Sony Keynote by Phil Harrison - console
(hx) 10:55 PM CET - Mar,22 2006
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At the Game Developers Conference in San Jose today, Sony Computer
Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison
delivered
a keynote address focusing around Sony's hardware and video game strategy
for the coming year. Here's an excerpt:
PS3:
- The system will have a full worldwide launch in all major territories:
Japan, North America, Europe, Australia. It will roll out in early November.
- Software will be region free by default. Publishers can choose to restrict their own software to specific display standards.
- To facilitate the launch, the PS3 will have the highest production capacity of
any Sony product yet brought to market, including its past consoles.
- PS3 will support every display standard, including regional standard
defitition settings including PAL and NTSC as well as all high-def standards up
to 1080p Full HD
- Integrated ethernet and wireless networking
- Hard drive included, though Harrison skipped past mentioning the hard drive
other than with a bullet point
- Middleware providers such as Epic (Unreal Engine 3), AGEIA (PhysX 2.4), and
HAVOK (HAVOK Complete XS 3.3) will tune their products to take full advantage of
the Cell's SPU and GPU
- Final development environments will ship to developers in June. Partially
complete tools will be available in April for E3.
- Sony is launching the SCE Worldwide Studios e-Distribution intitiative,
intended to attract developers with innovative ideas, who will then be
contacated by Sony regional offices. Games created through this initiative will
be distributed online.
- The system will have full backwards compatibility with
PS1 and PS2. Every PS1 and PS2 game that properly observed its system's TRC
- Sony will be ensuring that any user-created content or purchasable content falls within the standards of ratings organizations worldwide, but there will be no other restrictions. For example, there is the possibility of full-budget games being distributed online in markets with wide broadband penetration.
- Harrison acknowledged that PS2 was "difficult to program" due to proprietary
design, but PS3 SPUs are general purpose and targeted towards high-level
languages such as C++, allowing developers to easily understand the dev
environment.
- The Immersion force feedback lawsuit has had "no bearing" on Sony's failure to
show a finalized controller design. It will be shown at E3.
Online service: PlayStation Network Platform
- Name is an internal codename, and not the final consumer label.
- Four Cs: Content, Communication, Community, Commerce
- Basic service free of charge, includes all gameplay features: matchmaking,
online video and voice chat, email integration, community features; all of these
are processed by the PS3's operating system and accessible at the API level
- Games can be downloaded and run from hard drive; Sony envisions episodic
gaming and digital distribution taking off on PS3
- "Open internet" business philosophy allowing developers to add their own
servers for MMOs or other network-intensive games
- Next week, initial server/client SDKs will be sent to developers. By July, the
service will be in testing, and by September it will be complete, in time for
launch.
- There is no reason PS3 will be limited to game content; other downloadable
content (music, movies, etc.) will be supported by its online service.
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Updated:05:35 PM CEST Jun,04
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