Sony has confirmed with IGN that PlayStation All-Stars developer SuperBot has laid off a number of its staff. An SCEA spokesperson told the publication that work would continue on PlayStation All-Stars DLC to be released in the next few months despite the smaller staff at the studio. Sony did not confirm just how much of the staff had been laid off.

The United Kingdom has levied a fine of £250,000 against Sony for the PlayStation Network security breach that occurred in 2011 that put the personal information of 77 million customers at risk, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced. The government's agency in charge of data protection called the Sony security breach a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act" and note that - if Sony's security had been up to date - the attack "could have been prevented."

Sony announced that it plans to sell its U.S. headquarters, a 37-story building located on Madison Avenue in New York City. The PS Vita and PlayStation 3 maker will gain an estimated $1.1 billion from the sale. The buyer is a real estate consortium headed by The Chetrit Group. Sony expects that the transaction will close in March 2013. After paying back debt related to the building, Sony plans to pocket around $770 million from the sale.

Eurogamer reports that actor Jerry Lambert has settled a lawsuit with Sony over his part in a Bridgestone ad where he played an engineer playing a Wii video game. In 2012 Sony sued Bridgestone and the actor because they claimed that Lambert's engineer character in the ad was too much like its popular fictitious PS3 spokesperson Kevin Butler.

Life is filled with uncertainty but there remain various bits and bobs you can count on: death, taxes, and the fact that I'll pass out if I don't get something to eat soon.

Sony CEO Kaz Hirai had a few short but notable things to say about Nvidia's freshly announced handheld console, Project Shield, and his thoughts on how the PlayStation Vita is doing at this moment in time. First, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Hirai admitted that the system is at the low-end of the company's expectations:

A patent application unearthed by a NeoGAF forum post and picked up by Kotaku reveals that Sony has plans to implement a technology to deal with the use of used games on more than one console.

The results are in, the votes have been tallied and the sole light in my mom's windowless, basement bathroom burnt out while I was taking a shower this morning.  It's time to reveal which of the current consoles GamePolitics poll participants think has the dumbest name!

A particularly light and fluffy question for this week's poll, GP faithful:

Which of the current crop of video game consoles do you think has the dumbest name?

Is it the Wii?  It's the Wii, isn't it?

Yeah, it's probably the Wii.

According to new data from MediaCreate on sales in Japan for the week of Dec. 3 - 9, the Nintendo 3DS has sold more units to-date than the PlayStation 3. The 3-D enabled hand-held system managed to do this in the region in less than two years to boot.

Lifetime sales of the 3DS came in at 8,799,378, beating out the PS3 which came in at lifetime sales of 8,716,260 units in Japan. The PS3 has been on the market in Japan for six years. In terms of sales in Japan for the week, the Wii U came in on top at 308,142, followed by the 3DS at 211,499, and the PS3 at 36,994.

Episode 5 of Telltale's horror adventure series The Walking Dead based on the popular comic series took the top spot on the PlayStation Store charts for the month of November, according to Sony. In fact all five episodes in the series managed to make the Top 20. Coming is second was Assassin's Creed 3, followed by Sonic Adventure 2, Okami HD, and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

Sony has released full details on the PS Vita firmware update 2.00 which is hitting Europe today and was pushed out to North American PS Vita owners yesterday. The update adds some new features to the hand-held and offers a ton of tweaks.

In Episode 29 of the Super Podcast Action Committee hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the shaky launch of the Wii U console over the weekend, Sony perma-bans for PS3 'hackers,' and the good and bad side of Electronic Arts. It's a show to remember unless you stopped that Wii U firmware update - then it's a painful reminder that getting your brand new console 'bricked' kind of sucks! Download it now: SuperPAC Episode 29 (1 hour, 19 minutes) 73 MB.

Sony announced that it will raise an estimated $1.85 billion in cash through the sale of its convertible bonds. The money generated from the sales of these bonds, the company says, will help pay down on the $380 million it spent acquiring cloud-based gaming company Gaikai, along with financing investments it has in other businesses such as Olympus Corp., and paying off miscellaneous company debts.

Sony has begun taking steps to secure the PlayStation Network to deal with the threat of the PS3 lv0 boot loader key leak and the ability for hacked consoles to play online alongside legitimate users.

We know when Nintendo is releasing its next console: November 18th (NA).  Yep, that's this Sunday.

But when will Sony and Microsoft's next consoles see release?

