napalm
Power Member
Fonte: Kotaku
By: Brian Crecente
The Xbox Live Arcade wasn't just what helped define the Xbox 360, the Xbox 360 defined what gamers and developers thought of downloadable titles.
They were, according to the 360, smaller, less fully featured games, sometimes retro titles, that sold for much less than a full game. And for the most part Nintendo followed suit when their Wii came to market.
But Sony had a different idea in mind, and now they have an uphill battle as they try to redefine what downloadable games mean to both the people who play the games and those who make them.
"The assumptions you laid out are correct," Peter Dille, Sony Computer Entertainment's Senior Vice President of Marketing, told me in a recent interview. "Because Live has been around for awhile people assumed that Sony would create a service that has checked the box in every case, if Microsoft is doing something we will too, but we are doing a lot of things differently. "
Chief among them is what sorts of games make it to the Playstation Store. While the store is already home to the sorts of demos and short-play experience games that you find on the 360's Arcade, soon it will also be home to a pair of titles that will be instrumental in Sony's battle to reshape how people think of downloadable games.
"Live Arcade offers something for people who want a certain thing," Dille said. "But a lot of the products you have seen on arcade are 'been there, done that', some feel like PC shareware practically. Our strategy was to develop games specifically for the PS3 that would show off our console."
"The games you play via Live Arcade, are those really next gen games? We are using an online distribution network in a very different way, we are not delivering yesterday's games. Online can be many things, but when it is used as a distribution vehicle it shouldn't change the game design."
While you could argue that games like Blast Factor, which plays in 1080p, and flOw, which supports the SIXAXIS motion controls, aren't really that different than games like Geometry Wars Retro Evolved, that argument starts to fall apart when you look at the Playstation Store's upcoming line-up which includes Warhawk, SOCOM: Confrontation and Pain.
In Pain, gamers have to launch a character imbued with rag-doll physics into a cityscape where they inflict damage to both the environment and the person they've just launched from a giant slingshot. While the basic game seems to include enough features to give it quite a bit of life, developer Idol Minds plans to release periodic content for the game to expand both how and where you play the game.
"Pain shows off the Playstation 3 and lends itself to episodic content delivery," Dille said.
To me, Pain represents perhaps a half step forward in online distributed console games, but Warhawk and SOCOM, they represent a leap. Both games promise to feature robust online environments, large multiplayer gatherings and both the graphics and mechanics of a game you'd expect to find sitting on a store shelf, rather than available for download from an online store. But when news first hit that Warhawk was going to be a downloadable game, most gamers seemed to view that as a step down for the title.
"We didn't make any announcement about Warhawk, all of these expectations were based on rumor or innuendo," Dille said. "We clarified our strategy at Gamer's Day."
Not only did they confirm that Warhawk would be an online-only downloadable title, but they also unveiled another interesting twist on Sony's take on Playstation Store games, that the game would also be available in stores. The Blu-Ray version will be a sort of Director's Cut or Special Edition of the Warhawk purchased online. It will come with a slew of behind the scenes and making of videos as well as a Bluetooth headset. While not yet finalized, Dille said the same will likely be true for SOCOM: Confrontation when it comes out.
"We want to use the network store to offer choice, if you don't want to leave your couch or get in your car you can just download it," Dille said. "We give people a choice and give our retail partners a chance to participate in Warhawk."
While I still think Sony faces an uphill battle in changing the notion of what a downloadable game is, Dille believes they've already won over gamers and developers.
"I think gamers got it before (last month's) Gamers Day," he said. "Six months in we had about one million seven hundred thousand users online," Dille said. Six million pieces of content have been downloaded since the launch. "We feel like people got it. We think our 44 percent attach rate will ramp up very, very quickly, as more people understand what we are doing and with the coming of Home."
"Internally, people are very, very excited about developing for the network. We are seeing a ton of great products coming for the PSN," he said. "I think there has been an education process. Our third party partners had certain assumptions about what we would offer on the PSN. They probably didn't start imagining what they could do. Did any of them imagine we would be developing games like flOw or Pain? Now we're evangelizing a different type of experience."
One that is different from the 360, in part, because of differences in the two consoles' hardware, Dille says.
"We happen to have a hard disk drive in every Playstation 3.," he said. Microsoft "is selling to a fragmented user base. We can talk to the developers and say there are no limitations on what you make for us."
And changing gamers' and developers' preconceived notions of what makes a downloadable title is just the beginning for Sony, their next big nut to crack is true episodic content.
"I don't think anyone has done episodic content in gaming well," Dille said. "Currently episodic content means delivering content periodically. Whether or not it has that story line is the missing ingredient. When you contrast that to things like TV with Lost and the Sopranos. I think as an industry we haven't tapped (episodic content) yet. We want to get people to stand around the water cooler and talk about games they way they talk about TV, 'Did you install the latest content of this game that explained a plot or cliff hanger?'"
"You have to separate a distribution vehicle from a game experience."
, a sony não tá contra os jogos "antigos" já que tambem oferece o mesmo na psn só que ao contrário do arcade oferece tambem os jogos mais completos tão simples como isso... como o BrunoAlexS já tinha dito...