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No Universal Private Voice Chat in PS3 2.4 Firmware

Wed, Jul 2, 2008    (Rating: 4.5 stars, Click to rate this article!) Loading ... Loading ...

Gaming


If you were waiting for the 2.4 Firmware update for the PS3 to cure your in-game communication woes with the “in game XMB support”, then you are probably pissed off right now.

Either apply the 2.4 update bricked your PS3 as a good handful of people are reporting online or you noticed that trying to do anything other than text-message from inside a game requires you to exit the game.

Awesome

So this feature that has been in PC gaming for more than 10 years now, Sony still can’t figure out how to do.

To clarify, voice chat has always been supported in multiplayer-games that provide it, but on the Xbox 360 you can invite individual friends to private chat channels regardless of what either of you is doing. This is sort of like being on the phone with a friend while you both do something else. This also helps when you just want to talk with a close friend and play a multiplayer game together, but don’t want to sit in the game’s chat channel and listen to all the other multi-tards and angry 9-year-olds scream at each other.

Sony maybe have the tech lead over Microsoft, but their complete inability to understand their market is really surprising to me. It’s like Sony Japan (folks that develop the firmware) don’t listen to any of the screaming feedback coming out of Sony America.

Ahh well… it’s still an awesome Blu-ray player and Media Device… and the games sure look pretty, so I’ll forgive it.

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This post was written by:

Editor - who has written 1535 posts on The “Break it Down” Blog.

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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Anonymous Says:

    Yea, Private Chat Would Be Awesome

  2. setotitan Says:

    i so freaking know! damn, ever since i got my PS3 in 06 i’ve wanted in game chat! every single update that comes out i check to see if they add it. this article says it all, why the fudge can everyone else seem to figure this out except Sony?

  3. Riyad Kalla Says:

    setotitan,
    We have some hookups at Sony and we asked them this, and essentially the problem boils down to this:

    * American’s love multiplayer/multi-chat/online-tools/etc.
    * Japanese don’t care about it all

    And unfortunately, the Firmware/PS3 platform development team is entirely done at the Japanese headquarters.

    So while Sony-America can bitch and scream all day for online support, Sony Japan just doesn’t see the importance of it because in *Their* reality, “no one cares”.

    I don’t understand this personally… I mean jesus, you only need to say 1 thing to prove that it’s important: “World of Warcraft”

    Ummmm… biggest game ever anywhere… I think that proves that people like online support for stuff :D

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