Sony online gaming to debut with PS3

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sony unveiled its answer to Microsoft's Xbox Live service Wednesday, outlining broad ambitions for the online delivery of video games and expressing confidence its PlayStation 3 will dominate the Xbox 360 console.

Phil Harrison, the president of worldwide studios for Sony's PlayStation arm, announced an online service, to launch globally with the PlayStation 3 in November.

Code-named the PlayStation Network Platform, it will have a free tier that connects users to the Internet and allows them to chat and send e-mail to each other.

Microsoft's Xbox Live online service also has a free tier but charges users one general fee — about $50 a year — to play each other. In Sony's service, subscription fees will be tied to specific games.

Sony also will charge for extra online content, such as downloads of game levels or characters.

Harrison said he expects the service to create communities of game players, and called the move to online the most fundamental shift in game development the industry has seen.

"In the future, we're going to go through a radical change," he told attendees at the Game Developers Conference. "We will be creating and servicing a network of game communities," Harrison said.

The online service was widely expected for the PS3 system, which Sony recently said would debut in November instead of this spring. Sony has offered online play in certain games but did not have a comprehensive service that could be a stepping stone to the next generation of digital content.

To that end, Sony is years behind Microsoft, which first unveiled Xbox Live in November 2002.

To counter Harrison's speech, Microsoft said Wednesday that half of the Xbox 360 consoles it has sold have been connected to Xbox Live, and that players conduct an average 25 online gaming sessions a week. Players on the original Xbox are only connecting for six sessions a week.

Right now, most of the industry's revenue comes from selling game discs. In the future, people could pay to download episodes of games, Harrison said, and those games might be the talk around the water cooler the next day.

"I believe that games can have the same social currency as a great television program," he said. "Games can, and should, fill the same role."

That could lead to PlayStation games with the breadth of "World of Warcraft," a PC title that has 6 million paying subscribers. If those subscribers were to form a country, it would be bigger than Ireland, Harrison said.

"Now that is a fantastic achievement," he said. "I'd like to bring that kind of social networking into PlayStation 3 games and beyond."

Sony has launched a Web site, at www.playstation.com/beyond, to recruit game developers to an "e-distribution initiative" focusing on the direct download of games and other content.

One could argue that Sony's service is really a reaction to Microsoft's Xbox Live, said Brian O'Rourke, a senior analyst at In-Stat.

In the PlayStation 2 generation, Sony allowed online gaming but took a hands-off approach, O'Rourke said. Although that's changing, the online strategy doesn't seem to be factoring heavily into Sony's bottom line.

"Sony sees online as more of a loyalty builder for their audience rather than a money-making strategy," he said. "Microsoft sees it as both. It's really a different approach."

But even as Harrison was pushing the digital download model, he asked developers to consider making games for the Blu-ray format. Blu-ray is often considered to be one of the next-generation successors to DVD discs, but the format can also be used to hold games.

A single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25 gigabytes of data, about five times more than a traditional DVD. With that storage, developers can create one game disc for global shipment that contains all the local-language versions of that title, Harrison said.

He brought onstage Ted Price, the president of Burbank, Calif., developer Insomniac Games, to talk about how next-generation games are going to take up a large amount of storage space. That's where Blu-ray comes in, Price said.

"Simply put, to make more believable worlds, we're generating more content, and that's got to fit somewhere," Price said.

Blu-ray plays a huge part in Sony's overall corporate strategy, what with the potential to sell stand-alone video players and other electronics, said O'Rourke at In-Stat. That's driving the PlayStation arm as well, he said.

"Blu-ray is a huge bet for Sony, and they're going to do everything they can to make that happen."

In a meeting with journalists after his speech, Harrison said he had no concerns about losing any ground to Microsoft in the video-game wars, even now that PS3 debut a full year after the Xbox 360's November 2005 launch.

"It doesn't put us at a competitive disadvantage at all," he said. "Throughout our history, we have never been the first platform to market in what would be considered the generational shift."

Kim Peterson: 206-464-2360 or kpeterson@seattletimes.com