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GDC Keynote In Review

March 7, 2007 - 4:26pm — Mike Raffensperger

Just finished reading the live coverage of the GDC keynote by Phil Harrison (President of Sony Computer Entertainment) over at Joystiq. While I'm a little jealous of all the fun and frivolity going on, I'll admit I expected a bit more from the discussions, particularly this keynote. My snarky comments aside, I was really hoping for some leadership out of the keynote speech. While things certainly look great on the PS3 (LittleBigPlanet looks soul-crushingly cute), I'm not sure how I feel about their online developments. They took the best aspects of XBL (achievements, err... excuse me, "Trophies") and the Wii (persistent avatars) and then loaded it up with tons of sexy reasons to spend money - new clothes for your avatar, new furniture for your apartment, new wallpaper, pets, etc. Maybe it's just me, but when it comes to my console's online service I'm more interested in a seamless friend management system like XBLs than having a Sims-Lite game in a decked out lobby to launch the games I actually want to play from.

The part of the speech that actually was groundbreaking, namely user-generated content and community in gaming, they slapped a buzzword on (Emergent Entertainment!) then literally paid it lip service for 5 minutes:

10:50 a.m.: "This is about the connected device... powered by active communities built on open standards. We want the entire game community to add to this and build on this... It's about community, it's about collaboration. It's about customization. It's about emergent entertainment powered by the audience, with the audience at the center of this universe"

10:52 a.m.: Social, community, localization, Emergent entertainment ...

10:55 a.m.: "You will be able to download additional clothing from the PlayStation store to extend and expand your experience!"

No actual examples of how this community and collaboration revolution is going to happen were given. They did go on to talk about LittleBigPlanet for 17 minutes, which admittedly includes the ability for custom creation and sharing, but that's a title supported feature on a game coming out sometime in 2008. If Sony is serious about this they need a platform level answer to Microsoft's XNA.

What do you guys think? Am I missing something, or was this just Sony missing the boat on the online space and trying to play catch-up?

Comments

Sony isn't trying to

March 13, 2007 - 7:51pm — Anony (not verified)

Sony isn't trying to introduce an XNA type of community for their PS network. They're entirely two different ideas. One is more like a job (XNA), while littlebigplanet is making a game within a game. Think of littlebigplanet as youtube, and XNA as iFilm.

Sony is more interested in having big game developers creating downloadable content through their distribution network. E.g. David Jaffe of God of War fame creating calling all cars.