Sony released the PlayStation 3 on November 11, 2006 in Japan; in North America on November 17, 2006; and in Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Africa and New Zealand on March 23, 2007. China never got access to the system because the Chinese government didn't approve it for sale in the region. Nearly seven years later it looks like Chinese gamers finally have some hope of playing PlayStation 3 titles legally.

A new print ad from Sony Computer Entertainment France is getting some attention for pushing the boundaries of sexism to promote the company's PS Vita hand-held. The ad (pictured left and courtesy of MCV) shows a female body with four breasts and compares those four breasts to the PS Vita's front and rear touch screens.

The tagline for the ad is "Touch both sides, twice the sensations."

Some are chalking the ad up to what is acceptable in French advertising and cultural standards.

Last week we detailed a new hack for the PlayStation 3 that has some in the PlayStation Network concerned that they could face another major security breach like what happened back in 2011 when millions of users' information was compromised by hackers. But security firm GFI Software says that PSN users shouldn't be all that concerned about it.

Sony's PlayStation 3 is facing a new security threat - one it hasn't seen since the system was cracked via the PSJailbreak in 2011. According to a report on Eurogamer, a new PlayStation Network-enabled custom firmware was recently released along with the publication of the console's LV0 decryption keys.

A federal judge has dealt a class action lawsuit filed in early 2012 against Sony several blows that have seriously hindered their plans to take Sony to task for the 2011 security breach on the PlayStation Network, Qriocity, and Sony Online Entertainment.

It looks like Sony has decided that it will no longer support Stanford University's Folding@home distributed computing project via PlayStation 3. According to a post in the European PlayStation Blog, Sony will kill the ability for current and future PS3 owners to contribute part of the CPU power to the project with the next firmware update scheduled to go live sometime later this month. Sony didn't really give a reason why they have decided to do this...

Gaikai is being taken to court over the technology behind its game streaming services, GamesIndustry International reports. Last week, UK-based T5 Labs filed a lawsuit against Gaikai Inc. saying that the company's streaming game technology infringes on a patent it holds. Gaikai was acquired this year by Sony. Last year the company accused OnLive of violating its patents but court documents were either never filed or unobtainable at this time.

Bridgestone Tires has responded to a Sony lawsuit claiming that a recent Bridgestone tire ad featuring actor Jerry Lambert infringed on its IP. Sony alleges that Lambert was playing fictional PlayStation executive Kevin Butler in its new ad which featured lab technicians playing Mario Kart on the Wii. According to a Bridgestone representative, the actor who plays Kevin Butler simply appeared in the commercial as one of the company's engineers.

A "day late and 30 minutes short" would be the best way to describe Episode 23 of the Super Podcast Action Committee as host Andrew Eisen struggles with being sick and co-host E. Zachary Knight rails against the wickedness of the state of Oklahoma keeping his preferred candidate off the ballot. In between these trials and tribulations, Andrew and EZK talk about Kevin Butler being sued by Sony, Nintendo's non-gamer ad, the latest poll on GamePolitics, and troubles at the drive-in.

Kevin Butler may once have been the face of Sony's PlayStation 3, PlayStation Network and the PSP platform as the fictitious Vice President of various made-up departments within the company division. But apparently Sony has decided to sue the man (actor Jerry Lamber) that plays Kevin Butler and his company - advertising firm Wildcat Creek - over the Kevin Butler IP. Sony claims that Wildcat used the character in an advertising campaign for Bridgestone Tires, with a "Butler-type character" wearing a lab coat testing out Mario Kart Wii.

Were you planning on dropping a C-note in the PlayStation Store this month?  If so, you’re in luck because Sony announced on the PlayStation Blog this morning that gamers who spend $100 dollars during the month of October will get $20 credited to their wallets next month.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Sony Computer Entertainment UK boss Fergal Gara told the publication that gamers effectively killed off 3D gaming, because they voted with their pocketbooks.

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced a new digital content program for customers called PSN Day 1 Digital. The goal of this new program is to provide consumers access to digital versions of retail releases of PS3 games on launch day via the PlayStation Store. The program begins on October 1.

Beginning today, PS3 owners can pre-order a handful of select titles ahead of their release dates as well. Pre-ordering these titles will earn consumers a ten percent discount.

Sony Computer Entertainment President and group CEO Andrew House told Reuters that his company is relying on its PS3 business to help it return to profitability this year.

"I think we will be profitable this year," House told the news agency at Tokyo Game Show this week. "We have a growing installed base, growing connectivity of the PS3."