Slashdot Mirror
Sony Pins Hopes on E-Distro
Ars Technica reports on Sony's plans for their online service. As previously discussed, they'll be offering online play for free. They hope to make money via an e-distribution system. From the article: "Yet it is unclear what Sony intends to sell. While the 60GB hard drive in the premium console is spacious, it would not be large enough to hold a collection of HD video, although the company could sell storage add-ons in the future. We believe that Sony will initially sell other content, including music and standard definition video, as well as gaming content such as that available today in the Xbox Live Marketplace."
Sony has an online service they charge over 250 bucks a year for. That adds over a thousand bucks to the cost of a PS2. (SOE online pass for EQOA for those of you wondering just where I pulled the numbers from)
That's an inetresting bit of information but irrelevent since the whole article this Slashdot story is based on said that the online matching service was free.
But the other thing they might do.. since you ask so nicely.. is to release some MMORPGs on their service. They could just buy the rights to AC or AC2 and port them to the 360. (a lot of the "exploit/macro/botting" problems can go away when you move to a console after all)
They don't go away at all. They just change forms. Online console play is rife with cheating and many controllers offer extensive macro options making that aspect even worse (since it's harder for most people to macro PC games, no as easy to set up as a controller that features macros).
In other words, there are a lot of things MSFT might do and even though we are all supposed to rabidly hate MSFT, some of us still would not mind seeing Sony take it good and hard for all the ways they screwed over their customers in their neverending effort to achieve total media lock.
And what would those be? Are you sure you hate Sony gaming, or could it be your real enemy is Sony/BMG? Be careful to pick the right target.
I will not buy msuic from Sony/BMG because of the whole rootkit fiasco and general cluelessness when it comes to media. But I have no problems supporting Sony Gaming and the PS3, which seems to be to be trying to make a decent attempt at following a path of openess - every PS3 shipping with Linux and so on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
their weaker and troubled console
WTF are you smoking? All the specs for the PS3 point to a system that will barely (if at all) outperform the X360. The RSX isn't as powerful as the Xenon and it doesn't have onboard DRAM to do 4xAA for free. Coupled with the news that yields of the Cell are crap and that it will have to be underclocked to 2.8GHz to get decent numbers of chips off the production line I don't think Microsoft have anything to worry about except making sure they get a decent flow of exclusive third party titles.
I think you're a little delusional if you think that the PS3 is going to have anywhere near full backward compatibility. The PS2 doesn't even have full backward compatibility with PS1 games and it isn't using a software solution like the PS3 will be. Personally I see them having just as many bugs and non-playable games as Microsoft has at this point. It seems to me that the only console that will come close to having "full" backward compatibility is the Wii (yes I know it uses a software solution for games from the NES, SNES, N64, TGX, and Gen, but compare emulation of an NES to emulation of a PS2 and you'll see the difference).
There is one big flaw with your argument. You are assuming that Sony is not going to charge for their online service.
That would be a big flaw indeed if the main article itself had not quoted Sony as saying they were not going to charge for online matchmaking services. It's kind of hard to read "not going to charge" any other way unless you think it means they'll not take Visa.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley