From PlayStation Blog (FYI: Sony owned blog):
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This is Michael Shorrock. I'm the Director of 3rd Party Relations at SCEA. As you may have seen this morning/last night on GameHead with Geoff Keighley, we are announcing that a new franchise from Rockstar Games will be exclusive to PS3. As part of our long standing relationship with Rockstar, and the incredible success for both companies with the cultural icon that is Grand Theft Auto, we've agreed to the PlayStation exclusive rights of the next great franchise from the Rockstar studios.

Everyone knows to have success in this business you need to look ahead, identifying the talent and titles that are going to give consumers new kinds of gaming experiences that help set the bar for the rest of the industry. Rockstar has a heritage for doing just that. We have had incredible success with the GTA franchise and are happy to continue to offer those titles on our platforms, and even more excited about what's to come from the current and future relationship between our companies. Rockstar really wanted to make a game that you can truly only do on PS3, harnessing the power of CELL and Blu-ray disc and this deal lets them do just that.. This is really a win-win situation for both companies. As Jack mentioned in the interview with Geoff, this franchise is not LA Noire, but something all new. We agreed with Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive Software that we wouldn't disclose anything more about the deal or title at this time, so stay tuned, we'll share more info as soon as we can.
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From engadget.com:
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As noted on Engadget HD the other day, and further clarified by Major Nelson this morning, that story about Target going exclusively Blu-ray was false. Turns out they're just installing Blu-ray aisle end caps, thanks to a new promotional deal with Sony, but HD DVD isn't going anywhere.
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Full Story: engadget.com | majornelson.com
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From pro-g.co.uk:
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At the end of Q1, worldwide sales of the PlayStation 3 stand at approximately 4.48 million. 3.57 million came in the final half of the previous year, with a disappointing 0.71 million recorded in the first quarter 2007. Despite the console's poor sales in Q1, Sony has announced that it expects to sell a further 10.29 million units in the following three quarters, ending March 2008.

If Sony can meet its forecast then as of March 31, 2008, worldwide PlayStation 3 sales will have reached approximately 14.5 million units.
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Full Story: pro-g.co.uk
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From ps-gamer.com:
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According to the latest round of age ratings issued by Germany's USK board, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (GC-Demo) has been cleared for all ages, meaning that Polyphony Digital's teaser release (which we expect to be released over here towards the end of this year) should be available in playable form at Europe's premiere games show.

While it's by no means confirmed, the obvious hope is that Sony will then release the demo on the PlayStation Store. While Sony has lagged behind the likes of Microsoft is making demos and trailers from major tradeshows available to download, if the demo isn't too big, it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
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Full Story: ps-gamer.com
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From videobusiness.com:
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East Coast chain BJ's Wholesale Club will drop HD DVD from its shelves and carry the Blu-ray Disc format exclusively by the fourth quarter, according to sources at the retailer and several Hollywood studios.

Sources said the chain will carry Blu-ray exclusively at all its 170 stores, although it continues to carry both formats on its Web site.
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Full Story: videobusiness.com
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From gamasutra.com:
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Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. announced it has struck an exclusive game development deal with Eat, Sleep, Play, the new studio formed by God of War and Calling all Cars creator David Jaffe and Scott Campbell, former chief director of Incognito Entertainment (Warhawk).

Under the agreement, Eat, Sleep, Play is signed on for a multi-year, multi-title deal to develop PlayStation 3 titles, the first of which is slated for release in 2008.
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Full Story: gamasutra.com
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From economictimes.indiatimes.com:
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Sony Corp currently has no plans for a further price cut for its PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console following a $100 cut in the US, the electronics conglomerate's president said on Friday.

"We've announced the price cut in the US and have no additional plans beyond that at this time," Ryoji Chubachi told Reuters on the sidelines of a gathering of business executives in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan.
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Full Story: economictimes.indiatimes.com
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From kotaku.com:
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Ever since David Jaffe hinted at a big announcement on Friday I've been chewing at my nails, trying to figure out what it is.

I haven't been able to completely nail it down, but I have multiple sources confirming several aspects of Jaffe's big announcement. The tip of the iceberg is that Jaffe is forming a new studio with Sony Computer Entertainment of America's backing and that the studio will, among other things, develop Playstation Network titles.
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Full Story: kotaku.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From gamepro.com:
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Sony's vice president of marketing Peter Dille said in a recent interview that his company is aggressively developing its online platform in an effort to better compete with Xbox Live.

