Sony

Despite prefacing his comments with "I won't comment directly on 3DS," Sony worldwide studios senior director Mick Hocking - the driving force behind stereoscopic 3D on PS3 - hints to Gamespot that he believes 3DS has struggled because its main selling point isn't good enough. "What we've seen over the last 12 months is a strong correlation between good-quality 3D content and great response from our fanbase," he says. "The opposite is also true. When people see 3D that doesn't work very well, or content that isn't very compelling, I think quite naturally they're not as interested in it."

Motion control and glasses-free 3D screens aren’t a good fit, according to SCEE senior group studio director Mick Hocking, who has been explaining the reasons PlayStation Vita won’t support 3D. “At the time we were looking at Vita, there were several issues,” he told GameSpot. “One was the quality of the glasses-free 3D screens. It can work very well on small screens, but to get the best effect, you need to keep your head very, very still. Now with a handheld gaming device and Vita having Sixaxis motion control in it, there may be gameplay where you're moving the Vita around. And if you're doing that and having glasses-free 3D, the two things don't sit very well together. We wanted to offer a really, really high-resolution OLED screen, and the best way to do that was in 2D. At least for the first one.” Asked if slow early 3DS sales were an indication that gamers aren’t embracing 3D, Hocking added: “I wouldn't comment directly on 3DS, but I think what we've seen over the last 12 months is a strong correlation between good-quality 3D content and great response from our fan base. The opposite is also true. When people see 3D that doesn't work very well, or content that isn't very compelling, I think quite naturally they're not as interested in it.”

Speaking during a roundtable session at Gamescom last week, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said the company would give developers greater access to user metrics. "We like to provide our developers with much more services for the platform," he said. "Platform holders have data, and that data has not necessarily been available for developers. Sometimes it's just hard to provide the right data to development teams. But [we are offering] more and more services to developers, and I think things will just get better and better."

Sony's decision to drop the UK retail price of the PlayStation 3 to £199.99 last week appears to have reaped immediate dividends, with one "reliable retail source" telling MCV that sales of the system rose 65 per cent week on week. That may further improve this week, with Sony kicking off an extensive marketing campaign to spread awareness of the PS3's new low price.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said that the continiung absence of cross-game chat on PS3 was due to memory limitations. "Once a game gets RAM we never give it back," he said. "It's not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact. The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game chat]. There's always voice chat in the game. But it's part of a game feature, not part of an OS feature. That's the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games."

Speaking to Eurogamer at this week's Gamescom in Cologne, Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida said that recent reports that Sony had halved the RAM in its upcoming portable to keep costs down were "very funny." Those reports appeared to be corroborated by Reality Fighters developer Novarama, but Yoshida says a RAM cut was never on the agenda. "It's been very funny. Some developer mentioned the RAM was halved," he said. "We never announced the amount of RAM, and we never changed it. We've been making games, right, and we've been showing the games since January. If RAM gets cut in the middle of development, there's no way we can complete the games. So I was like, what's going on?" Sony's PSP successor has 512MB of RAM and 128MB of VRAM, meaning it has more memory than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Reports prior to E3 in June suggested that Sony had halved the Vita's onboard RAM in a bid to drive down costs. 1UP notes that a spec sheet released yesterday confirms that Vita does, in fact, have the full 512MB of RAM, and 128MB of VRAM - giving it more memory overall than Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

Announced - under its Japanese name, Gravity Daze - but sadly rather lost in the crowd at E3, Gravity Rush is a cel-shaded action adventure centred on, as the name suggests, controlling gravity to traverse the environment. It's an internal project, under development at SCE Japan, and certainly has pedigree, helmed as it is by Keiichiro Toyama, director of the first Silent Hill and, more recently, PS3's episodic survival horror Siren Blood Curse.

This latest trailer, first shown at Gamescom yesterday, shows just how well the creative elements of Media Molecule's platformer translate to Vita's capabilities. While touchscreen controls are an obvious help, we were quite taken with the use of the handheld's built-in camera to add a little natural colour to creations.

At Gamescom yesterday Sony announced this downloadable spinoff from Infamous 2 which, in what appears a clear nod to Red Dead Redemption's zombie expansion Undead Nightmare, casts players as series protagonist Cole McGrath in a vampire-infested New Marais. Cole has been bitten and infected, and has one night to find and dispatch the head vampire to save his city and himself. Unlike Undead Nightmare, this is a standalone game, a PS Store download that doesn't require the original Infamous 2 to play. Festival Of Blood is set for release in October.

The latest trailer for SCE Studio Liverpool's futuristic Vita racer, debuted at Gamescom last night. Follow the below source link for all our coverage in one place.

Sony has revealed that Vita development kits will cost just €1900 plus VAT, making the upcoming portable a viable proposition to smaller studios. Significantly cheaper than the €15,000 cost of a PSP dev kit at launch, Sony even hints it is prepared to lower the price to get independent developers on board. "There is no cost to join the PS Vita Develop Programme," SCEE's George Bain revealed at GDC Europe yesterday. "There's just the cost of the dev kit. If you're a small developer, we [would be] happy to talk to you about this. It will help if you have a games portfolio. There's no reason we won't speak with smaller studios about joining up."

Sony announced at Gamescom today that all PlayStation Vita games will be available digitally through the PlayStation Store. They will also be sold at retailers through a new, proprietary flash-memory storage medium. In addition, the handheld will support all PSP games released through Sony’s online marketplace. The company further announced plans to launch free dedicated Vita apps for popular social networks Facebook, Foursquare, Skype and Twitter. It said these represent the "initial applications" in a larger social networking and communications line-up.