After all the hubbub last week on kotaku on developers getting kind of upset with Sony’s “online strategy” of basically leaving most of the leg work and maintenence up to the developers themselves instead of giving a structured online experience with frameworks like Microsoft did with Xbox Live.
We all kind of knew this was coming, Microsoft is inherintly a software company thats always been and remains amazing at developing frameworks and the 360′s development framework was no joke and continues to grow… support not only for customers, but for their developers really is where its at on the 360 side… but it seems news is getting worse…
Tony Hawk a longtime Playstation game has its upcoming version coming without a online presence at all… (online play only on the 360 version), i just can’t wrap my head around this, so now the ps3 games are loosing multiplayer? It’s a temporary thing probably but with this on top of the already “hard to work with” strategy, it can’t mean good news for the ps3 and sony in general (considering sonys betting basically the entire company on the ps3′s success)… Arstechnica says it best i think ….
IGN has a nice preview of Tony Hawk’s Project 8 up at their site and while they tend to glow about the game a little too much for my liking (about standard for previews) there is one thing that jumped out at me. The game will have online play for the 360, and only the 360. If you’re lucky to get your hands on a Playstation 3 in November, you’re just going to have to wait until the sequel to play online. The reason? Apparently Sony didn’t get their dev kits out in time for it to be added, but the more troubling thing is revealed right after that.
- Neversoft is confident the PS3 version of the game will ship at launch in November, but it still hasn’t received all of the software libraries and has no indication of how the online components will work on PS3, so it’s not offering them. For a software company that’s always supported the PlayStation system and was, in fact, the first developer to offer online play on PS2 with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, that’s saying something. Neversoft wouldn’t explain any further, but it’s clear to this reporter that if Neversoft could go online with the PS3 version, it would.
I really have to agree with Ars… with Tony not being a first party game, people are gonna start compairing feature to feature of the ps3 vs 360 versions… and with something as big as the entire online section of a game missing… thats a big no no… Especially for a console that many consider to be overpriced, extremely late, and in drastically short supply… add to that a very intense market with cut throat competition, things look worse and worse by the day.
Source: Arstechnica
