It seems that Sony’s PlayStation 3 has been hit by a ten-years-too-late Y2K style calendar bug, which has just ticked over for many users, causing all kinds of issues for both consoles and services.

Sony's PlayStation 3 Slim is, thankfully, uneffected

The issue has effected a fairly wide proportion of the PlayStation 3’s userbase, though for the moment it seems that anyone using the PlayStation 3 Slim, released last October, shouldn’t encounter the bug. For those of you using a “fat” PlayStation 3, the news is strange, and not good at all. Indeed, it could well be the case that games are entirely unplayable.

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It’s emerged that Sony, which has long touted the fact that its PlayStation Network (PSN) service is free as a selling point over Microsoft’s Xbox Live, has been considering making a “premium” PSN service available to those who’ll pay.

Word comes from Kotaku that Sony has been conducting some fairly interesting surveys in an attempt to ascertain whether or not the PlayStation 3 owning public would actually pay for the use of PSN, in much the same way as Microsoft offers a free Xbox Live Silver or a fee-based Gold membership for its Xbox 360.

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Microsoft’s upcoming motion controller for its Xbox 360 games console may well not see the wide range of implementation that the company had originally hoped due to a noticeable amount of lag between the “controller” and the console.

TomsHardware is pointing to two separate reports that Microsofts attempts to add motion sensitivity to its current console line-up have hit some fairly major stumbling blocks. In both reports on the hardware, it seems that those who had actually had a chance to get their hands on the device were pretty much universally impressed by the innovation, but far less so by the performance, which they described as having lag on the input.

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Nintendo’s motion-sensitive games console has managed to reach a fairly massive milestone, managing to break the nine million consoles sold since the launch of the Wii.

News comes via Gamespot UK that Nintendo’s Wii has managed to achieve nearly twice the penetration of Sony’s PlayStation 3 in Japan. Perhaps most interesting though, is the other news that can be drawn from the same piece, not least of which, the fact that the recently released New Super Mario Bros. seems to be driving increased sales of Nintendo’s Wii.

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Nintendo is a company whose products seem to be so vastly successful that any move it makes is fairly sharply watched. The gaming giant has recently moved to trademark the word “Zii” precipitating a raft of speculation.

Could the Zii be the successor to the Wii?

Word comes from TechRadar of Nintendo’s recent acquisition, which leads to some fairly messy issues. Perhaps most interesting for media-player fanatics is the fact that Creative has recently announced a new media player line under the name Zii, but it seems fairly unlikely that there’s any relationship between Creative’s Zii and Nintendo’s recent trademark.

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It’s been revealed that Sony, despite making some fundamental changes to its console line-up, is still losing money on every one of the new PlayStation 3 Slims that it sells.

In an interesting breakdown of the probably costs of all of the parts inside the current model of Sony’s PlayStation 3, industry analyst iSuppli has added up the totals and found that Sony isn’t likely to be making any money on hardware sales this Christmas. Indeed, it seems that Sony’s console is costing it somewhere in the region of $30 for every unit sold in the US.

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Well respected game developer Bioware has said that this Christmas, Sony’s PlayStation 3 is to be a “key platform” for games development, indicating that it could be the platform to watch over the winter.

Bioware has, in the past at least, fairly famously outsourced some of its PS3 development to companies with a little more experience in porting or developing games for Sony’s fairly complicated hardware. From now though, it seems that it could well be doing its own work on the PlayStation 3 from now on, at least according to CVG. Of course, the big question this leaves for pretty much every Bioware fan with a PS3 is whether or not we’ll see Mass Effect and its upcoming sequel hit Sony’s console.

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The United States’ Air Force is reminding everyone that it can make the term “modern warfare” mean whatever it likes with the news this week that it’s ordering itself up no less than 2,200 games consoles.

The Air Force already has a bit of history with Sony’s PlayStation 3, having bought around 300 of the devices last year so that it could run tests with the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (which is usually just shortened to Cell processor) that Sony’s been touting as the best thing in processors for a couple of years now. It seems as though they’ve found what they were looking for, considering the fact that they’ve now moved to up their quote of PS3s by another 2,200, but it’s not going to be all that simple.

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With the recent shakeup in the games console market, it seems that long-time faithful Xbox 360 owners are moving over into Sony’s side of the market, picking up the new PlayStation 3 Slim.

In what’s starting to look more and more as though it could have been the turning point in the current generation console war, Sony’s decision to price-drop it’s PlayStation 3 to €299 with the release of the PS3 Slim has precipitated massive sales of the console, many of which to Xbox 360 owners, with relatively few PS3 fans going in the opposite direction with the Xbox price drop.

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Sony has proudly proclaimed that it has managed to sell one million of the new version of its PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 3 Slim.

TomsGuide is reporting that sony has officially hit one million PlayStation 3 Slim sales worldwide. The figure of a million PlayStation 3 Slims estimated by Sony to have been sold in the 24 days since its launch earlier this month is perhaps more telling than Sony would like it to be. While it certainly indicates that the company’s newest addition to the console space is doing incredibly well, it’s no secret that the PlayStation 3 had long been suffering in competition with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. The PS3 Slim’s high volume of sales could well indicate something Sony doesn’t want it to.

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