Phil Harrison’s GDC Keynote details leaked?

Phil Harrison and PS3 - Image 1We’re treating this rumour with a bit of skepticism, but user DevelopersHeart from the neoseeker forums claims to have keynote details from Phil Harrison’s keynote speech at the Games Developer Conference which starts tomorrow in San Francisco.

The speech by Harrison is supposed to be happening on Wednesday, March 7, and according to these keynote details will include a lot of announcements by Sony Computer Entertainment, so lets run through them.

One of the first things we noticed was that there will be a new firmware update for North America, Japan, and Asia, with European PS3’s coming pre-loaded with this latest firmware update. Here are the details of the update:

  • More refined PS Store front end
  • Playstation Network integrity enhanced
  • Wallpapers from pictures
  • Ability to change background colors
  • Sony Connect Store for music and movies added to the PS Store; hundreds of trailers/full films/song videos and mp3s available for download
  • Playstation Card option in PS Store enabled
  • Playstation Lifestyle – Similar to Myspace/Youtube; user generated content and experiences are the key and more

It is alleged that the emotion chips which won’t be present in European PS3’s on launch will also be removed for North America and Japan in April to reduce costs, leaving all PS3s’ running backwards compatibility using software emulation. The benefit of this will be the ability to upscale selected PSone/PS2 games to 1080i/720p.

There’ll also be an influx of new content available on the PS Store on March 8, including:

While this extensive list cannot be confirmed, it does seem to sound quite legitimate and has been reported on all over the internet. We won’t however know whether any of this is true until the GDC speech by Harrison on March 7, so stay tuned to QJ throughout GDC for the latest news!

Phil Harrison and PS3 - Image 1We’re treating this rumour with a bit of skepticism, but user DevelopersHeart from the neoseeker forums claims to have keynote details from Phil Harrison’s keynote speech at the Games Developer Conference which starts tomorrow in San Francisco.

The speech by Harrison is supposed to be happening on Wednesday, March 7, and according to these keynote details will include a lot of announcements by Sony Computer Entertainment, so lets run through them.

One of the first things we noticed was that there will be a new firmware update for North America, Japan, and Asia, with European PS3’s coming pre-loaded with this latest firmware update. Here are the details of the update:

  • More refined PS Store front end
  • Playstation Network integrity enhanced
  • Wallpapers from pictures
  • Ability to change background colors
  • Sony Connect Store for music and movies added to the PS Store; hundreds of trailers/full films/song videos and mp3s available for download
  • Playstation Card option in PS Store enabled
  • Playstation Lifestyle – Similar to Myspace/Youtube; user generated content and experiences are the key and more

It is alleged that the emotion chips which won’t be present in European PS3’s on launch will also be removed for North America and Japan in April to reduce costs, leaving all PS3s’ running backwards compatibility using software emulation. The benefit of this will be the ability to upscale selected PSone/PS2 games to 1080i/720p.

There’ll also be an influx of new content available on the PS Store on March 8, including:

While this extensive list cannot be confirmed, it does seem to sound quite legitimate and has been reported on all over the internet. We won’t however know whether any of this is true until the GDC speech by Harrison on March 7, so stay tuned to QJ throughout GDC for the latest news!

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