Sony goes Home and gets Game'¦ Game 3.0!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 08 March 2007 18:48

Your IT - Entertainment

Is Sony’s concept of the ‘Game 3.0’ vision, unveiled by Phil Harrison, the key to Sony’s domination of the next-gen console space, along with the Second Life-esque ‘Home’?

Sony clearly know more about their plans for the PS3 than they’ve let on, even with the just announced new Game 3.0 initiative and two new PS3 titles, the 3D world of Home filled with graphically lush avatars and in-game elements that has so far wowed attendees of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and a new community based game called ‘LittleBigPlanet’, where users can build a game environment, play in it and share the results with fellow PS3 gamers online.

There can be no doubt that Sony needs more such initiatives to re-ignite consumers passions for Sony’s next-gen games console, as the initial lineup of games, while impressive enough for the first generation of PS3 games, has had to fight against titles such as the newly anointed ‘Best Game’ Gears of War for Xbox 360, claimed by many to be a much better title than the PS3’s Resistance: Fall of Man, and the winner of ‘Game Design and Innovation’ awarded to Nintendo’s Wii Sports, which has taken physical gameplay to a whole new level, even though the Wii’s graphics are nowhere near as good as those seen on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

Sony has also had to wage the console battle with the most expensive games console on the market, at a price point where consumers could buy an Xbox 360 and a Wii and have two games consoles instead of one PS3, although Sony of course would say that one PS3 is superior to an Xbox 360 and a Wii.

So Phil Harrison’s announcement has come ‘just-in-time’ to deliver some real excitement back in the PS3, thankfully only little more than two weeks from the PS3’s launch in Europe, Australasia, the Middle East and the Africas.

It also makes us all wonder what other surprises Sony still has up its sleeve – there surely must be more to come.

Game 3.0 is a gaming concept that borrows from the user-generated and user-centric world of Web 2.0, where users actively create content on web platforms such as MySpace or YouTube which is then instantly shared with other users in the network (although in the case of MySpace this can be limited to friends only for safety purposes).

Home and LittleBigSpace are the only two such PS3 titles so far that actively encourage not only user participation, which all games do, but user-creation of game elements, game levels or worlds, online collaboration and more to truly tap into the community of Playstation gamers in a way that has never been done on games consoles before.

After all, which developers have truly actively encouraged users to become part of the game creation process on games consoles? Sony would appear to be the first, and given the latent power within the PS3, seem able to deliver on their Game 3.0 promises now and well into the future.

At the Game Developers Conference, Phil Harrison said that “Technology innovation is part of the culture at SCE as evidenced by our influence on real-time 3D computer graphics and the optical disc format in the 1990’s, to the more recent innovations such as Cell Broadband Engine computing and the use of Blu-ray in PS3. Our vision for the future, Game 3.0, will continue our track record of industry advancement by leveraging the convergence of technologies, from broadband and video chat to supercomputer-speed processors, to make gaming more interactive and dynamic than ever before.”

Now that Sony has unveiled the Game 3.0 concept, along with two games or experiences to demonstrate Game 3.0 in action, the big question besides whether or not Sony can capitalize on their new initiative and truly capture the imagination of their users as never before, is what Microsoft and Nintendo’s response will be.

So, does Sony's new Home and Game 3.0 mean that they're now in a much better position to win the ultimate dominance of the next-gen games console space, or will all three consoles reach some kind of equilibrium where they are all winners? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion!