From videobusiness.com:
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Hastings Entertainment has significantly expanded Blu-ray Disc rental in all 150 of its stores following a revenue-sharing deal with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

The Amarillo, Texas-based chain, which also sells DVDs, music, books and other merchandise, now offers Blu-ray titles for rent in all stores as well as improved copy depth at each location. Currently, Hastings' offers HD DVD titles for rent in about one-third of its stores, which are found primarily in secondary U.S. markets.
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Full Story: videobusiness.com
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From biz.gamedaily.com:
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One anonymous respectable industry veteran told GameDaily BIZ that his company has been referring to the PS3 as the 'PS3DO' for some time now. The 3DO, introduced by EA founder Trip Hawkins back in 1993, sported cutting-edge tech for its time. A steep price ($699) and a lack of any real "killer apps" didn't allow the platform to live out the 32-bit era, however. By 1996 it was officially dead. 3DO's marketing even promoted the platform not as a video game console but more as a high-end audio/visual product. Sound familiar?

But is the comparison to 3DO fair? David Cole of market research firm DFC Intelligence certainly doesn't think so.

"I don't think there is any comparison at all to the PS3 and 3DO," he said. "The main argument would be that they were both priced high at launch. But 3DO was a startup company with a different business model to license their platform to hardware manufacturers who could really have cared less about promoting the platform. They also didn't have software support and thus they didn't have games to drive the platform. With no games, a shoestring marketing budget and no consumer base to start with it sold less than a million units in the time it was on the market."

Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter agrees. "It's a pretty stupid (and unfair) comparison," he said. "3DO was a new platform, no brand ID, not compatible with legacy software, and with no first or third party support. The PS3 has a great brand, a loyal customer base, is generally backward compatible, has a ton of third party support, and an ever-increasing number of good first party titles. I hope the industry veteran was kidding. If he was serious, he's a fool."
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Full Story: biz.gamedaily.com
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From kotaku.com:
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While Americans and Koreans sun themselves from the collective glare bouncing off their shiny, whopping 80GB PS3s, other parts of the world make do with 60GB models. Japan, surprisingly, is one of them, but Japan's COrporate News are reporting that might not be for much longer, Kaz Hirai saying that Sony are considering "boosting" the Japanese model's HDD capacity, and also that they'll take user requests into account when making the decision.
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Full Story: kotaku.com
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From computerandvideogames.com:
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Bioshock could make its way to Wii, PS3, PS2 and handhelds, according to an analyst in a recent Take-Two report.

Don't put your life on hold though - if Bioshock should make it to other formats, Hickey (via GameDaily) doesn't expect it to happen before fiscal year 2009.
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Full Story: computerandvideogames.com
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From shacknews.com:
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Much ado has been made about the potential presence of cross-platform play in Epic Games' upcoming multiplayer-heavy shooter Unreal Tournament 3 (PC, PS3, X360). The most likely compatible platforms have been PC and PlayStation 3, as the Xbox 360 version has taken a development backseat and the PS3's approach to network architecture is more conducive to the kind of freedom Epic would want for such a service. PS3, unlike Xbox 360, also supports mouse and keyboard controls, which would allow for a more potentially level playing field between users of the two platforms.

Still, in an IRC chat conducted yesterday featuring numerous members of Epic's UT3 team, Epic VP Mark Rein finally confirmed that the game will not feature cross-platform multiplayer--at least at launch.

"The biggest challenge in doing cross platform play is syncronizing [sic] the builds such that the build on the PC is 100% compatible with the build on the PS3," said Rein. "Unfortunately (or fortunately) when you [develop] games on console you have a lengthy certification process to go through each time you release anything new."

"We looked at how this would impact our ability to respond quickly to things happening at internet speed on the PC side of the equation and realized that this would not be in the best interests of our very loyal PC userbase," he went on, "because we would constantly be holding on to updates to wait until they passed cert on the console platform."

Rein was sure to note that the feature may see release later on, "after the game has settled down," but "even then the likelihood is small."
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Full Story: shacknews.com
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From ff-xiii.net:
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The November issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) reports that although info on Final Fantasy XIII is tight and hard to squeeze out of Square Enix, one tidbit has popped out, Final Fantasy XIII is up and running on Playstation 3 hardware as of now (see scan 1). Whether FFXIII has just gotten up and running on PS3 hardware recently or if it's been up and running and this info has only just made it to EGM is unclear. If it's the case that FFXIII has just gotten on PS3 hardware recently, the prospect of seeing it inside 2008 seem slimmer than ever, especially in english.
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Full Story: ff-xiii.net (with scans)
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From gamesindustry.biz:
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Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has told GamesIndustry.biz that recent chatter about an entry level 40 GB PlayStation 3 is just "rumour and speculation".

