a 1st for me, as I am used to the author whipping together a story for the sole purpose of getting "Fanboys" riled up and never having to answer for their lack of facts, skewing of the facts or out right lying. You can definately make an argument for a few of your points, but Sony won't be able to please everybody. I am on the otherside of the fence, as I actually look forward to updates and usually wonder when the next one will arrive. I am starting to realize that alot of people actually do not use most of the PS3s features. I on the other hand use almost all of them. I have hundreds of photos on it so this latest update was wonderful. I have about 110 albums, 100 music videos and around 40 movies/stand up comedy acts, so the last updates addition of sequential playback was wonderful. (I have a 320gb HDD BTW) I love watching Family Guy on Hulu so the flash update was great, and I love the new youtube interface (not a Sony update). Home and Life with Playstation both have potential, however they are seriously lacking for now, so I look forward to updates. I asked a friend who is a non gamer what would they think about an electronics product that improved itself through free firmware updates about every other month. He said he would love it and began talking about his dvd player that doesn't upconvert and his bluray player that can't handle BD Live or HDMI 3.1 and a few other items that he would have to re-purchase in order to get the latest. I still think that tthis is one thing Sony has right and deserves more praise than persecution for.

[magriffith]

I agree with Sky. The simple answer is if it isn't news, don't report it as such. There's no need to write about every little routine update. Unless there's some major, noteworthy new feature coming, we can find out when it happens.

[Hastor]

Before consoles had internet connections and mass storage, we were permanently stuck with what we got, bugs and all. We had no hope that they might add a feature that isn't there yet. I don't see the point in bundling updates into less packages. If a fix is available, however small, go ahead and put it out there rather than waiting for others to bundle it with, let people enjoy it. I hate when I hear a fix for something is done but is gonna be part of a spring update that is months away, go ahead and give us what is confirmed working. It would be nice if the downloads were smaller. I don't know if it downloads the whole front end every time, or if updates are incremental. Seemed like an awfully long download when they just added full screen flash though. Small updates are fine, but I hate to sit down to play a game (or have a crowded room ready to watch a blu-ray) just to watch a download bar for so long that sometimes not everyone can stay through the movie. I know they are optional and could be skipped till later, but I'm always afraid its fixing something that will affect what I'm about do.
As far as it needing to be shipped without bugs to begin with, well there have always been things shipped with bugs. They were restricted to games though, because systems didn't typically have an OS, or if they did, it was very basic and hard to mess up, just launched a game. Now we have so many processes running, so many background programs we dont even know about, that its like we have a huge collection of 8 bit games taking care of many ways our system behaves. Most settings are done in the OS now, not the game. Now go through any huge collection of 8 bit games, or even a small one, 20-30 games, and see how many bugs you can find. I do agree that there have been a few instances where inexusable bugs were let through, most likely due to less testing because they knew they could update. Most recently I think of Fallout 3, which unpatched on PS3, locks up any time you get a notification of a friend signing on, maybe even trophies I can't remember. That is inexusable and made it score lower than the 360 version on IGN, though now patched, is probably on par at least (I have it for 360 myself so I can't say more than I've read, but it has been above average bug-free on 360 for a game of that scale. There are some in any version of it though. there was a recent 360 update for it that took care of a couple excusable but annoying ones)

[KrisisCore]

like i always said Matt Peckham is on Microsoft's payroll. Dont listen to this incompetent writer and his nonsense gibberish. Whining like a girl. The reason why there are more update for the PS3, you nitwit, is because its got loads more features than the XBox 360 and Wii. Sony, unlike the other companies, take the time to improve these features in order to give the consumer a richer and better experience. This makes the PS3 more than just another gaming console. If they released fewer updates that the other two, we would see you complaining. Either way you would still complain. Go bury your sad head in a hole. Dimwit Matt

[dragon69]

i don't like this paragraph
"We used to have a rule that end-users were never beta testers (not involuntarily, anyway). Bug-crippled games were routinely savaged in critical circles, and rightly so."
well i guess you have not purchased any software or hardware from micro$oft lately as i feel i have been a beta tester (yes for free) for them for over 5 years and i am getting sick of it as the only real success i have had with micro$oft is win 7 beta ( funny it might the only thing that micro$oft put in the last 5 years that worked pretty decently )
but to get back on track i think sony is just listening to their customers with these updates
gl and tc

[EatingPie]

I'm going to pipe in here once again...

