Source: ps3blog.net

Tosh covered this in the side bar, but the topic is worthy of more coverage. Sony will begin mandating trophy support for all new PS3 games in 2009.

Many gamers are happy, since they like trophies and this will mean that more games will feature them. But this also means that some developers that don’t want to add trophies to their game will just not put their game on the PS3.

I don’t like this kind of thing at all. This crosses the line from basic technology, stability, and obscenity issues to actual creative content. This would be like the movie theater chains mandating that all new comedies use laugh tracks or all new action movies must have at least two car chases.

It’s normal for bosses, investors, and big clients to make these kind of demands, but Sony (and Microsoft/Nintendo) is essentially a middle-man between independent studios and the public. If I were a passionate independent developer, and some clueless beaurocrat middle man started to tell me how to design my product and what feature list it needed, I would tell them to kiss off! What’s next: all games must feature bald space marines and singing purple dinosaurs?

OK, I’m probably overreacting a hair. Trophy logic can’t be that complicated to program in to a game and it’s not that invasive on the game experience. However, I still think that this is the wrong way to go. If a development studio is able to fund and create their own products, they should have maximum creative control over the end user experience and shouldn’t be mandated into supporting the platform’s latest brand-identity marketing gimmicks.

Lastly, let features live and die on their own merit. If a feature is appreciated by users and the development resources are justified, developers will generally support the feature on their own terms without coercion. We are seeing this willing developer adoption of trophy support. Why take the choice out of the hands of the developers and force those that feel otherwise into compliance?

I’m sure my coblogger Henning would love to enforce split-screen support on all games, but isn’t this kind of decision best left in the hands of the developer?

Source: ps3blog.net

I know I’m late on posting this… But better late than never. By the way, this uses Zoho’s new interactive chart so you can mouse over and click to see data details. Unfortunately, the x-axis labels are clipped but you can’t have everything.

One interpretation question: How much does hardware price matter?

Obviously the 360 price drop is completely responsible for it’s first big sales boost over PS3 this year. On the other hand, the entry level 360 is even cheaper than the Wii, and the Wii still holds a rather dramatic lead in hardware sales… The Wii sales phenomenon has clearly been more than simply price and these numbers are strong evidence of that. The Wii appeals to a certain demographic (particularly non-gaming women who are shopping for children) in a way that the 360 and the PS3 do not.

Source: ps3blog.net

The star of LittleBigPlanet is the level creator and the community aspects surrounding that. But ignoring that for a moment, how good is the core platforming gameplay?

Pros

• Playground Feel: The game looks charming and adorable, but what’s really shocking is that the game is more charming and adorable to play than it is to look at. The whole game feels like you are playing with blocks and toys on a playground. The use of physics and materials takes simple simple play mechanics, like swinging over a pit or riding an elevator, which is really old-hat stuff in traditional platformers, and makes them surprisingly fun to play.
• Physics: The gameplay has as much in common with those playground-style Flash-based physics games as it does with a traditional platformer. One really nice aspect of the physics is the material system. There is a wide variety of cloths, woods, metals, glass, plastics, etc and they generally look and behave like you would expect.
• Vehicles: The vehicles in this game look horribly crude next to the ton of racers and modern platformers on the market, yet I honestly have more fun racing the DIY-style rockets or mine carts in this game than I do with a polished HD racer like Wipeout (I still love that too).
• Level Design: Even beyond the cleverness of the overall design aside, the core levels are extremely inventive, funny, and dazzling to play through.
• Co-Op: The co-op works extremely well. The character customization, emotion control, and gesture control really work well in combination.
• Fleshed Out: A lot of new-concept type games just tease the player with the possible potential rather than deliver a fully realized experience. With LBP, that isn’t the case at all. Right out of the box, this game is very well fleshed out. Beyond the core concepts of simple platforming and create mode, this game has a variety of well-executed, fun to play, and create-mode-extendable mechanics.
• Collecting: I really don’t care about collecting artificial points, but collecting custom stickers, and costumes, and create-mode objects and materials is very rewarding and fun to do.
• Passes the Kid Test: Most kids have terrible taste in games. They would rather play utter ad-ware style garbage on the Disney Channel website rather than anything that even warrants being listed on Metacritic. That being said, I was impressed by how well this passes the kid test. My step daughter does not normally like playing traditional games and she loved this one. She also shocked me by telling me all these ideas she was dreaming up for a level. She is not that kind of kid to sit indoors and play video games, much less work on a level, but the fact that this got into her imagination that much is astonishing.

Cons

• Short: Obviously, the user-levels will extend the lifespan of this quite a bit. But I wish there was more high quality professional story content that shipped with this game as well.
• Nothing: It’s just that good. It’s definitely not for everyone. Maybe the simple playground style physics based platforming won’t gel with everyone. Even for me, it took a while before it really won me over. I expected the creation mode to be impressive, but I wasn’t expecting the core game to be so much fun.
• Will it last: Right now, I’d hestitantly pick this as game of the year. But will it last? Will I still love this game six months later? Will we still be seeing new, exciting content coming from the user community? Realistically, the enthusiast and jouranalistic community tend to focus on games before launch and give them peak attention at launch, and then forget about everything a month later. I’m personally optimistic, but this is my biggest skepticism. I hope that by the time I can finish a cool level (and I really don’t have the time to invest that I would like), that people are still playing this game.