Numerous websites and blogs have suggested that Sony is due to unveil a scaled-down console for around GBP 299 in the UK, with USB ports and backwards compatibility functions removed.
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From twice.com:
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Home Theater Specialists of America (HTSA), the $500 million buying group for A/V specialty dealers and installers, has formally confirmed that it is backing Blu-ray Disc technology based on sales trends among its 62 members.

HTSA said it expects its exclusive support of Blu-ray to "strengthen retailer commitment to providing more BD-based devices to meet growing consumer demand."
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Full Story: twice.com
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From computerandvideogames.com:
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Speaking off the record (which means we can't name names), we've been told by sources in both the publishing and retail sectors that PS3 is on the verge of receiving a massive price cut - to £299.

But this won't be for the 60GB system that's currently on the shelves. It'll be a stripped down version, which Sky News reports will ship without backwards compatibility or USB ports. How you'll sync your controllers without them, we don't know.
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Full Story: computerandvideogames.com
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From next-gen.biz:
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Sony's Phil Harrison hits on the big issues within the PlayStation business in this extensive Next-Gen interview.

* Now the PS3 price cut. It happened recently and [PS3 sales] still didn't, in the US, pass the Xbox 360 in monthly NPD sales. If a $100 price cut hasn't done it yet for PlayStation 3, what is the next step?
* Well we had a great up-tick in sales as a result of that price cut, and these price moves are fairly predictable. Taking your starting and ending price point, you know largely what your increase in sales is going to be. What price moves often surprise us in, actually, is how long the message takes to get through to the consumer. You can change the price at a retailer pretty quickly, but [the sales increase happens] when [consumers] start seeing that price repeatedly advertised to them in the supplements that come out in the newspaper or in the print ads in the local paper or when they actually go to the store itself. So it can actually take weeks or months for the price message to really get into the psyche of the general consumer, obviously not the specialist gamer, but the more general mass market.
The second thing is that price alone is not enough to drive demand for the system. It has to be coupled with software and with demand for, in PlayStation 3's case, the other functions, like Blu-ray movies, network, et cetera. All of those are building up. This holiday season, we're going to see a really tremendous lineup of software from us and from third parties and also the increasing importance of Blu-ray disc as a movie format. So I think that it will come into its own over the next few weeks or months.

* It seems that both Sony and Microsoft often look at the Nintendo Wii and say, "oh yeah, Wii's great, its success is really good for the industry." Those kinds of compliments don't happen too often between Microsoft and Sony. Can you equally recognize the success that Microsoft has had?
* It would be churlish to try and suggest that you would wish ill on any company, because as I said, if the business has got a lot of momentum and it's aggressively acquiring new users, new forms of creativity are being accepted in the marketplace and the kind of games that we can make as creators gets wider, that's a great thing from a game designer point of view, from a game creating organization. That's incredibly empowering because it means that people's minds are more open to new challenges. In the 16-bit and the 8-bit era on 8-bit Nintendo and 16-bit Genesis and Nintendo, it was all about 2D platformers, some sports and that was it. And that's a pretty boring place to be.

* What do you consider the biggest factor in the PS3 overtaking Xbox 360, if that's destined to happen?
* First of all, we don't look at it in terms of short term notches, where we're trying to overtake that particular product or in that particular market. We just look at it in terms of a longer-term strategy. It actually reverts back to the earlier discussion about what we should be doing in our business to be the creative choice of the developers and the commercial choice of the publishers. If, as a game development studio, we can create the most compelling experiences that showcase our platforms in the most interesting way, that generate the most fun games for people to play, people will buy our systems. Now that has to be linked to great marketing, great promotion, the right price points, the kind of rising tide of Blu-ray disc adoption and an increasing adoption of networks. But those things will be fine. They'll all take care of themselves, but we just need to stay focused on building the right game content, bringing those to our systems, and then I'm pretty happy that everything else will fall into place.
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Full Story: next-gen.biz (3 pages)
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