Game Developers Clueless Over PS3’s Online Availability?

ps3onlineJust recently, a something about a review that IGN made for Tony Hawk’s Project 8 caught people’s attention: that the game’s online version is only available on the Xbox 360. This has caused a lot of people to wonder why online play was not made available to the PS3 version of the same game. Some just chalked it up to reasons such as “exclusivity”, or perhaps  the developers overlooked it.

But what was disconcerting was the following statement that was quoted from the game review in question:

Speaking of online play, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is built with full online capabilities for Xbox 360, including support of Live, classic two-player challenges, a new game called Walls (which plays like Snake or Tron), and up to eight-player online games. But Project 8 is not online for PlayStation 3. Not online for PS3. Only within the last three weeks has Neversoft received its PS3 beta kits…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.

Though the game developers have promised that the PS3 version would have special features such as character cameos that are not available on the Xbox (though nothing specific was mentioned), one can’t help but wonder if this is indicative of what is going to happen with other games that are set to be released for the PS3. Was there really a crisis with Sony not being able to produce enough test kits? Will people hoping to purchase the PS3 for the online gaming experience be sold short?

ps3onlineJust recently, a something about a review that IGN made for Tony Hawk’s Project 8 caught people’s attention: that the game’s online version is only available on the Xbox 360. This has caused a lot of people to wonder why online play was not made available to the PS3 version of the same game. Some just chalked it up to reasons such as “exclusivity”, or perhaps  the developers overlooked it.

But what was disconcerting was the following statement that was quoted from the game review in question:

Speaking of online play, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is built with full online capabilities for Xbox 360, including support of Live, classic two-player challenges, a new game called Walls (which plays like Snake or Tron), and up to eight-player online games. But Project 8 is not online for PlayStation 3. Not online for PS3. Only within the last three weeks has Neversoft received its PS3 beta kits…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.

Though the game developers have promised that the PS3 version would have special features such as character cameos that are not available on the Xbox (though nothing specific was mentioned), one can’t help but wonder if this is indicative of what is going to happen with other games that are set to be released for the PS3. Was there really a crisis with Sony not being able to produce enough test kits? Will people hoping to purchase the PS3 for the online gaming experience be sold short?

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