Next-Gen recently sat down for an exclusive interview with SCEA boss Kaz Hirai, to quiz him on the coming of PlayStation 3 and, specifically, the company's online strategy and why it doesn't have a name…
Just a month before the launch of the PlayStation 3 in the North American and the Japanese market, Hirai has pretty much all the pieces of the puzzle in place. Next-Gen asked him about the overall strategy, the online plans and SCEA's view of the competition…
Salman from Tech4Gamers writes "Mortal Kombat 9 revived the series from a low point after bringing it back to 2D combat. It marked a new high-point for the franchise due to its incredible roster, exciting cinematic story mode, and high-octane combat."
Shaolin Monks is a forgotten gem. I would love to see a new one, or a remake of the old.
That game was actually goated. It was the first time ever that I actually tried to get good at a fighting game. Unfortunately the online connection was so dogshit it made it hard to enjoy and eventually I gave up. Haven't really played much fighting games since.
The new unit comprises over 500 developers representing the entire World of Warcraft development team.
I used to be anti-union, it kills productivity, investment and turns product mediocre. Their games suck anyways though so what was lost? Might as well get their people paid until they are dissolved.
Unions are necessary regardless of how you feel. You know how fked the working class would be without them. As if we're not already.
No they aren’t, regardless of how you feel. Unions make zero sense for skill based labor. They are for people who press a button every 10 seconds on an assembly line. “working class” is a made up term. I don’t care about corporations or developers, I just want good games lol. Killing your incentives to appease the lowest common denominator doesn’t lead to great games imo
I wasn’t trying to be offensive if I came off that way. The Union is an old mentality and I can see their usefulness but also the danger. We’re in the age of AI and robots and skill based labor. Unions can be dangerous these days. You could replace your entire workforce in one move. Checkmate. Look to the kiosk replacing workers in the 20 dollar minimum wage era.
Well run businesses don’t need unions. If you need a Union that business won’t survive anyway. Unless it’s propped up by the government with corporate welfare (which is the real issue). If you’re not going to spend some on your workers (Amazon, Google) then your welfare is cut off. No tax breaks. All you put together don’t match their wealth and resources, the union is a traditional memory at this point and counterproductive with this new enemy we face. They need a flying elbow from the top ropes. And by “working class is a made up term” I just mean we’re not a class system and even CEO Bobby Kotick puts in a days work lol. Or did.. It’s just a vague term that doesn’t mean anything no offense lol. People say “middle class” but that can change quick right? Up or down. That’s not a “class system”.
Taking a trip back to Housemarque's forgotten platformer.
interesting interview.
Why couldn't he just answer the question? I want to know what service I will be having, will it be for sure free, will I have to make 30 different screen names to play each game? It's only a month away I want to know stuff...Oh well it's still going to be sweet.
he dodges the question because he doesn't know, but at least he has a "philosophy".
it's a month from launch kaz, we should know a lot more about your online service by now.
although if you read carefully on his doublespeak it makes sense:
"This is a platform that we are presenting to the publishing community. All the publishers will be able to take advantage of this and become a part of the online experience of our service. We are trying to offer as many options as possible, for example in the area of billing for the downloadable content if the publisher is a smaller publisher and they want to offer this kind of content, we can do the billing for them. On the other hand if they are a big publisher and they have their own billing system or strategy we can accommodate that business model as well. We are trying to be as flexible as possible and we are trying to match up with the business needs of all the publishers. "
so basically, the online service will be different for each publisher..I can see why they want it that way, it was such a huge success with the ps2.
But the idea of integrating the network part as a part of the whole service sounds good. No need to have a separate Live if it's there all the time.
You mean like PayPal? for example, if you don't want to pay a fee and can get your own merchant account from a bank at a lower rate? Well these options may be good for the developers but under no circumstances is good for the gamers. The same goes on giving too many options to the developers to implement the online game play. Here is the reason why?
1) You will have to enter your payment information for each developer you want to purchase content from.
2) Each developer will have their own policy when it comes to downloadable content (i.e. you can only download the content x days after purchase, like they do now).
3) If not profitable to the developer, your game server may be shut down sooner to make room for other games or to force to buy their latest sequel.
It is obvious that Sony knows it is too expensive to built and maintain a centralize system like xbox live therefore is trying to find ways to come up with a solution to not look "too" bad. I hope they realize the nature of consoles. Consoles are not PC, and we don't want another PC, most of us have a computer anyways. The last thing we want is to have the same annoyances we have on the PC into our living rooms. Consoles managed to stay away from these by having a very controlled environment and rules that each individual developer has to follow. It seems like Sony is trying to break that. If they do, it may be a bad Idea. They will position themselves in a collision course against the PC. They may have a chance against the 360 but against the PC? Soon the PC will/is supporting the XBox 360 control, wheel, vision camera, maybe HD-DVD, games for windows, xna, directX 10, live Anywhere, etc. Microsoft is dying for Sony to do this. If you look closely at Microsoft strategy you will see that they are making the PC a high end Xbox, supporting everything the xbox 360 supports (including peripherals and service), eventually people will be able to say, “I can choose between the core, premium, and vista” vista being the best value.
Sony should stop trying to make the PS3 seem as a computer. This may sound like a good thing today, since the PS3 can be considered a high end computer. But in 1-2 years the PC will surpass the PS3 in hardware and will make it seem obsolete. And if the PS3 is a computer who's going to want an obsolete computer 1-2 years from now?
I know sony fanboys will disagree with this, but most people don't like to hear the truth.