Talk about revealing that the sky’s blue… Sony has finally conceded that they’re to blame for the two years of delays that European PS3 owners have had to put up with when it came to releases on the PlayStation Network. After waiting up to a year for games like Super Puzzle Fighter and even teeny-weeny add-ons like Blast Factor: Advanced Research, it’s about time we got some sort of explanation.

Sony being Sony, we don’t even get that! Hohoho! The saga of Eurorants continues after the jump…

Now, see, we’ve tried being reasonable. We’ve tried to accept that the localisation of games can be a time-consuming progress, since every line of dialogue has to be re-recorded and every menu screen has to be rewritten in the local language of choice for the large number of European territories. I’ve even tried to explain that away as the reason for the umpteen delays the European PSN receives to its updates:

What truly irritates me is that localization appears to be the afterthought rather than a natural part of the development process, as it should be.

It turns out that I might have been a tiddly bit wrong back in July, but that was before the publishers of various PSN releases stepped up and said that it wasn’t actually anything to do with them. In other words, localization is probably already part of the development process and isn’t simply a last-minute afterthought, tackled long after the game hits the virtual shelves of the PlayStation Store.

Nope, as we should have known all along, it’s Sony’s fault. The COO (would that be like a pigeon?) of Penny Arcade Adventures developer Hothead Games explains that Sony’s various international arms handle the distribution processes independently of each other; SCEA will tackle the American releases and will stay out of the affairs of SCEE. Which is a shame really, because SCEA are really, really good at getting games out in a swift and timely manner.

A Sony rep admitted that “this has been an ongoing issue”. Two years is an awful long time to sort an “ongoing issue”. I want to know why they’re taking so goddamn long to sort something that should really be sorted in an instant.

My guess is that SCEA’s PSN team is made up of scores of well-trained IT professional would-be superheroes who soar around the Sony offices every week filming Qore and freebie catch-up video Pulse, adding new content to the store every Thursday and negotiating deals with movie studios to distribute their films on the video download store as soon as possible, all at the same time.

SCEE on the other hand probably employ a single high school dropout called Jim, or Dave, who is left to his own devices to sort through all of the PSN content by himself, week by week. Jim/Dave would love to negotiate with movie studios so we can stream The Dark Knight to our PS3s when we feel like it, but he’s too busy trying to prepare the PSN’s weekly update with the huge backlog of stuff America received four months ago.

I think SCEE needs some more staff. Failing that, a swift boot up the jacksie and a severe instruction to “just f**king get on with it” would do fine. Look, Sony, seriously, just do it already. If America and Japan can prove themselves swift in distributing store content, why can’t you match them? I don’t want to have to own up and say we Europeans are simply a bunch of lazy bastards. Don’t make me do that, please.

Publishers: Blame Sony for Euro PSN delays – CVG

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