Sony Plans Digital Distribution? 78
Along with Sony's plans to take on Xbox Live, they may be planning a move to counter the Revolution's classic gaming library. GamesIndustry.biz reports that Sony may offer digital downloads of classic PSOne and PS2 titles. From the article: "In Sony's case the challenges may be significantly more difficult, since PlayStation titles were customarily several hundred megabytes in size, and PS2 titles spanned multiple gigabytes - compared to just a few megabytes or less for NES, SNES and N64 titles in the Nintendo back-catalogue. However, as Internet connections speed up downloads of this size will be far more reasonable - already, several Xbox Live demos for the Xbox 360 are over 600Mb in size - and our sources indicated that Sony may also be investigating the possibility of remastering certain PS2 titles to allow them to stream later content over the network while the player is already playing early parts of the game."
Possibly already too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this was meant to be a serious feature, it would have been mentioned and covered long before now. But since Microsoft has proven its self with Xbox Live, and Nintendo has been talking about the access to their back library for some time, it sounds like Sony is getting a bit worried.
First, a week or two ago, someone brings up a story about a possible Revolution like controller scheme. Now were hearing about downloadable games. It just reeks of damage control marketing to me.
It also does not help that Sony does not have all that much in teh way of classic, evergreen titles to draw on. Most of their monster hits have recent iterations available, and those iterations are often in the vein of Gran Turismo, where the new ones are just going to be better then the old ones. I am sure they have some titles that qualify, though. You cannot get into Sony's current position without having any enduring hits.
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How interesting is sony's back catalog anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
By the time the PS3 comes out the second hand ps2 games will go down in price as well, I wonder if it won't be cheaper to buy all the ps1 & 2 games you want second hand than through their online service.
Nintendo's catalog is much more interesting in that respect, the originals are often hard to find and expensive, heck even microsoft's offerings on marketplace are more interesting, where else can you get those classic arcade games, legally?
Neat potential... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sony would no doubt impliment some kind of DRM to make sure the burned copy is only played on the PS3 that downloaded it, though. Not that I would blame them entirely, but I wouldn't mind it so much if you could actually transfer it to another machine. (Suppose your PS3 goes tits up as Sony hardware tends to do...)
This has potential. As it stands now as great as net-delivered content is, I'm not real comfortable paying for something unless I get to keep a physical media copy as well. Nintendo's online content delivery service might be crippled if it's limited to storing inside the Revolution hardware, though if you can transfer it to a memory card it won't be so bad.
How many times have I jumped tracks here? I'll shut up now.
Not very (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right though about Nintendo and Microsoft. Nintendo has at least three generations to go through (NES, SNES, N64) not counting the Gameboy line and Microsoft has LEGAL classic arcade games plus a proven track record (at least for consoles) of handling online services.