Firmware 2.80 For Developers Only?

Yesterday’s firmware release was an odd one.  Without fanfare or much warning (apart from the file being available for debug machines for a little while) and with a tiny changelog promising nothing more concrete than better support for an unnamed number of PS3 games, speculation has started to rise around just what the firmware update actually did.

Well, apart from oddly locking the Microphone level to 3 (you can’t change it now) on the surface it appears the update has done nothing at all.  However, a post from Gaming Age’s Jim yesterday suggests that whatever the firmware has updated behind the scenes, it’s purely for developers right now. “It has at least one thing in it that people will want,” he said, “but the feature won’t be immediately useful.”

This had lead to further speculation around the web that the update has allowed developers to start to work on cross-game voice chat, something that everyone has been asking for since we realised the PS3 could get firmware updates – if indeed this is the case then this might explain why, at the time of writing, there’s not even an automatic prompt for the user to get 2.80 – there’s simply no need to.  Yet.