"We're attacking online very, very aggressively," Dille told Gamasutra in a post E3 interview. "We offer online for free, and our competition charges people to get online."
Dille also criticized Microsoft for charging gamers for what he called "old content and catalogs from previous generations," whereas he claims his company focuses on making new, original downloadable games not limited by a lack of hard drive referring to the Xbox 360 core system.
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Full Story: gamepro.com
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From ps3fanboy.com:
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Nielsen just released their monthly GamePlay Metrics report, and it showed that PS3 owners use their consoles much longer than any other systems. The average session with a PS3 was 83 minutes in the month of June. In comparison, the average Xbox 360 session lasted 61 minutes, and the average Wii session lasted only 57 minutes.

Although PS3 owners reported played the longest average sessions, they still account for only 1.5% of the total gameplay minutes played last month. The PS2 is still the most played console, accounting for more than 42% of total gameplay time.
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Full Story: ps3fanboy.com
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From playthree.net:
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Woolworths found that sales for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray had been virtually non-existent, however since the PlayStation 3 release, Blu-ray movie sales have seen a modest but steady increase, and they are now rolling out Blu-ray movies across all their medium to large stores. The company believe this market will increase as the proliferation of HDTV across the UK becomes more widespread over Christmas. However they will be dropping HD-DVD lines completely.
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Full Story: playthree.net
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From next-gen.biz:
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Sony said today that Q1 income skyrocketed despite PlayStation 3 costs, as the games division posted an expected loss.

For the quarter ended June 30, sales in the games segment shot up 60.5 percent to $1.6 billion primarily due to sales from PlayStation 3. The Tokyo-based firm said unit sales of PS2 and PSP rose, as overall software sales increased.
Despite the rise in sales, the games segment posted an operating loss of $237 million for the quarter. The loss came from Sony strategically pricing the PS3 lower than its production cost.

However, during a conference call Sony executive VP Nobuyuki Oneda said the firm may be able to break even on PS3 hardware yet this year, after the Cell, RSX graphics chip and Blu-ray optical components decrease in cost.

During the quarter, Sony sold 710,000 PS3s, 2.14 million PSPs and 2.7 million PS2s. The latter two were up 730,000 and 370,000 units year-over-year, respectively.
On the software front, PS3 software sold 4.7 million units during the quarter, PSP sold 9.9 million units of software (up by 600,000) and PS2 sold 31.1 million (down by 1.6 million).

The company reiterated that it would have 200 disc-based PS3 games coming to retail this year worldwide.
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Full Story: next-gen.biz
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From gamespot.com:
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The European arm of software giant and PlayStation 3 maker Sony has picked up the main award at the Develop Industry Excellence Awards, which took place this evening at the Hilton Metropole hotel on the UK's south coast before a crowd of 500 games industry executives. SCEE picked up the Grand Prix award for "capping 12 months which have seen the firm deliver a new hardware format that has inspired developers around the world to make cutting-edge next generation games."
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Full Story: gamespot.com
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From biz.gamedaily.com:
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Mystic Game Development announced today that EMotion FX 3 is now available for PS3. The middleware is a real-time character animation SDK designed for multi-core processor systems. The Cell processor that powers the PS3 incorporates 8 SPEs.
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Full Story: biz.gamedaily.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From forbes.com:
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Target Corp., the nation's second-largest retailer, will start selling a Sony Blu-ray high-definition DVD player during the critical holiday shopping period and feature the player along with Blu-ray discs in store displays, dealing a potential blow to the rival HD DVD format.

The move, which the companies will formally announce Thursday, is another step in resolving a format war that has kept confused consumers from rushing to buy new DVD players until they can determine which format will dominate the market.

Target said it will sell the Sony BDP-S300 for $499 in October and display it along with Blu-ray DVDs from three studios, including Sony Corp. and The Walt Disney Co., at the ends of store aisles.