Source: ps3blog.net

Pros

• Technology + Graphics: R1 looked good, but I was slightly underwhelmed by the R2 beta: it was definitely better, but I wasn’t blown away. After playing the single-player campaign: wow! This blew me away. I think that the single player campaign is a much better showcase for the visuals and technology of this game. The environments are consistently spectacular, the animation of the enemies is very lifelike, and the fire effects and water effects are awesome (I wasn’t impressed by the use of water in the beta co-op level).
• Beautiful bosses: I tend to prefer regular gameplay to bosses, but the bosses in this game are really spectacular.
• Variety: The great thing about R1 was the variety. Of course, the game has a reputation for weapon variety, but beyond that, there was an awesome variety of enemy types (widely varying sizes, behaviors, locomotion, and combat mechanics) and a wide variety of level types (claustrophic corridor shooter levels, epic mass-scale warfare levels, etc). R2 improves on this on every front.
• Action is Great: This is subjective, but the action is spot-on. The enemies are challenging, they move realistically, the AI is fun, the pacing and levels and environments are varied, the weaponry feels just right. This is easily my personal favorite single-player shooter shooter by a long-shot, but this is highly subjective, and if you weren’t impressed by R1, this might not win you over.
• Fixed Problems from R1: R1 had some plain environments (mixed in with some awesome ones) and the first few levels were a little slow before the game got really good. So far, R2’s environments are consistently gorgeous and the game is awesome right from the start.

Cons

• Scripted: Some of the sections are very heavily produced and they have a scripted feel to them. The first level is a good example of this (still a cool, exciting level on the whole). Most of the game doesn’t have this scripted feel, but this is still worth mentioning.
• Story: The storyline is OK. It’s not terrible and it’s not intrusive on the gameplay, but it’s not great.
• Traditional Shooter: This is a fairly traditional, yet highly polished shooter.
• Obvious Influences: Many influences from other shooters are fairly obvious. This delivers plenty of improvements and innovations to make this its own unique experience, but the readily apparent influences are noteworthy.

Bottom Line

Based on the first three levels, this game is spectacular. It still feels very fresh, fun, and exciting. It adds to the shooter genre on just about every front. Although I know others have good reasons to disagree, personally, I’d say this is the best shooter of today.

Source: ps3blog.net

Sony is planning to create a new optical disc format for music based on Blu-Ray technology that is compatible with traditional CD players but provides expanded quality and features on Blu-Spec capable players. This format is extremely reminiscent of SACD, which was a music optical disc format that used DVD disc technology to provide higher quality and extra features on SACD capable players, while providing a hybrid CD compatibility so that audio discs would work on regular CD players as well.

This is very surprising for two reasons: Obviously, music has been moving away from physical media and towards Internet distribution and secondly, SACD was mostly a disappointment which even Sony seems to have deemphasized (even new PS3 units won’t play SACD content outside of the CD compatibility mode).

I don’t see many users moving back to optical discs for music storage, but there’s one thing that would make this a very cool development: lack of DRM and full rip/burn support. There are still a few things missing from existing music download stores that this could fill:

• High Quality: Supposedly everyone is completely satisfied with standard .mp3 quality. I’m not. And beyond merely ripping CDs with a higher bitrate compression, I’d like to see genuinely higher quality source audio.
• Multi-Channel: I’d like to be able to buy multi-channel (surround sound) electronica music.
• Extras: I’d like my digital music data to come with all the extras: name+genre tags, lyrics, album artwork, and other bonus feature content.
• Album Format: Does all audio have to be delivered in 70 minute albums broken up into 3-5 minute tracks? How about multi-hour productions such as operas or electronica landscapes?

SACD (and DVD-A) had most of the above, but they killed it by successfully preventing users from ripping/burning and using the massive convenience of digital music jukebox technologies. If a new format gave us all the benefits of SACD and more and gave us the full flexibility and freedom of moving that content across devices, and got full support from the recording industry, then this could be a big development.

Source: ps3blog.net

Games are usually designed around a fundamental challenge of completing objectives, whether it’s defeating enemies, building an empire, or escaping from danger. Great games engross the player in the challenge and get them hooked and poor games usually try to do this, but fail because the challenge feels too repetitive, or too frustrating, or the game just fails to draw them in.

LittleBigPlanet has that core element of challenge as a traditional platforming game but that’s really not what the game is about. The basic platforming elements are generally very easy. Merely beating the levels or getting points isn’t very satisfying by itself. The fun part about this game is discovering all the cool designs, and tricks, and ideas that go into each level. Even with the pre-packaged levels, I’m constantly surprised and amused with what I discover. And, obviously, with the user-created levels, it’s a ton of fun to see all the different concepts that people were able to execute.

