GDC07: Liveblogging the SCEA Blogger Congress
Sitting in a meeting room between Phil Harrison and David Karraker at a table filled with bloggers.
Ouch. I just got called out on the liveblogging think be Dean and the Merc.
Harrison is talking about the unveiling of both Home and LittleBigPlanet.
The thing lost, I think, during the original keynote, is that Sony is hoping to spur a wider conversation about something they call Game 3.0.
The idea is that it would create a set of terms and ideas by which gamers and developers could judge new and future games.
I just asked if it's possible for that arcade, the one showing eight or so games inside the public space of Home, could be used as a form of premium advertising inside the PS3 space for indie games.
"Yes, that's a good idea," Harrison said. "We are already working with some external developers to create those games inside Home anyway."
"We initially intended to make the arcade games java based, but we've gotten away from that. It's not trivial to be able to create those games."
Home, Harrison said, will have a system in place to manage users with both a soft and hard cap, to prevent an overflow of people in one place that could hurt performance.
Money will be made in home three ways:
Object sales, item sales.
Advertising
B2B, like partner brands being embedded into the network.
The free stuff will include your avatar, public spaces, your home, there will be furniture and some items you can unlock by purchasing PS3 games.
"Exactly what the list is I don't know."
We're quizzing Harrison on how Sony will make Home work, live.
It sounds like he doesn't think it's going to be a big issue. It isn't really like Second Life, he points out when asked and despite it's detail thinks it will be accessible to a broad audience.
Home will require a registration to the network and a free ID, and right now about half of the million or so PS3 owners have their consoles registered for online use.
The existing user agreement will be used to deal with griefers in Home, and those who "get in your face" can be set to just disappear.
More after the jump.
Harrison is talking about customizing your view in Home now:
You can buy a better view you can download a better sunset.
Speculative, we had a discussion about. Lets say you have a great view out the back of your apartment... all your friends come around and see thats great you have this view. Maybe as a premium item you can get that V of ducks or a boat floating in the water.
While the big view is the same of your friends, you might be able to customize your view.
We're getting into the whole Sony image thing now.
Robert Summa just pointed out that people see Sony as being arrogant. The constant foot in the mouth statements, any little thing, people latch on to.
Now we're into a discussion about whether the console is doing well, why some people think it isn't doing well. Harrison points out that he thinks that Sony is doing quite well.
Now we're on to corporate blogging and why Sony doesn't have their own Major Nelson.
"We don't have a Major Nelson, but we have a Dave Karraker. You can get tremendous access to people inside Sony."
We got into this whole thing about ThreeSpeech, but it ended with most of us, or at least me, not quite sure who they are still. According to the UK PR guy, it was set up by Sony to be an independent voice and specifically in the UK.
Harrison is saying again that he considers the PS3, when compared to the PS2 and PSOne, a success.
He also says he doesn't think that exclusives are as important.
"I' m not sure that's as big a deal as everyone points out," he said.
Talking about E3. Lets look at what the old E3 was becoming, there was a huge number of stakeholders, who were not decision makers who were not valuable to the industry.
Harrison: Our investment to support the booth was going up and up and up. It was like an arms race.
Karraker: They are limiting it pretty much to US only. Will it provide enough glitz and glamour to attract the mainstream media.
Harrison: My prediction we have just reset the clock.
Music and games, we're talking about how the two compare, thanks to an intelligent question by Stephen Totilo.
And we're off into a ranging philosophical discussion about the nature of gaming, music, human nature, tribal culture. Essentially, it sounds like Harrison believes that all forms of pop culture is suffering from this issue that people now fall into so many more niches then they once did.
On to the Playstation Portable.
Harrison said he didn't talk PSP during the keynote simply because he didn't have the space.
PS3Fanboy asks about the unrealized potential of the PSP.
The Sony guy here for the PSP group, sorry I didn't get his name, tackles this issue:
"It's a matter of how best to distribute on the PSP. Downloading movies need to be secure. We've been working on a way to do that."
"The promise is there. We ran some research. They say they would rather watch movie on a PSP than an iPod."
"It's something we need to address. We are well aware of the market."
So, still working on, going do it, just don't know when. The design, he added, will stay the same.
Back to Home.
Harrison: They will be mining the database of PSN members, but the exact numbers haven't been announced yet.
He adds that potentially you can use the avatars from Home in games, but their our some technical issues, so it won't work in every game. It is something we hope to do.
And now other stuff:
Richard Marx (SCEA interface guy): We are working on a new camera. We've shown Eye of Judgment and things. It will have much better specs. We are working very heavily on microphone input. We have research for longer-range products. I don't think the end goal for an interface is brain control. My personal opinion is we want to widen that as much as possible.
On Warhawk
Dylan Jobe, Warhawk game director for Incognito, was asked how much Warhawk would be as a downloadable.
"I'm not the person to make that decision. We were concerned about the changes we were going to make to Warhawk. I truly feel you have to take a gamer centric view when you make a game. I would love to see the game price more appropriately, I don't want to see it priced full-priced."
Then I asked him if he though t there is a stigma attached to downloadable games.
"I don't think the success of iTunes have lead music producers to sit in a studio and lower their bar. Crap product will sell crap whether it is digital or on a store shelf. I think there is a stigma that download titles is shovel ware. I personally think it's BS."
"I think it's a stigma, it's there, it's something we have to deal with. That is something Sony has to deal with. We are not going to try and cram some game into 10 megs or 20 megs. There is definitely a stigma. When we announced it into the team, one of our team members didn't like that."
"Sony's commitment to their Playstation network transcends an arcade port. Proof is in the pudding. We have to put our product where our mouth is."
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