A Crafty Little JPG Knocked Up By Disgruntled Gamers Yeaterday.

An anonymous N4G blogger known as Super_Secret supposedly leaked the reason for the lack of one of Playstation's most demanded features: cross game chat.

The reason Super_Secret's claims were given credence were because of his past predictive performance. Months before Sony announced the PS3 Slim, Super_Secret had detailed every minute feature of the system, leading many to believe he worked within Sony.

In his latest post he details that Sony have been working on cross game chat for a while, but a "large company" would not support it. He cites the problem of cross game chat as something similar to in-game soundtracks. Ever wondered why they don't work in every game? Super_Secret claims it's because the feature only worked with 95% of the Playstation 3's back catalogue, and therefore, said "large company" did not want their games to look inferior. Thus Sony opted to implement the feature at the developers discretion, and not across the board.
[quote]
"When they found out that a new firmware update was going to suddenly make one of their games look inferior to just about every other game released, they protested. A lot. They threatened everything, from legal action to dropping support for the PS3 all together."</blockquote>

Of course, Super_Secret suggests that this is a similar case with cross game chat. It works with most titles, but not all. It's here that he hints at EA's part in all this.
[quote]
" It's not Activision. It's not Ubisoft. It's not Capcom. It's not Insomniac. It's not Konami. It's not Take 2. It's not Midway. It's not Squaresoft. are wE All getting the picture yet? One point I want to reiterate - there's a difference between the games that didn't work with in-game XMB and the games that DID work with in-game XMB but DIDN'T work well with custom soundtracks, so stop picking out the ones that simply didn't do in-game XMB. Also, it wasn't just ONE game that caused this, either. Although one title does come to mind and it wasn't even what you or I would call a "Big" game. I'll give you a hint: HPatOofP. "</blockquote>

EA's Jeff Brown says the post is utter nonsense: "Not no-how, not no-way did that ever happen. This is a total fabrication – total nonsense. We think voice chat is an extremely cool feature and added it to Madden/ PS3." Brown then added, "We support cross-game voice on other systems and would be happy to do that on any console."

Sony were quick to backup EA, claiming, "This is rumor and frankly not true."

We don't think there's any credence to the rumours that Super_Secret has been spreading. But the question does remain how he know the full specifications of the PS3 Slim months before it was announced.

All we know is that, if not true, we feel really sorry for EA. They felt the full wrath of the PS3 fanboys on their forums yesterday, seemingly in a case that had nothing to do with them.