As the conference approaches, Sony is fast becoming a company to keep a close eye on over the course of this year’s E3, with word coming out now that the company could be gearing up to announce a “premium” version of its PlayStation Network.

Word of the upgraded, fee-based service comes from VG247, which cites a ‘highly-placed source’ has having given them a quick run down of what the service will offer to users and just how much we can expect it to set us back. It’s an interesting affair, and given the fact that Sony has long been rumoured to be gearing up for it, we’re not too surprised to hear that the for-pay version is in the works. Still, there’s a chance that Sony could end up alienating a percentage of its users; one of the biggest reasons to pick up a PlayStation 3 until now has been the fact that, unlike Microsoft’s Xbox Live, PSN remains free.

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Infinity Ward’s record breaking Modern Warfare 2 can add another fairly impressive number to what’s fast becoming a long list with the news that the game has now hit 25 million players.

Modern Warfare 2 keeps stacking up impressive figures

The news comes via a posting on Activision, the game’s publisher, twitter feed for developers (which you can check out at this page if you’re so inclined), which shows that they’re not just pleased to have hit the 25 million player mark, but that there is finally some news of the upcoming downloadable content. The posting simply reads,

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It seems that the issue that caused a massive number of the PlayStation 3 consoles to suddenly and inexplicably fail for 24 hours on Monday has been determined to have been caused by the same thing that caused a massive 24 hour Zune failure two years back.

It was always a bit of a monolith...

Indeed, the great Zune failure of 2008 lasted a similar period of time and happened on a similar scale, effecting pretty much every 30GB model of Microsoft’s media player in the field. Interestingly enough, and as many had suspected given the similarities between the two apparently unrelated plagues of not-quite-functioning devices, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry blog points out that there’s one key piece of hardware shared by the pre-PlayStation 3 Slim PS3 models and Microsoft’s Zune – an ARM processor.

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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 seems that Sony’s strangest online offering, PlayStation Home, could well be in a little trouble with the emergence of word that the service is haemorrhaging advertisers.

Still, it's hardly as though Sony has much left to lose with Home...

PlayStation Home, originally lauded as an ideal way to have the average PlayStation 3 user interact with brands in new and interesting ways, but with the service long since seeming to be something of a ghost town, it’s seemed only a matter of time before something gave… and give it indeed has, with advertisers said to be abandoning the platform. BrandWeek is reporting that advertisers had begun to question just what it was that Home had to offer both users and advertisers, citing usability issues with Home itself.

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Microsoft took the time to release some figures detailing the number of subscribers to its online service, Xbox Live, prompting Sony to release official stats for PlayStation Network in response…

Twenty three million paying subscribers seems an awful lot...

Of course, this is something a lot of the die-hard single console faithful have been waiting a while to see. While many have pointed to Sony’s PlayStation Network as a solid base that’s been gradually improving over time, the fact that it’s free to all PlayStation 3 owners is the single feature most likely to have a pronounced impact on its figures. By contrast, Microsoft’s Xbox Live offers a for-pay service that is (as someone who has a fair bit of experience with both) just a little bit ahead in terms of both user interface and integration. Still, let’s take a look at the numbers before we go any further.

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It seems that the rumours that Sony was seriously considering implementing a charge for the use of its PlayStation Network service weren’t entirely unfounded. Sony execs have admitted that the idea is an attractive one.

Word comes from IGN of an interview with Sony’s senior vice president of marketing, Peter Dille, who wouldn’t be drawn as to just whether or not Sony had already made a decision on whether or not it would charge for the service yet, but he puts paid to any lingering doubt about Sony wanting to monetise the service current service. If so, it could well be the beginning of a fairly fundamental shift in the console landscape.

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It seems that the recently revealed hack for Sony’s PlayStation 3 has now been released to the web at large through the medium of the hacker, George “Geohot” Hotz’, blog.

With many questioning the veracity of Hotz’ claim that he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3, or simply to what extent that hack might be useful, it seems that the most sensible move would be to simply release the hack into the wild and see just what the community at large can do with it. Still, it’s well worth keeping in mind that this is the same man who originally managed to hack the iPhone.

Perhaps the most detailed (without being so complex as to be practically incomprehensible) writeup on the first exploit to hit the PS3 has come from Eurogamer.net, which quickly points out that,

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Nintendo is to bring support for Netflix video streaming service to its Wii games console, adding the functionality to the Wii’s web-based lineup.

The move sees Nintendo’s Wii join its various competitors in offering some form of Netflix integration to the console. Indeed, both Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 already offer some form of Netflix integration, so it’s one area in which Nintendo is very much playing catch-up, but it’s still an interesting development from an industry point of view, especially, coming as it does, from the market leader.

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Word has arrived from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that Microsoft has managed to get downloadable content for Modern Warfare 2 before other platforms.

According to the report from gaming blog Destructoid, the by now inevitable downloadable content for the record breaking latest entry to the Call of Duty series, Modern Warfare 2, will appear on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 before being made available on either of the other two platforms on which people are playing the game, the PC and Sony’s PlayStation 3.

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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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Sony has offered a preview of its upcoming update to the PlayStation 3, which brings the device up to version 3.15. The new firmware update adds support for Sony’s “Minis” as well as save-file sharing across different consoles.

Sony’s Minis are essentially a way for the company to sell minigames – the kind of content usually made as a free unlockable game or perhaps offered as part of a collection more normally – directly through its PlayStation Store. Until now, these had been available for the PlayStation Portable, but now Sony has announced that PlayStation 3 users will be able to download and play Minis from the more stationary console when the new update hits.

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