Sony Sued Over Killzone: Shadow Fall's 1080p Promises

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People in California are actually suing Sony because Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer doesn't actually run at 1080p. The plaintiff is seeking $5M. That seems like adequate compensation. :rolleyes:

"Sony admitted that it did not in fact design Killzone to display multiplayer graphics in 1080p, but instead used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide 'subjectively similar' results," the suit argues. "But Sony never advertised and convinced consumers to buy a technological shortcut."
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What a mfing douche. 4 million because they did some frame interpolation/interlacing?

A class action might have a chance because the large number of buyers for the game, but just 1 guy? Shouldn't he be suing for $60 or whatever he paid for the game?
 
Dawill said:
What a mfing douche. 4 million because they did some frame interpolation/interlacing?

A class action might have a chance because the large number of buyers for the game, but just 1 guy? Shouldn't he be suing for $60 or whatever he paid for the game?
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I should learn to read the article first... Other site had it listed as a single guy filing the suit. This one appears to be class action in california. So we got a bunch of douches instead of 1.
 
waaa, my toy is blurry, waaa

not surprising some people are such piddling babies. I hope the courts and lawyers counter sue them for wasting their time, but that is VERY wishful thinking, I bet they will get on top of this faster than anything that actually matters.
 
I hope they win. False advertising like this should be illegal and if this case teaches Sony a lesson then its worth it.
 
We need an overhaul of the system here in the US. The loser should be paying all legal fees.
 
If the whole game was like that, then I could see the lawsuit as being fine, don't let companies get away with using "buzzwords" that actually have meaning for purposes of getting more customers. It'd be like Jack in the Box advertising their Vegan Bacon Double Cheeseburger, if it really had bacon on it :D

However the fact that the game does run 1080p, and its just the multiplayer aspect that is different seems a bit silly.
 
When you say our console does 1080p on this multiplayer game and our competitor's does not.

And someone buys your console over the others, and "can see" that this is false, you should be sued.
 
I hope it loses, but then again, should he be sueing for every 360 game ever? They all say 1080p on the box and those are just as not 1080 as killzone was..

Some people. But then again, it would be nice to see an end to all the marketing bullshit, say it like it is and let people buy games based on how GOOD they are, not what rez they run at
 
to prevail you need to show you were damaged in some way, at most his damages are the 60 he paid for the game, first he has to prove he can tell the difference between the interlaced and actual 1080 I'm bettinghe couldn't, I will cheer when he's ordered to pay Sony's costs for this frivolous suit, the only people who win class actions are the lawyers members of the class get very little.. I don't recall any advertisement that said 1080p for this game, now the developer said it would run in 1080p, Sony only said the PS4 is capable of running games in 1080p and it is, for he most part Killzone is in `080p.
 
Ocean said:
When you say our console does 1080p on this multiplayer game and our competitor's does not.

And someone buys your console over the others, and "can see" that this is false, you should be sued.
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irrelevant its a PS4 exclusive.
the Xbone can't play this game at any resolution.
 
Tak Ne said:
I hope they win. False advertising like this should be illegal and if this case teaches Sony a lesson then its worth it.
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show me single ad for this game that claims 1080p , the only thing that was ever talked about was this game at E3 and that doesn't constitute an ad.
 
Ocean said:
When you say our console does 1080p on this multiplayer game and our competitor's does not.

And someone buys your console over the others, and "can see" that this is false, you should be sued.
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Can see is a very bold claim, it literally took months and a breakthrough from Digital Foundry to realize it. It's still 1080 frames, it's just more 1080i than 1080p. It was ridiculous of GG to not just simply mention it but hundreds of games have done this before. Every game made since PS360 has 1080p on the back of the box.

This isint going anywhere because he can't show damages. If they wanted to sue for something they should have sued them for making a bland ass game. I got it at launch and can't finish it.
 
Dawill said:
What a mfing douche. 4 million because they did some frame interpolation/interlacing?

A class action might have a chance because the large number of buyers for the game, but just 1 guy? Shouldn't he be suing for $60 or whatever he paid for the game?
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A shady lawyer is behind it (as always). They'll find some dupe somewhere who will let them use his name for the promise of a potential pay off--as you say, a consumer would simply ask for his money back. Some attorney's offices actually employ people to examine manufacturer claims against the actual products, and then they try and cherry pick the class-action litigation targets from there. Finding willing dupes is the easy part. The "$5M" is an amount calculated to induce Sony to "settle" for $500k, or so, of which the lawyers will keep 80%-90%, out of which the dupe is rewarded. The actual class they pretend to be representing most often sees little to nothing when these suits are settled. Legislatures could easily fix these problems--but there you have the fox guarding the hen house, lawyers passing laws that favor lawyers.
 
quimby999 said:
show me single ad for this game that claims 1080p , the only thing that was ever talked about was this game at E3 and that doesn't constitute an ad.
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From the article:

A California class-action lawsuit alleges Sony Computer Entertainment America engaged in "deceptive marketing" of Killzone: Shadow Fall for PS4 when it advertised the game running in 1080p.