The Target announcement comes five weeks after a decision by video rental chain Blockbuster Inc. to offer only Blu-ray titles when it expands its high-def offerings this fall.
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Full Story: forbes.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From sonyprotectiongroup.com:
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First let me point out that this is all done in "Home Beta 1.6" and Sony is continuing there updates to Home for more content and also with much feed-back from users through the beta. Users start out with there own "Home Space" where they design the inside of a pre-made house. The customization within these houses are endless as you can take 50 different objects and place them ANYWHERE in your house. Make a tower of chairs or a movie theater type seating arrangement. Anything you want can be done here!

Next, Users can go to one of many other locations via a portal or there "Home PSP's". These locations include the Game Lounge, Central Lounge, or the Theater Lounge. These locations offer many different things to do in them such as in the Game Lounge you can play pool, bowling, and five different arcade games, but more is expect in the next updates to follow. The next spot in the Home journey is the Central Lounge where users can just go and chat and offers a lot of seats. The last location is the Theater Lounge where users go to watch trailers and movies and game previews that are soon to come out and they can watch in a theater or on a preview screen in the halls.

Much is to be added later in these different lounges but as of now, the beta is working out many of the glitches for the main game. I have had to reset the PS3 several times when relocating to a new lounge or when playing pool but that is expected in betas. Aside from the few bugs, Home offers great things and much more is expected in the coming months to the first public launch.
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Full Story: sonyprotectiongroup.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From 1up.com:
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- PlayStation Home icon on the top menu screen: within the Home universe, there will be something like a "Gran Turismo World" galaxy. You can then enter the top menu of the game from Home, or vice-versa by selecting the respective icons.
- My Page: When the game starts, a My Page screen will also appear. In the final version, Yamauchi hopes to include a friends list as well. There will be several background images for the My Page screen such as Tokyo and other cities, but will also include sceneries of both outdoors and indoors. There is also a weather forecast displayed so that other players will know which geographic location you are in and how the weather is there.
- Chat features: Prologue will include 2 online modes, one which includes the chat features and the other which excludes this feature.
- Number of cars and course selection: about 40 cars and 4 courses with 8 different layouts. There will also be new courses which was briefly shown in the E3 trailer.
- Prologue will not have cars and course downloadables.
- Prologue falls somewhere in between the GT and Arcade mode. Players can earn reward money from each race and purchase new cars. There will be normal cars and tuned cars, but players cannot tune their own cars in this version. The save data from Prologue (such as money earned and cars purchased) can be carried over to Gran Turismo 5.
- 16 cars during races for offline mode. This may drop to 12 cars in online mode.
- Game control features "Normal Mode" based on simulation engine and "Professional Mode" based on actual car behavior and physics.
- Yamauchi hopes to include B-spec mode but it is still not decided at this point.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is scheduled for an October release in Japan.
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Full Story: 1up.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

At long last, the first gameplay from Kojima's battlefield surfaces from the 20th Anniversary celebration.

From next-gen.biz:
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According to Sony, PlayStation 3 sales have more than doubled since slashing the price of the console by $100. But is this success sustainable? Next-Gen spoke with SCEA's Peter Dille on the price cut, reducing costs, PlayStation Home and more...

"We're confident. One of the things that Sony does very well is eek out consistent manufacturing efficiencies in its products," Dille says. "At the end of the day we are a manufacturer of consumer electronics, unlike our competitor on the Microsoft side. So we know how to do this. We cost-reduce products over time. We miniaturize them."

"Look at what the PlayStation 1 became and then look at how we reduced the PlayStation 2. Look at the PSP for that matter. This is something that Sony is very, very good at doing. With the ramp up of manufacturing, one of the things that's happening is we're able to cost reduce PlayStation 3 and as Blu-ray becomes more prevalent and appears in multiple devices, the cost of all these components start coming down."
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Full Story: next-gen.biz (2 pages)
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From joystiq.com:
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GameDaily finished transcribing their interview with Nintendo's VP of marketing and corporate communications George Harrison.

Harrison says in terms of the Sony price drop, "I don't think they had any choice." He then makes the error of saying that "it's pretty soon after launch to be dropping your price." That was a nice try by Harrison to pull a fast one and make us forget that Nintendo knows quite well how to drop console prices to save themselves. Case in point, the Gamecube dropped its price almost 60 days earlier into its life cycle than the PS3 did. Although he gets back on point saying Sony is continuing to confuse consumers with two versions of the PS3. We wonder why Sony can't just learn from their PSP Lite and simply replace the old with the new.
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Full Story: joystiq.com | biz.gamedaily.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From gamasutra.com:
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According to NPD, total industry sales were up 31 percent to $1.1 billion for the month, with hardware sales up 34 percent to $399 million, as the DS again leads all other hardware formats with an impressive 562,000 handhelds sold.

