Sony facing class action lawsuit over Killzone Shadowfall resolution

Sony Computer Entertainment America is facing a class action lawsuit over the resolution of Killzone Shadowfall's multiplayer component. The game is advertised as being native 1080p both online and on the game box but once it came out, Digital Foundry discovered that the multiplayer didn't actually run at the native full HD resolution.

The suit was filed by Californian resident, Douglas Ladore, who alleges that Sony falsely advertised the game's graphics and then “used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide ‘subjectively similar' results.”

Back in March, Digital Foundry analyzed Killzone Shadowfall and found that the game's multiplayer ran at 960×1080 rather than the full HD standard, 1920×1080. After this discovery was made, Killzone developer, Guerrilla Games, posted the following explanation on its website:

“In both single-player and multiplayer, Killzone: Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 frames per second. 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 ‘temporal reprojection,' 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.”

The lawsuit takes advantage of this, alleging that ‘temporal reprojection' is not native 1080p and Sony has failed to change its marketing to reflect that. Other allegations involved in the lawsuit include: negligent misrepresentation, false advertisement, unfair competition and fraud in the inducement. The plaintiff is seeking a total of $5 million in damages.

This lawsuit is being carried out by law firm Edelson PC, which is responsible for the lawsuit against Sega and Gearbox Studios over Aliens: Colonial Marines. This isn't the firm's first time in a court room with Sony either, in 2011 the firm had filed a suit against Sony and EA as the company had promised to deliver a free copy of Battlefield 1943 to those who purchased Battlefield 3 for the Playstation 3 and failed to hold up the deal.

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KitGuru Says: While it may have disappointed some that Killzone's multiplayer wasn't native 1080p, I think a lawsuit is a bit over the top. However, I do agree that Sony shouldn't advertise the game's multiplayer as native 1080p if it doesn't actually run at that resolution. What do you guys make of this?

Source: Polygon

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