Rumor Control: East Coast EA and the PS2 HDD "cover-up"

RUMOR #1: Electronic Arts is creating a new East Coast hub in Orlando, Florida.

Source: Sun-kissed local paper, The Orlando Sentinel

The official story: "There is currently no fixed plan for creating a new EA in downtown Orlando. At this time, we can't further comment." - Jeff Brown, vice president, corporate communications, Electronic Arts

What we heard: With EA moving West Coast developers to its Redwood Shores, California, headquarters as quickly as rental trucks can carry them, rumors of EA creating a new East Coast center seem unlikely. However, the Tuesday article in the Sentinel claimed to have evidence in the form of a leaked memo. Allegedly written by Orlando's Economic Development Department, the memo says the city council may tempt EA with a $41 million tax-incentive package to plant roots in the city. The incentive is reportedly in response to an EA plan to create a new 1,050-person studio in Orlando, Lake Mary in Florida's Seminole County, or Vancouver, British Columbia. However, since Vancouver-based EA Canada already employs more than 1,000 people, an expansion of the Florida-based EA Tiburon studios--developer of best-sellers Madden NFL 2004, NCAA Football, and NASCAR Thunder--seems more likely. And since EA Tiburon is already in suburban Orlando, a move downtown would not uproot its 275 workers. Still, Brown said there are no concrete plans for Orlando but did concede that Tiburon had outgrown its current offices. "We have a studio in Florida that is doing very well, which we do need to expand," he told GameSpot, "And we have a lot of different options."

Bogus or not bogus?: While very likely, for now it's bogus.

RUMOR #2: Sony Computer Entertainment America is covering up the fact that the PlayStation 2 hard drive shipped without its previously announced multimedia features.

Source: Several e-mails to GameSpot from irate PS2 HDD purchasers.

The official story: "We will have more information on the HDD and additional content support in the near future." - SCEA statement.

What we heard: At the 2003 SCEA Gamers' Day, Sony announced that the PS2 HDD would come with a bevy of features, including a "personal jukebox" that would let PS2 owners store and play MP3s and songs ripped from CDs, in addition to a photo manager that would enable users to store, edit, and display digital photos. The lure of so much functionality caused many to preorder the HDD, which was then shipped minus the special features--"without warning"--according to one angry purchaser. Another buyer claimed that Sony was quietly covering up the whole affair and had deleted the September 16, 2003, press release that referred to the original HDD specs and locking Playstation.com forum threads that addressed the omission. At first, the allegations appeared to be true. The release that outlined the features was indeed gone (although another one hyping Final Fantasy XI's bundling with the HDD remained). However, further investigation found that Sony did, in fact, say in several publications that the PS2 HDD would not come with the announced features out-of-the-box, although no press release announcing the omissions was ever released to the actual press. Additionally, not only are there active HDD-outrage forum posts on the PlayStation.com site, but also it appears that Sony has gone so far as to contact individual posters to assure them that the HDD multimedia features simply weren't ready for launch and would be released "soon." Given some of the now-mollified HDD critics' angry posts, it's unlikely that they're SCEA shills. However, the question remains: "How soon is 'soon?'"

Bogus or not bogus?: Semi-bogus. While Sony is certainly trying to keep the HDD feature omissions quiet, it appears that it will eventually release an update with the multimedia features.