Two quotes from Matt (and I, too, appreciate his participation in this forum).


bq. Right, I just wish Sony followed a slightly more conservative update model. As for the "we now buy potential" point, however, we flatly disagree. See Stardock's Gamer Bill of Rights (links to PDF), point #2, to which I subscribe religiously ("Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state"). ...
bq. The single "right" I referenced, if not every other I pointedly didn't, applies perfectly to consoles. And I'm surprised you'd actually defend glitches and bugs, as if they're somehow "features" we're supposed to celebrate in one medium but not another.


While I agree to some extent about games being in a finished state, I do not agree at all that this applies to consoles.

A console update is an OS (or packaged support applications) update. This is similar to Mac OS X 10.5 --> 10.5.6, which over the interum added a some under-the-hood features, and a mass of bug fixes. Similarly, I receive Quicktime (a "packaged support app") updates all the time. These updates are absolutely imperative for an OS, if not for smooth functioning, thenalso for security.


When I got my PS3, one week after release, it was feature complete as advertised -- games, online support, and Blu-ray playback -- and bug free from my experience. I never crashed a Blu-ray, Resistance or Motorstorm. Certainly Sony could have left the PS3 there, and it would have been a great console. Sure, there had to be bugs, after all, no software as complex as an OS is bug free, but it worked very well.

What Sony did, however, was to add new features. A lot of amazing new features. Some for gaming (Playstation Home), some for Blu-ray (BD Live), some for online support (revamped PS store), some for streaming (HD playback of almost anything!). NONE of these features were there in the original. None of them! The updates added tons of features, and fixed a variety of bugs. There was an HDMI chroma bug, I believe, some online bugs, and audio codec bugs. Great to have them fixed.

I don't think there's any argueing that added features on the PS3 have been absolutely great. (Same could be said for the 360, which has a completely different UI as of November). But what about bugs?

The logic here is simple. If I run into a bug, I want it fixed... now! I submitted a bug report where 5.1 was downsampled to 2.0 audio. It took forever for that issue to be resolved, and there were many point release resolving other issues in the interim. But my bug wasn't fixed, and I longed for a minor point release to get that one done. (It was fixed when UPNP support and multiple codec streaming was added.) For this reason, a minor point release is just the ticket. And it makes end-users happy... Certainly by the ones effected by the bug, but also the others who know Sony is actively fixing problems and getting them out. So these are totally justified.

On the issue of "Sony making a big deal about little changes"... okay, agreed. However, I have to wonder, do they really? The Official PS3 Blog is Sony's clearing house for scoops like point release features and bug fixes. I read the blog for that reason. Sony, normally tight-lipped, is keeping users informed. And that is also a good thing! I don't feel like they're touting these updates, but just being transparent about what's been done. If the press at large touts the updates, maybe that's their fault, not Sony's?

So overall, I highly disagree with the article. I believe Sony has done a great job of fixing bugs, adding new features, and keeping users informed. All very important things indeed, and worthy of recognition, not of criticism.

-Pie

[coastie65]

A lot of the firmware updates will be included in new game releases, so you don't have to actively got looking for them. My last one was packaged with Tomb Raider: Underground. I have no more problem with them than I do with micro$oft's Windows updates. This is much ado about nothing in my opinion. coastie65

[Hastor]

I can surely agree that I like how Sony has a page that informs us of what the updates actually do. 360 especially, and Wii, have updates that from our end, seem pointless. At least Sony lets us know when there's a new feature to play with or that we can play that video file that didn't work before. Also when new settings are added, its nice to know they are there in case you don't want the default. Every update of any kind to a console or pc hardware or software should include release notes. I do wish they'd be more specific about things when they say stability is improved on certain games etc. Maybe the bug that kept me away from a game or made me quit playing it was fixed, lemme know what you did to improve performance, is it a slight frame rate increase or do you no longer walk through walls on some game? Otherwise it sounds like something they can just tack on whether they did anything or not and no one will be the wiser. Everyone will just assume they never encountered the fixed bugs to begin with.