Sony Claim Publishers Are At Fault For PSN Game Delays.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix was a perfect example. Speaking openly on the Playstation Blog, Sony's Angela Madronero tried to clear some of those issues up. Talking about first party titles, Angela claimed, "We know how important this is to you, and I hope that you've seen an improvement in synchronised, worldwide releases over the past six months".

It's a fair and very valid point. But what of the third party games:
[quote]
The decision about whether and when to release a game for sale is in the hands of the individual publisher (companies like Capcom, EA, Konami, Ubisoft, etc.).

In the same way that the publisher decides when to launch the disc version of a game, they also decide if and when PlayStation Network content is made available.

There are many reasons why our third party partners may not be able to launch content in one region on a particular time/date; this may be due to technical glitches, digital rights issues, localisation requirements etc. So the issues are a little more complex than may first appear.

We know that there is a lot of frustration when content is released on one store but not another. I can confirm that from a PlayStation Store point of view, we are committed to supporting our third party partners in bringing as much content as possible to the European Store.</blockquote>

We actually understand how the moaning on this topic could be really frustrating for Sony. If things really are down to the publisher, then it must be irritating for Sony to take the wrath of a problem that isn't inherently their fault. Hopefully SCEE can continue to make strides towards making the process as seamless as possible for us however. It's a problem we'd very much like to not have to think about, regardless of who is at fault.