Sony has explained why, despite its release of the likes of SOCOM Confrontation and GT5 Prologue as downloads and its growing push toward digital distribution on the PSP, games such as LittleBigPlanet aren't downloadable.
Speaking at the Wedbush Morgan Securities New York MAC conference Susan Panico, PlayStation Network senior director, said, "One of the things we found, though, was that the Blu-ray disc experience for marquee games like that [LittleBigPlanet] currently just work better because the consumer wants to go in and get that physical product. They want to go in and get the extra goodies that they get on the disc."
With that said, the PSP LittleBigPlanet game gets released, there will be a digital release alongside the UMD version - in Japan, at least.
There is another reason - a reason Panico was open about. "There's also retailer relationships that we're really sensitive to, and making sure that we're balancing those with the digital distribution content. It's something we're continually looking at on a title-by-title basis."
You could, of course, make the point that if Sony went fully downloadable it wouldn't need retail - but someone needs to sell the hardware. Similarly, the company needs retailers to support the PS3 so that third-party disc-based releases won't be shoved to the back of the shop. Finally, despite the 20 million registered PSN users, not everyone uses their console online.
There's also the issue of disk space. Whatever size hard disk your PS3 holds, there are only so many 'full' games it will currently hold before if fills right up.
David Jaffe, for one is not to happy with the idea that retailers might be getting one over on developers. He Tweets: "Why do we gotta give a fuck about retail when they don't give a fuck about us?"
Speaking at the Wedbush Morgan Securities New York MAC conference Susan Panico, PlayStation Network senior director, said, "One of the things we found, though, was that the Blu-ray disc experience for marquee games like that [LittleBigPlanet] currently just work better because the consumer wants to go in and get that physical product. They want to go in and get the extra goodies that they get on the disc."
With that said, the PSP LittleBigPlanet game gets released, there will be a digital release alongside the UMD version - in Japan, at least.
There is another reason - a reason Panico was open about. "There's also retailer relationships that we're really sensitive to, and making sure that we're balancing those with the digital distribution content. It's something we're continually looking at on a title-by-title basis."
You could, of course, make the point that if Sony went fully downloadable it wouldn't need retail - but someone needs to sell the hardware. Similarly, the company needs retailers to support the PS3 so that third-party disc-based releases won't be shoved to the back of the shop. Finally, despite the 20 million registered PSN users, not everyone uses their console online.
There's also the issue of disk space. Whatever size hard disk your PS3 holds, there are only so many 'full' games it will currently hold before if fills right up.
David Jaffe, for one is not to happy with the idea that retailers might be getting one over on developers. He Tweets: "Why do we gotta give a fuck about retail when they don't give a fuck about us?"
Read More Like This
Comments
config 12 Mar 2009 12:56
1/1
"One of the things we found, though, was that the Blu-ray disc experience for marquee games like that [LittleBigPlanet] currently just work better because the consumer wants to go in and get that physical product. They want to go in and get the extra goodies that they get on the disc."
What extra goodies? A box, cover and manual? I don't think there was anything in the LBP manual that hadn't already been covered in the excellent "introtorial" (look Mummy - a made a new word!)
LBP was a prime candidate for download and I had trouble making my brain accept that it was retail only.