Tag Archives: eric lempel

Sony’s to release PS3 Firmware 3.10 today, PSN director Eric Lempel’s told 1UP, bringing Facebook integration. The firm’s been keen to stress the social media site’s advent on PS3 has nothing to do with the fact it’s just gone live on 360.

“I’ll just say that it’s been in the works for quite some time,” said Lempel.

“It’s never been easy to just integrate new content into the PlayStation Network. We’ve had this planned for a while now.”

Facebook integration is the main thrust of the software update, meaning PS3 gamers will now be able to dump to share Trophy updates into the service’s news feed.

Lempel added that tools to allow games to trasmit event updates to Facebook have already been sent out to Sony’s first-party developers.

There’s more through there.

SCEA’s Eric Lempel has told Joystiq that Mini pricing for PSPgo rests solely in the hands of the publisher – that’s why you will find some games listed whose iPhone counterpart (Hero of Sparta) may be cheaper.

“As far as pricing goes, the publisher of the title sets the pricing,” he said. “I think they have to carefully price their content. Minis was intended to be something a little different and we wanted to see a lot of different types of content through minis.

“If it’s not priced correctly, consumers may be turned off at the proposition and say ‘I’d rather just go for this kind of stuff instead of minis.’”

Maybe after the newness of Minis wear off some publishers will come to their senses.

More through the link.

Ericp Lempel, director of operations for US PSN, sat down with Varitey’s Video Business and had a chat.

During which, Lampel not only let slip that PSN has 12.5 million registered users in North America, bit that most users are educated males in their late twenties who apparently, have girlfriends if the type of movies rented are any indication.

“Right now [the userbase] it’s primarily male. The average age is 28 years old, in usually the middle- to higher-income range. They over-index against those with graduate degrees. But it’s expanding,” he said. “What we’re finding ever since we’ve introduced services like the video download service, we’re getting more of the household on the PlayStation Network.

“Some of the top rentals and sales on the video side have been content that probably doesn’t appeal exactly to that 28-year-old male. It’s more those movies that are geared toward women.”

Unless 28-year-old males secretly like Kate Hudson, we’d say the guys rented “movies that are geared towards women” for a gal-pal.

Via Kotaku.

Sony’s Eric Lempel has told PC World that the XMB glitch the causes the battery meter to cover PS3′s clock is going to be fixed.

“I personally don’t like that either, and it’s something that’s definitely being corrected,” he said.

Thank gravy for that. Lempel added that the major update coming to PS3′s UI later this year “won’t be like what the rumors say”.

That’s right, Eric. Nothing like the rumours.

SCEA’s director of network operations, Eric Lempel, has said that there isn’t a NXE-like overhaul in PSN’s future.

“What we find is that people really like our current interface,” he told CVG. “We did redesign the PlayStation Store last April to make some improvements, make it faster, make it better, and we’re always listening to consumers. But right now the XMB is an Emmy Award-winning interface and people like it.

“They’re very comfortable with it. So we’re not looking to do anything radical. We’ll still do some research behind the scenes and see what can we do to make things better, or how can we make it so consumers find content faster, but right now we’re pretty happy with it.

“No plans right now to do anything like what the competitor has done.”

There ya go.

Update: The software’s confirmed by both SCEE and SCEA as releasing tomorrow.

SCEA’s announced PS3 Firmware 2.60, saying the update is “coming soon.”

The main additions to the console’s functionality are a photo gallery and DivX 3.11 support.

“The PS3 firmware update (v2.60) is designed primarily to enhance the system’s media capabilities,” PSN boss Eric Lempel said on the PSBlog.

“The key feature is a new Photo Gallery application, which delivers a suite of tools for sorting through and displaying your digital photo collection.”

Other additions include:

• Guest access to PlayStation Store – This enables non-PlayStation Network members to browse through the storefront to check out the latest games, demos, videos, etc.
• DivX 3.11 support – Videos in this format can now be played on PS3.

There’s an explanatory video after the break. No firm date on when it’s going to be released, but “very soon” is a safe bet.

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According to this US PlayStation Blog post, Firmware 2.42′s launched for PS3. It sounds like a minor fix.

