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."

Comments

Sounds Ok?

[neonprimetime]

In short, it appears as though Sony plans to offer for free what Microsoft is currently charging for, and that could be a big plus ... it could convince many gamers that the PS3's expense is more reasonable

Get Charged up front or have an optional fee later on? Hmmm ... PS3 better be incredible ... otherwise this will be another victory for MSFT.

Re:Sounds Ok?

[gstoddart]

Get Charged up front or have an optional fee later on? Hmmm ... PS3 better be incredible ... otherwise this will be another victory for MSFT.

Or maybe Nintendo.

I've owned a PS, and now a PS2. I don't want on-line gaming, and I won't be spending anywhere near the kind of money Sony wants for a console. I won't buy an X-box either.

Personally speaking, my next gaming platform will be Nintendo. Both MS and Sony can go pound sand. I've been deciding I want silly, fun games to play instead of overly-complicated, impossible for me to control, eye-candy. I'll take less graphics and better game play thank you. Nintendo seems to be doing that.

RTFA

[SuperKendall]

The article itself talks about Sony providing matching services, which is just what XBox live offers. That means there will also be a framework to make use of these services...

It also says that service is free, so where do you get the idea that game makers can or will charge for online play?

As for unique online systems, again SOny is providing a centralized online hub for free. So it pretty much blows that theory out of the water.

Basically think XBox Live Gold, only I don't actually have to pay to play games with other people online. I think it's pretty funny you're raising the boogeyman of people MAYBE having to pay for online PS3 games when you already have to for just about every 360 title.

What you get

[SuperKendall]

So in a PS3 I get a whole Blu-Ray drive as part of that $100 extra cost. Only now it's not $100 more because I also get the equivilent of XBox Gold for free, which is $50 a year - thus the PS3 now only costs $50 more than a 360 (if you only plan to play online games for a year), and includes a Blu-Ray drive which allows games to hold far more data. Consider everything else is the same:

360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have 20GB hard drives.

360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have component out for HD video (though here the PS3 gets a nod since it supports 1080p)

360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have just as many ports (basically USB and memory ports, the more expensive PS3 also has media ports)

360 premuum and $500 PS3 both support the same networking options (ethernet in)

Seems to me like Sony has priced the console pretty well against the 360.

Re:2 jugs to fill the bath

[spyrochaete]

The harddrive in the PS3 is there to be used for Linux and your downloaded media. There will be a small area for caching if a developer decides to use it for that.

I was thinking more along the lines of something like Steam where people could buy games online. You know, E-Distro. Like they mention in TFA. Then again, Kutaragi's claim of "content" isn't very well defined.

Harddrive != fast loading. Despite what Microsoft marketing convinced so many Xbox fans to believe. With the tremendous amount of space at BluRay disc holds developers aren't having to do heavy compression and are able to just stream directly off the drive. There is no need to unload game data to the PS3's harddrive for the vast majority of games.

See if you sing the same song while you sit at loading screens on your PS3 games. I don't know what the BDROM throughput is but I guarantee it's nowhere near the speed of a hard disk. Plus, streaming uncompressed data works fine while playing movies\cutscenes, but when you start pulling nonsequential data off the disc like textures and speech you have to deal with latency caused by the laser moving across the disc radius. HDD was no big deal in Xbox because they didn't take advantage of its potential. Try burning an old installed PC game and play it off the disc on a 16x DVDROM drive and tell me with a straight face that it's just as fast as even a 5400RPM laptop HDD.

My point is that a 60GB HDD is hardly next-gen. They're calling this thing a computer replacement but you can hardly even find HDDs under 120GB on second-hand Emachines anymore. If they really wanted to boost speed they could have put in 1GB of low latency RAM and pre-streamed textures, or something. Of course I'm only speculating that the PS3's load times will be no shorter than PS2's, but I've seen no reason to believe otherwise. It's just another disc format limited by laser latency and spin-up time, and installing the game on HDD seems the obvious fix if my assumption is correct.

$499 for a 1080p BluRay player that also plays almost every major console developers games? Expensive, I don't think so...

Every journalist at E3 disagrees with you.

The real headline...

[steveo777]

Should read

Sony to nickel and dime gamers to stay afloat

I really don't like the idea of episodic content. I'm not paying any developer, publisher, or hardware maker more money for a game I bought (non subscription, I do play WoW) just so I can get a better gun, or a new level, but I am okay with real expansions.