It's just an army of Cartmans acting like cocks on the Internet. It's a shame it gives a bad name to all the real fans of gaming.

If EA tries to stop the feature from being introduced because of one game (or a few), rather than just owning up and saying "oh well, that game was coded differently from every other damn thing out there", then the blame goes to EA.  Sure, Sony didn't have the feature at launch...this justifies EA from trying to stop the feature completely because of some older games that didn't even sell well?  No; if this is true, then fuck EA.

EA had to have done cost-benefit analysis, right?  "How bad will it be for us if Harry Potter is almost the only game without voice chat?  Hmm, it won't really matter.  How bad will it get if we try to kill the voice chat feature and fans find out about it?  Oh, fuck."  Smooth one, idiots.  (if this is at all true...we'll see.)

EA is getting hammered bad right now, i suggest they close their forum down until they can get a handle of the shituation.

I couldn't resist joining in with them..... good fun

Some sleuths on Gaf have discovered that the "attack" on the EA forums is really a raid perpetrated by members of 4chan.

Well, perhaps it'll at least send EA a message. The whole Anonymous deal is a big 4chan joke, but it has certainly raised awareness of the horrors of Scientology.  Of course, the message being sent on the EA forums isn't as wholesome as teh message sent by Anonymous.

Any statements yet?

I think somebody should just get a massive petition going, and I really think this Super_Secret guy is Sony viral trickery at it's finest.

Yeh I can imagine that "super_secret" guy is actually hired by sony to put preasure on EA.

From the point of view of a developer/designer of interfaces: this doesn't sound very convincing.

Let's say that cross-game chat requires a daemon ( a background system process, that is ). And let's assume that it wreaks havoc with some weirdly coded existing games.
As a coder, I'd say that you would add a couple of system calls to the OS so that a game can start/stop the cross-game chat service at will. And also add a toggle into the in-game XMB UI, with a lower priority than the code calls.
Also, the OS knows which game you're running (I suppose each one has a unique string ID) and can very well take care of saving your settings for each game. The default would be that the service is Off.

This way:
1) all "new" games can call the "turn cross-chat on" when they want, or disable it when they want. To the user, it's a transparent thing: they load their game, it has the feature.
2) all "old" games are run initially with the service disabled as they don't have the code calls, unless they are patched by their authors. The user would have to turn the service on from the in-game XMB the very first time, then the setting would be saved by the OS and be On automatically during subsequent runs. If it causes troubles, then the user will have to turn it off, it will stay off in subsequent runs and that particular game won't have the feature but it won't be broken, either.

Such calls are analogous to what I assume are now in the OS for the custom soundtrack, for both 360 and PS3. On the PS3 because by default it's off so there must be software switches, and on the 360 because I know that developers can add calls to their code that fade out the custom soundtrack and force the games one if they want (say, in a cut-scene or when the music cue is really needed)

And obviously the same "user turns it on once in the XMB" could be used for custom soundtracks in old games, too... all in all it's such an obvious solution that I don't know what to make of the original quoted post.

If its true.. that its EA and Harry Potter its laughable. The HP games are the worst games ever made. And this is the same EA that said that UFC wouldnt sell, and are now doing a MMA game. Ha.

what I don't understand is, why they couldn't have negotiated some deal, you know...where EA is ok with Sony releasing in game music but at a later date, so that EA can get the initial sales of the game before the movie hype dies down and this the game sales die, rather than the no deal type of way things went.