“This update improves the playback quality of some PlayStation 3 and PlayStation format software,” said PSN director Eric Lempel.

We told you the PlayStation Video Store was going live last night, and PS3F has confirmed it.

You can download a SD film in one-to-two hours, Eric Lempel said yesterday. If that feels like too long to wait, you can actually begin watching the film before it’s downloaded, which is nice.

No word of a European date, of course.

By Mike Bowden

PSP Firmware 4.05 is available for download right now. The update “will add new visualizers for music playback, among other features,” says Eric Lempel on the PlayStation Blog.

Get it while it its hot.

By Mike Bowden

The PlayStation Blog is reporting that firmware 2.41 is now live. Sony’s Eric Lempel:

“Hi, everyone. As many of you know, we released PS3 firmware update v2.40 last week, but had to take it offline temporarily because, for a limited number of users, the XMB wouldn’t display after the update was installed. We’ve been able to fix the problem, and I’m happy to report that firmware update v2.41 will be released shortly.

We want to extend our apologies to the PlayStation community for any inconvenience. Now we’ll be looking forward to seeing everyone online and racking up those trophies!”

We’re grabbing it now. Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

By Mike Bowden

PSN boss Eric Lempel has told Next-Gen that this autumn’s promised Home launch will be the real article – it just won’t be the finished product.

“The reason we’ve been delaying [Home] is so that we can deliver a high quality service that the users will enjoy,” he said. “Even though it will be in beta, it will be a fair representation of what the service can be and its potential, so it won’t be a 0.5 release, it will be a fully robust service.”

Home’s roll-out was described last month by PSN director Susan Panico as being similar in plan to Gmail’s release, where the initial “beta” was in fact the full product with rough edges.

An autumn release for the service is now looking increasingly solid, with no execs commenting on the issue deviating from the time-frame.

PSN chief Eric Lempel told Gamespy that all PS3 games will have Trophies, although these things take time.

“We’re working with developers to hit a deadline. It’s not something that we’re trying to force on them, since it eats into their development schedules,” said Lempel when asked how long it would to implement Trophies into PS3′s back catalogue.

“Many of them want to do it. It’s just there’s some additional work on their end; someone has to create art and assets, and we don’t want to interfere with what they’re currently working on. Ultimately, we’ll have trophies for every game, but we didn’t want to force it on them immediately.”

Full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

In an interview with Next-Gen, Sony ‘s Eric Lempel found time to criticise Microsoft’s newly-formed policy of dropping old and unpopular Xbox Live Arcade titles.

“While naturally we only want to keep quality titles on the network we do have room for a lot of them,” he noted. “I think if I look over at the competitors’ UI they may have some issues just displaying content, and scrolling up and down lists isn’t the easiest way to find things.”

In addition, Lempel reiterated Sony’s promise that PSN will never charge a subscription fee, come hell or high game prices. But then, he didn’t even mention Qore.

Hit the link for the full interview. There’s a lot in there on the Firmware 2.40 release, so it’s well worth a read.

By Nathan Grayson

It’s here. The piece is Eric Lempel, Sony’s PSN boss, answering questions on tomorrow’s Firmware 2.40 launch, including topics on voice chat, web browsing, Trophies and a heap of stuff on in-game XMB. Must-read.

PSN boss Eric Lempel said in today’s PS3 Firmware 2.40 video walkthrough that the update would include the Google Search Bar.

“We’ve addeed one more feature that we’ll talk about today,” said Lempel. “This is something we did a few weeks ago on the PSP, with Firmware 4.0, and that’s the addition of a Google Search Bar.

The next video walkthrough will be available in a “few days” with firmware 2.40 being released “very soon”.

By Mike Bowden

PSN chief Eric Lempel said in today’s Firmware 2.40 video walkthrough that custom soundtracks will be supported, and alluded to the fact that all games would support the feature.

Up until now no-one was sure whether the feature would be limited to specific titles, but Lempel made no mention of this in his demonstration with his only disclaimer being, “please bear in mind this is a concept and it may not be what it looks like when we deliver it.”

So there you go.

By Mike Bowden