Sony's downloadable games service for PlayStation 3 will not follow the same route as Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade - which just recently played host to classic shooter Doom - and will aim to offer high quality new titles instead of trawling videogames from the past.
"Sony [has] less product but it is higher quality than Xbox Live downloads," says Philip Oliver, CEO of Blitz Games, which has recently founded new division Blitz Arcade to concentrate on downloadable games. Sony is "not going to go the retro route," Oliver explains during an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, "in fact [it wants] its games to be around the same price but to be higher quality".
To do this, Sony is setting higher memory limits for developers than Microsoft does for Xbox Live, prompting the development of new, hi-def arcade titles and steering away from re-purposing retro games. "It's setting the entry barrier higher, which we don't have a problem with because we want to do high-end games," Oliver adds.
As we saw yesterday, Sony's first wave of online games look both familiar (Blast Factor) and intriguingly fresh (Flow). And, although we love Doom and can think of a dozen old-school titles that we'd rush to download from Xbox Live Arcade, Sony deserves a pat on the back for trying to encourage an exciting stream of brand new, quick-access gaming action. Will it work out? We'll just have to wait and see.
