This is part 2 in our series. Part 1 can be found here.
Sony is banking heavily on the success of its online store to create a large revenue stream. As such, Sony has been heavily and actively pushing its first party developers to make as much use of the store as possible. The global Store has already been available since the US launch day, and ever since then, Sony has been pushing along the development of its in-game store fronts (a concept first shown in Phil Harrison’s speech at GDC 2006).
Sony plans on making access to the store as easy as possible for the users by pushing it onto as many avenues as possible. One of these avenues is the PC, and it should come to as no surprise that Sony is expected to launch a PSN store sometime in June-July 2007. Interestingly, our sources indicate that the reason the PC version of the store has not been made available yet is due to issues with DRM. The last hurdle for Sony is to figure out how to get content purchased through the PC Store onto platforms such as the PS3 or the PSP without the opening itself up to the risk of piracy.
Through the PSN Store, users are supposed to be able to download new content not just for the PS3, but also for the PSP. Unfortunately, Sony appears to have hit a major roadblock in getting the PSN implemented on the PSP. The PSN is built upon certain assumptions, namely two which are missing from the PSP: being “always on” and having persistent storage. Being a portable device, the PSP obviously can’t always be on. As well, the PSP doesn’t have guaranteed persistent storage like the PS3 (a PSP may or may not contain a memory stick). So Sony Japan is basically going back to the drawing board on this matter, and it is unlikely that PSN will appear on the PSP any time soon (leaving some fans disappointed).
Now we get to the crux of this article: Sony’s Commerce system. Sony plans to have three types of Commerce interfaces available to end-users. The first is obviously the global Store, which you can access from the XMB and works quite well as it is. The other two interfaces are both in-game and fulfill the promises made last year at GDC and E3, namely the availability of in-game store fronts.
The first system is an in-game Commerce SDK which will be made available to developers. Once the 1.60 update hits in late March, developers that implements this API will be able to have direct access to the Sony store, and it will allow their games to download content, install it, and retrieve money from the user without ever leaving the confines of the game. Developers will be able to create their own front-end interface and presentation for their store, configuring it to their hearts desire.
This new API will offer developers a greater flexibility for marketing their own downloadable content from within their own game. The only downside to this new API is that it will require approximately an extra 60 MB of memory to be made available to the OS. The memory requirement seems quite hefty, but we should also remember that such an interface would be integrated into the front-end menus of a game, which should use up less memory anyways and therefore pose less of a challenge to developers.
The final interface is something known as “Title Top”. Little is known of this system currently except that it is also due out in June-July 2007. This is another in-game interface and will probably be a uniform system to access the global Store from within any game. At this point however, it is mostly conjecture. This system is sure to require extra memory resources from the game to be allocated to the OS for its operation, but this should come as no surprise.
The 1.60 update will open up the floodgates for in-game commerce. As more and more games support the Commerce API, we will finally get to see a clearer picture of where Sony is aiming to take its online business on the PS3. The 1.60 update should also finally see the availability of subscription based games.
Join us again tomorrow when we take a look at the Friends system and cross-game functionality.