I just read the article, I've never heard of the game.
 
I hate how game companies advertise and promise shit then never deliver.
 
Sadly we need lawsuits to stop false advertising. Otherwise we will have Hershey Chocolate bars that help you lose weight. Not only that, they clean and straighten your teeth!
 
next-Jin said:
This isint going anywhere because he can't show damages.
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It's pretty easy to prove damages. He paid for a certain feature that was promised and they never delivered on the feature. If you paid me for a 6oz candy bar and I only gave you a 4oz candy bar I couldn't turn around and say, "well, it's still chocolate". Maybe visually you couldn't tell just by looking at it, but when you put it on a scale it would only show 4 oz. Similarly just because to the naked eye a game looks OK doesn't necessarily mean when you inspect it technically and it doesn't match up that you haven't been cheated.

In fact there was a case regarding a gas station around where I live a couple years back. The gas station calibrated all of the pumps to only pump out 0.98 gallons per 1 gallon metered. Sure, if you pumped the 1 gallon of gas in a can chances are you wouldn't be able to tell by eyeball if it was short or not, however that doesn't mean you weren't damaged. The standard is quite black and white. You are either delivering a product that meets specifications or you are not. There is no middle ground.

As much as I don't care because it doesn't personally effect me, some game companies need their hands slapped when it comes to false advertising.
 
Yeah if they're paying 5 million, it's probably not about damages to the plaintiff so much as punitive damages. I hope they are successful, I can't say I'm a fan of false advertising in any form.
 
To those claiming the actual damages would amount to only the price of the game, I'd say that the price of the console has to be a factor as well, especially if they were sold on the PS4 because they loved Killzone and were excited about the high-resolution, high-detail visuals.

Now, I could never be party to such a lawsuit because I don't care even a tiny bit if a game is rendered at 1080p or 960p or 480p as long as the game provides the amount of fun I expect for what I paid...and I can't really expect to win a lawsuit based on my subjective evaluation of a game.

But it's a bit odd to see people participating in such a [H]ardcore forum yet dismissing an allegation of false advertising when it comes to hardware/software technical capability. If someone sold a video card claiming to have <Y> stream processors but only <0.95*Y> stream processors were actually present, I doubt y'all would be so sanguine about it.
 
Tak Ne said:
I hope they win. False advertising like this should be illegal and if this case teaches Sony a lesson then its worth it.
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I have to agree, far too many companies get away with blowing smoke up our ass, and then when you call em on it you hear "oh well uhmumblemumble and synergy 2.0 patch mumble."
 
Babbster said:
If someone sold a video card claiming to have <Y> stream processors but only <0.95*Y> stream processors were actually present, I doubt y'all would be so sanguine about it.
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We should sue all hard-drive manufacturers then?
 
Youn said:
We should sue all hard-drive manufacturers then?
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Maybe? If you believe the advertising is false, then get something started. It's certainly not an idea I'd dismiss out of hand, though I doubt I'd want to participate because the differences between reality and advertising regarding storage space don't really bother me. The fact that hard drive manufacturers tend to operate using fairly consistent terminology and standards also leaves me a bit nonplussed regarding the idea of a false advertising suit.

Really, all I'm suggesting is that the cavalier dismissals here are purely out of personal opinion/preference with a little extra edge generated by what I infer is an attitude that "console gamers get what they deserve."
 
Tak Ne said:
I hope they win. False advertising like this should be illegal and if this case teaches Sony a lesson then its worth it.
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I agree. I don't get why people in this thread are siding with people who mislead their customers.
 
I don't really know a whole lot about this debacle, but here's what it says on Sony's website:

Q: Is KILLZONE SHADOW FALL running 1080p, or something else?
KILLZONE SHADOW FALL&#8217;s single and multiplayer modes both run at 1080p.

Q: Is SHADOW FALL running 1080p natively?
In both SP and MP, KILLZONE SHADOW FALL outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 FPS. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition.

In Multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called &#8220;temporal reprojection,&#8221; which combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image. If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native.

Games often employ different resolutions in different parts of their rendering pipeline. Most games render particles and ambient occlusion at a lower resolution, while some games even do all lighting at a lower resolution. This is generally still called native 1080p. The technique used in KILLZONE SHADOW FALL goes further and reconstructs half of the pixels from past frames.

We recognize the community&#8217;s degree of investment on this matter, and that the conventional terminology used before may be too vague to effectively convey what&#8217;s going on under the hood. As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future.
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Honestly it sounds like they are being really fast and loose about the terminology.
 
