The 1.60 firmware update for the PS3 was released late last week. Thanks to an official statement, and anecdotal evidence, we are pleased to see that our earlier report has become inoperative as, in fact, background downloading won’t indeed be paused when playing an offline game.

This is clearly a recent shift in strategy at Sony. Our original report was based on information we obtained from an early February high-level meeting between various internal parties at Sony involved with the PS3 online’s strategy. At the time, it was unequivocally enunciated that this feature would not be available in the 1.60 update. To be exact, from the meeting’s minutes we obtained:

“Background downloads will be performed from within the context of the XMB only. They will be queued, and resumable if the connection is severed mid-download.

This will appear in the 1.60 SDK, scheduled for release at the end of March, 2007 to coincide with the SCEE launch.

WWS defined the feature to mean “downloading while playing a game”, and SCEI clearly stated that this would not happen at first because it would take system resources to do so, and thus it could affect the game play.

There were discussions that this feature could be controlled by an API, and allow the title to say whether or not to allow background downloading while playing the game. It was mentioned that while a title may not allow it on all the time, there certainly could be points (e.g., frontend screens) where they would allow background downloads to take some of the PS3 resources.

SCEI responded that this type of request, potentially for another phase, would be evaluated after the 1.60 release.” [emphasis ours]

It is unclear, at this point, what prompted the change in strategy in the last 6-7 weeks, and we would appreciate any feedback from insiders on that. To its credit, SCEI (Sony Japan) has obviously found a way of making enough resources available for background downloading without affecting games currently being played – which makes for an altogether better gaming experience.

We’ll keep updating this topic - and overall industry strategizing - as we get new info.

Posted by Raoul on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 6:20 pm.