Meus Renaissance said:
What I find disappointing in all these debates on price cut is that people are discussing what is good for Sony's finances and Sony's business. Yet no one is talking about or pressuring Sony to focus on improving the XMB on the console; to provide more game orientated features, to make the PSN more complete
Some features are not added because of OS memory limitations. It took Sony a while to implement in-game XMB because XMB features used up too much memory. Once Sony was able to compress and refine the software to use up less memory, the in-game XMB was able to work. However, cross-game chat may be held back for one of the three reasons:
-Not enough available memory yet to make it happen (I know there's still some OS memory issues since some games that use up quite a bit of RAM can have issues when you try sending a friend a message in-game). If PS3 did come with more RAM in the first place, this would not have been an issue (360 doesn't have too big of a RAM issue since its all unified (not split like PS3), and MS is a software company afterall and could get the OS memory down to using around 20MB). There's plenty of articles out there about the OS memory issues the people who work on the PS3 OS had to deal with. While the PS3 OS memory has come way down since launch, it still uses more memory than the 360.
-I could be wrong, but I believe the 360 had memory reserved just for the voicechat, which made it possible for cross-game chat. This was planned right from the get go. On PS3, it was never planned, which might make it harder to fit in right now.
-There could be various patents out there (MS owns a ton related to the 360 console, such as one that will play a custom soundtrack in any game) that may complicate implementing the feature.
That's why I'm honestly not going to complain about features which may use up a lot of memory not being implemented, because PS3 just doesn't have that much RAM (a big mistake when planning PS3).
Cross-game invites can never fully be utilized though. MS had them planned in the 360 way before the console was released. They basically came up with standard online features, which every game had to implement. Sony on the other hand may have many of the same features, but they give developers pieces to work with. Since they never created a standard set of features every game had to interface with online from the get go, that's why it will never happen (because just by adding cross-game invites doesn't mean an older game like CoD4 will suddenly have them. A developer would have to patch their game to make it work, but most developers aren't willing to add features to games released over a year ago). PS4 may have them right from the get go.
As for game launching in Home, you are a little behind on news there, since more games have it now. But the thing is, adding game launching just isn't going to make every game work (since many games are a closed project). Only way to make it work is for a developer to patch an old game. Since many of the tools for game launching weren't made to developers until maybe a year ago, games would need a patch to work with it. Most developers have moved onto new projects, and would rather not spend the time/budget implementing the feature (It's out of Sony's control). It's the same reason why you will never see cross-game invites working for every single game, mostly because older games would have to be patched even if it was standard.
As for the slim, I do believe its coming, but I'm not going to assume any price point since we just don't know what will happen.