Already, there are a ton of completely entertaining user levels. A good example is a level that someone recreated from the first level of the classic NES game, Super Mario Brothers. The level isn’t challenging and I definitely wouldn’t want to play a whole Mario Brothers game like that, but it was fully entertaining to play the level, and see how many little touches they were able pull off and how they did it. And that level isn’t even close to the best user level I played (Touch of Color is an easy favorite level so far).

The other fun part of this game is using the level editor itself. Most regular players probably won’t take it so far that they are making polished, prize-winning levels, but plenty of people will have a ton of fun making simpler goofy levels and just having a blast while doing it.

Most gamers remember the previous era of user-created content for games like Lode Runner, Eamon, Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake, and Marathon. One big difference between that era of user-created content and something like LittleBigPlanet is that previously, there was a big lack of professsionally made games. Today, there is just so much more content on the market and it’s so much easier for regular gamers to get. Previously, user created content generally aimed to fulfill the lack of games to play, while today, user-created content is more about providing community expression that is missing from more traditional games.

Everyone is wondering, will this game be a commercial hit? Will this title unleash tons of entertaining ideas and concepts from the community? Is this title going to start a new a new genre of gaming? No one knows, but this game delivers the most novelty we’ve seen all year and this title is clearly the first to usher in a distinctively new era of user-created game content.

Source: ps3blog.net

Have you been watching Media Create’s top 30 software sales charts in Japan? From a platform/publisher perspective, it’s consistently populated by mostly DS games and slightly fewer PS2, PSP, and Wii games. PS3 titles are very sparse on the list and 360 games are even rarer.

It’s surprising that even today there are so many more PS2 releases and software sales than those on the PS3 and 360 combined. In the west, developers and the media completely lost any interest in the PS2 many years ago. I remember in late 2004, most of the western media outlets started to proclaim the PS2 era as over and many new game development was being started on next-gen systems. The media definitely jumped the gun by at least a year or two, but in the west, there was such an eagerness and excitement to move on the next generation of hardware back then. But in Japan, here we are in late 2008, and the PS2 is still far more popular in terms of software sales and quantity of popular new game releases than the PS3 and 360 combined.

Anyone have any good theories for why this difference may be? Is it a consumer issue such as cost or size of the hardware or fancy graphics and online features that are perceived as adding more complexity than entertainment value? Or is it a developer issue? Are the developers slow to change production practices, slow to invest in new technology, or hesitant to jump to a newer and financially riskier platform?

Source: ps3blog.net

Sony’s Fiscal Q2 2008 = Calendar Q3 2008. Here is the game division overview:

(official report here)

Noteworthy points:

• Sony, as a company overall, is still making a profit. Overall net income was 20.8 billion yen. This is way down from last year’s 73.7 billion yen, but the company is definitely still in the black. Sony’s biggest division in terms of both expenses, revenues, and profits is consumer electronics (HDTVs, cameras, laptops, DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc).
• Game business is losing money, 39.5 billion yen, but loses are way down from last year’s 96.7 billion yen.
• It’s easy to forget, but Sony still sells both more PS2 hardware and software than PS3 software and hardware. I wonder if or how they are counting PSN purchases.
• Overall software sales are down slightly since PS2 sales dropped more than PS3 sales rose.
• Overall R&D spending is slightly up for 2008. I’m hoping some of this is increased investment in PS3 game development, although there public statements don’t give this detail.

Source: ps3blog.net

This title is looking better and better…

Source: ps3blog.net

This is somewhat surprising. By looking at the USA NPD numbers, multiplatform software generally sells roughly twice as well on the 360 as it does on the PS3.

However, when looking at financial statements from EA, Namco Bandai, Konami, and Ubisoft, their worldwide totals show the opposite: PS3 is actually moving more software on a worldwide basis.

According to EA’s previous financial statement, the PS3 accounted for about 17% of total revenue in comparison to the Xbox 360’s 10%.

According to [Namco Bandai’s] recent financial statement, the PS3 currently moved approximately 57% more software than it’s direct competitor, the Xbox 360

according to Konami’s recent financial statements, the PS3 accounted for a whopping 57.3% of the sales this past quarter, while the Xbox 360 accounted for only 2.6%.

According to UbiSoft’s half year financial report (6 months 2008/09), the PS3 accounted for about 20% of the software sales compared to the Xbox 360’s 14%.

The Konami numbers aren’t very telling since their main title of the past quarter, MGS4, was PS3 exclusive. However, Namco, EA, and Ubisoft? Namco seems to be releasing much more 360 exclusives, so it’s very surprsing that the company still gets more revenue from PS3 sales. I suspect this may be because Namco releases more 360 software in the west, but in Japan, they release more of those weird titles on the PS3 that westerners generally don’t care or hear about.