I'd rather have seen EA sued for false advertising for delivering one buggy piece of shit after another that are advertised as"games" or our ISPs sued for not delivering promised as advertised speeds, but at least we might start getting some type of precedent set if this goes though.
 
While I think that this is a little bit of a frivolous case, it does serve one purpose... Companies who promise something and don't deliver should know that they're going to be called out on it. Even when this is thrown out of court, Sony has still had negative publicity internationally which they can't be enjoying. Maybe next time they'll make things clearer when promising something.
 
Everybody knows that a game being 1080 is the only thing that matters with console games. It is absolutely the only metric that needs to be met. Unless the game is exclusively for the PS4, then it doesn't matter at all...
 
MavericK96 said:
I don't really know a whole lot about this debacle, but here's what it says on Sony's website:



Honestly it sounds like they are being really fast and loose about the terminology.
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Game engines use all kinds of tricks to get the best visual quality for the least amount of processing.

1080p is a display resolution. They are correct in that they are displaying that resolution. They might not be rendering to that resolution all the time, but the end result is 1080p. Next games are going to have to render every texture at 1080p to justify it? So they use a little interpolation to get to an output resolution.

There is no real case here. By definition the game outputs 1080p to the display controller of the ps4. It doesn't natively render that resolution but instead it interpolates data between multiple frames to achieve it. Still 1080p. Does it look as good as an image rendered directly at 1080p? Probably not, but I'm sure it looks a lot better than a native 1080i game.

This is not lawsuit material. Also I do not work for sony or any company affiliated with the game or even in the gaming industry. But I do believe this is a bullshit lawsuit.
 
The problem here is how much do we let them get away with before a lawsuit is justified? If a game advertising 1080p output takes a 320x200 CGA output and renders that out as 1080p, is that false advertising? Maybe in a technical sense, no. But would purchasers feel ripped off, probably.

Another issue in these cases is the poor return to the 'victims'. Often only a dollars off coupon on the next purchase. I think the lawyer's reward should be in the same currency the class members get. If a class member gets a $20 coupon, the lawyers should get their cut of the reward in $20 coupons. Even if that means they get many thousands of $20 off coupons.
 
Uhm, wasn't this obvious from the start? They always stated Multiplayer was going to look a bit worse than Singleplayer since it's designed to run at 60FPS vs 30FPS. You can't just make 30FPS into 60FPS with the same graphics, you have to tone them down somewhere. If it says 1080p on the box, that can refer to Singleplayer. This just seems like a money grab lawsuit, or someone is extremely bored with their life and has nothing better to do.
 
So is this just everyone in agreement that the majority of game cases showing 1080p on the back of the box is false advertising or is the animosity here directly because it's Sony/Gurilla Games?

Because it ultimately comes down to that. If this goes to court it really shouldn't have a damn thing to do with GG it Sony. It should affect the entire industry across the board.

I'm for it becoming a new standard to specifically state what the native internal resolution is as opposed to it's up scaled output. But I just don't get how some can say it's not 1080p and focus THIS game specifically when a majority of titles out are specifically not 1080p in any fashion yet still advertise it as such on the back of the box.
 
next-Jin said:
So is this just everyone in agreement that the majority of game cases showing 1080p on the back of the box is false advertising or is the animosity here directly because it's Sony/Gurilla Games?

Because it ultimately comes down to that. If this goes to court it really shouldn't have a damn thing to do with GG it Sony. It should affect the entire industry across the board.

I'm for it becoming a new standard to specifically state what the native internal resolution is as opposed to it's up scaled output. But I just don't get how some can say it's not 1080p and focus THIS game specifically when a majority of titles out are specifically not 1080p in any fashion yet still advertise it as such on the back of the box.
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The problem with the idea that advertising "1080p" just means that the game will output at that resolution is that it's meaningless.

The Xbox 360 (unlike the PS3) has been doing 1080p output of everything for years and I'm sure both the Xbox One and PS4 can output everything at the 1080p display resolution. So, "1080p" the way you describe it, when it comes to [these three] game consoles is only a hardware concern that shouldn't be featured on any game. Therefore, advertising that a game is 1080p should be in reference to rendering since the output resolution is going to be determined at the hardware level.

So, if consumers care a lot about the rendering resolution - and since companies do advertise about it, at least those companies think they do - then being deceptive about it is fraud, and that fraud isn't limited to just this game/developer/publisher.
 
DF-1 said:
I agree. I don't get why people in this thread are siding with people who mislead their customers.
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I'm not siding with sony. I think it's meritless and a waste of the courts time. In the grand scheme of things, this is insignificant.

If it gets thrown out and the judge says "meritless and a waste of the courts time" do I win a prize?
 
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