Lots of News, But No Supplemental Update

Today has been a busy day on the PSU news front, although one piece of information many players were looking for is still unknown.

First, Sega of America announced that the US/EU servers will be receiving compensation for the login server outage that occurred last week. Beginning after the maintenance period on Friday, July 2, players on the regional servers will be able to earn 20 casino coins per day. This compensation period will run for two weeks.

Next, GM Edward hinted at a likely release within the next week or two for the supplemental update. Unfortunately, this still pegs the release date at sometime in mid-July (as I predicted back in May). No further information about this has been provided, so the wait continues.

In the same thread, GM Edward also hinted at a possible release of PSU on Microsoft's Games on Demand service:

Although we cannot announce any details at this time, please stay tuned for more information in the very near future. I would be very surprised if we did not see PSU available on Games on Demand by the end of the Summer.

We've spent a little bit of time discussing this topic already. I think that this idea would have some benefit if Sega could somehow find a way to modify the PC/PS2 client to connect to the Xbox 360 servers and use the Xbox Live service through Games for Windows Live. However, this will probably never happen so I'm just going to leave it at that.

Finally, GM Edward announced that the Ambition of the Illuminus expansion pack is now a free download on Xbox Live. Players that were afraid of being cut off by the removal of V1.0 support should fear no more! Despite this change, the original game is still required to play online.

If only Sega had done something like this for the PC/PS2 servers...

PSU Version 1.0 Removal Postponed

When Sega of America announced that the supplemental update was coming to US/EU PSU back in April, it was also announced that support for PSU players without Ambition of the Illuminus would be cut off during maintenance on June 21.

That maintenance period would have happened tonight, but Sega of Japan announced on Friday that removal of PSU version 1.0 support from the US/EU servers is now postponed indefinitely. Sega of Japan says that a new date for the maintenance can be expected "soon".

This almost certainly means that the supplemental update will not appear until mid-to-late July at the earliest. Many players were expecting that the update would be added before the July 4th holiday weekend, but I think the chances of this happening now are almost zero.

The maintenance period that was originally scheduled for Friday morning has been moved to early Tuesday morning (roughly 3 1/2 hours from the time of this post). The annual Sonic lobbies will be added in preparation for Sega's "Happy Birthday Sonic" event. Awards will also be handed out to the Xbox 360 winners of the second Great Gurhalian Cup event held at the beginning of the year.

The Sonic lobbies will remain up until maintenance on Friday, July 16. If you're expecting to see the supplemental update before then... don't get your hopes up.