All consoles saw a rise in sales with month, with Wii leading at 381,800 units, followed by the Xbox 360's 198,400, and PS3's rise from 82,000 last month to 98,500. The PSP also rose to 230,100 units sold. No information was given by NPD this month on PlayStation 2 or GameBoy Advance hardware.
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Full Story: gamasutra.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From gamesindustry.biz:
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SCEA has announced that, based upon preliminary internal data, PS3 sales have increased by more than 135 per cent at the company's top five retailers over the past two weeks.

"The new price on the 60 GB PS3, coupled with our very strong software showing from E3, is certainly paying dividends in terms of impressive sales across the board at retail," said Jack Tretton, SCEA president and CEO.

In the two weeks following the price drop, total PlayStation hardware sales have increased by 161 per cent, software sales by 15 per cent, and peripheral sales by 60 per cent.
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Full Story: gamesindustry.biz
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From gamasutra.com:
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When asked why Sony had chosen to re-announce its partnership with Epic Games at the recent E3 expo, along with plans for continued optimization of Unreal Engine 3 on the PlayStation 3, Harrison admitted a lack of support on Sony's part for the popular middleware solution.

"If we're honest, we didn't do enough of a good job supporting them and getting them the tools and technology early enough," said Harrison. "Also, Epic isn't a huge company. They don't have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them. Specifically, to optimize for SPUs (synergistic processing units) which are the point of difference that the Cell processor has."

Harrison further suggested the possible advantages of this fix, which is currently disadvantaging Unreal Engine 3 developers on PlayStation 3: "The benefits that [increased support] yields to end developers whether they're writing exclusive titles or multiplatform titles is that the performance on PS3 goes up exponentially, and it will make for a much better game experience," claimed Harrison.
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Full Story: gamasutra.com
Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

The new v1.90 PS3 OS is already released in Japan, it's coming tomorrow in EU and 'soon' in the US.
From PlayStation.Blog (FYI: Sony owned blog):
[QUOTE]
A quick update: we have a new firmware upgrade in the works for PS3, it will be available for download in the next few days. Firmware 1.90 brings with it several new features, many of which readers of this blog have requested - I'm happy to report.

Customization is one new feature: you can now personalize the wallpaper on your XMB with a photo. This was one of the top three requests we received via the blog's contact form. When viewing a photo, simply bring up the options screen by pressing the triangle button and selecting "set as wallpaper" from the options displayed. Additionally, you can now change the order of the games displayed under the game icon on the XMB.

Another new feature focuses on added communication elements: When you're sending messages to friends on PLAYSTATION Network, you can now use emoticons. We've added a bunch of emoticons that can be easily accessed from the virtual keyboard. Also, another cool addition is, when an avatar is displayed during voice/video chat, the avatar will move in response to audio.

Finally, on the more technical side, you can now play AVCHD videos saved on a Memory Stick or digital video camera, and we've added the ability to upscale audio CD output from your PS3. Now, there are two requirements for this feature: the device you're outputting to must support a sampling frequency of 88.2 kHz or 176.4 kHz, and your PS3 must be connected to that device with an HDMI cable or digital optical cable.

Oh, and one more thing: you can now eject discs using your controller by selecting "Eject Disc" in the options menu after you push the PS button.

Several other minor options will be included in 1.90 including a few new display options that will allow you to adjust your display while playing PlayStation, PlayStation2 and Blu-ray movies. More info on these options as well as detailed info on the rest of the 1.90 additions will be available later this week. We'll update this post with a link to that info when it's available.

We're working on additional features for our next update that will incorporate more of your feedback, so as always thanks for all of your support, and please keep those suggestions coming!
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Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com

From kotaku.com:
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According to website Playstation Universe, Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu is reporting a quote from Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto that there will be no playable demo of Final Fantasy XIII or Versus XIII until next year. Square Enix did state however, that video footage of both games will be available later this year, presumably at the Tokyo Game Show.
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Full Story: kotaku.com
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