Phil Harrison, Representative Director of Song Computer Entertainment Inc., presented the Tuesday keynote address entitled, “Playstation 3: Beyond the Box.” This session was well attended by developers anxious to hear about Sony’s ongoing strategy and to get a glimpse at the technologies being developed for the upcoming Playstation 3.
Phil began his presentation with a report card of the last 6 years. Highlights include over 100 million Playstation units shipped, 1 Billion Playstation games sold with 6732 titles, representing 60% of the market. Sony’s goals going forward include grow, lead and innovate the market. The Playstation 1 (PS1) was the first console to ship 1 million units. Industry pundits expected the console lifecycle to be around 3-5 years, but in reality the lifecycle is 10-12 years. The PS1 is still selling in many markets. The Playstation 2 (PS2) is still a viable development opportunity and Sony is committed to continue supporting it. In the future look for God of War 2 to appear for PS2.
The Playstation Portable (PSP) is the fastest growing format ever. Phil announced Sony’s plans to lower the price for PSP development tools to 5K. The PSP innovative features include downloadable OS updates, RSS feed access and a Flash-enabled browser. In the future, look for new technologies to appear including video and voice-over IP, digital camera peripherals, and a GPS receiver. These new technologies represent amazing new game opportunities. The digital camera is set to ship in September of 2006 and the GPS receiver should ship in October 2006. Sony is also innovating with the ability to download and run games to a memory stick. Another key initiative for Sony is enabling e-distribution of games. Sony plans to make the library of PS1 content available for download. There will also be tight integration between PS3 and PSP using USB and WiFi. This will enable the PS3 to act as a content server for the PSP. Phil then showed several titles that are currently in development including Loco Roco for the PSP.
The presentation then turned its attention to the Playstation 3 (PS3). Its features will include backward compatibility to other Playstation consoles, legacy SD to full HD support, broadband connectivity, wireless controllers, and an integrated HDD. Playstation 3 will be launched worldwide on November 2006. Sony manufacturing is gearing up to ship 1 million units per month, so there won’t be any problems with availability.
Sony announced its dedication for tool and middleware support for PS3 developers including support for Epic’s Unreal Engine, Ageia’s PhysX, and Havok’s Complete products. Sony has recently acquired SN Systems, who is working on tools including a Debugger, a Tuner, a Distribution and Build System and an Optimized C Compiler for developers working on PS3 titles. The Final SDK is set to ship in June, 2006 and the final hardware configuration will be shipped to developers by E3.
The Playstation 3 hardware includes multiple SPUs for distributed processing. The hardware will also take advantage of Blue Ray Disc enabling developers to deliver their content rich titles on a single disc. This technology enables game titles to include more content, better sounds for a higher quality gaming experience. Developers will also be able to ship their products worldwide using a single global SKU. Phil then invited the developers of the fore-coming title, WarHawk, to show a prototype of their game. The game enabled multiple rendered surfaces with a photo-realistic environment while all physics computations were off-loaded to a separate processor.
The Playstation 3 platform centers on several specific principles include Content, Communication, and Commerce. The PS3 will feature a basic internet offering which will be free of charge. They envision this as leading to an “open internet” worldwide. This will also allow 3rd party vendors to connect to games and let users access the internet using a unified login and username. The commerce aspect will allow games to include online shops for purchasing and downloading customized content directly within the game. Games using a subscription model can save and launch custom game content from the hard drive. The communication aspect will include chat window overlays allowing players to chat and email each other within the game as they are playing.
Phil sees the future of gaming where packaged games are augmented with network sales. This makes it possible to deliver episodic content for games. Another commerce opportunity is in-game advertising. Recent data indicates that Socom 3 players have combined for over 29 millions hours of game play. Subscriptions are another viable commerce opportunity. For example, the World of Warcraft is a great example of a successful subscription model. If the World of Warcraft world were real, it would be larger than the country of Ireland.
Phil then presented what he sees as the “wheel of fortune,” representing several unique commerce opportunities that the Playstation 3 platform makes possible including:
Mobile Gaming
Game Object Auctions
Merchandising
e-Distribution
Phil concluded the session with an invitation to developers to contact and work with Sony on these initiatives. The website at www.playstation.com/beyond has been establish to capture the feedback from the development community.
Unite 2010
