For once-bitten, twice-shy gamers whose PS3s were rendered useless by a recent Sony firmware update, the latest Playstation 3 firmware update may have looked like a unnecessary risk to videogamers abroad. In Japan, however, you must potentially turn your beautiful PS3 into a large, black, shiny brick in order to do anything online. Luckily, Of Rice and Zen discovered that for us Japan-based gamers Sony have opened yet another wing of the Labyrinthine Mansion that is gradually being constructed within our obelisk-like consoles.
Sony has played a few smart hands in its time. For example, having the foresight to kill HD-DVD before the PS3s release by pre-loading its behemoth new console with a Blu-Ray drive, thus ensuring that Playstation owning households had already taken their sides in the format war before even weighing up the options.
Another example would be opening up the PS3 into new areas of multimedia entertainment one small step at a time, rather than aiming for an overly ambitious launch. From day one a game store was built into the console’s online menu. A plethora of free videos and demos of upcoming titles kept us busy longer than the disappointing launch titles.
Free games featuring purchasable expansions were available from the first moment the Of Rice and Zen team booted up our first generation PS3. Real world vouchers giveaways for convenience stores that appeared within those early downloads in virtual form brought real world marketing into the video game world. Sony’s cross-over theory of digital worlds selling real products began to take shape.
Next came a home screen info ticker advertising new releases that was switched on by default after a firmware update (but which can mercifully be turned off). A collection of compatible peripherals is available from the comfort of your futon. Backward compatibility for PS and PS2 games, for early adopters at least, and an ever increasing archive of downloadable Playstation 1 games also helped to compensate for the slow starting PS3 developers.
A few weeks from now will follow Home, Sony’s massively ambitious, oft-delayed and much-anticipated virtual meeting place/game hub/advertising venue in which users can live a second life that is focused around Sony’s marketing, rather than their games. By offering a well-tested and immersive virtual world to explore, Sony can centralise its various marketing initiatives in one place to which players will flock.
No more chasing or spamming required. Sony’s market will come in search of adverts as entertainment. The development costs of the giant project will more than be offset by the commercial gains.
Just before the long-awaited Home arrives, however, Sony quietly released a update that has added a video rental store to Japanese PS3s, along the lines of Apple’s iTunes store. The new direction in which this drives Sony’s flagship console, into direct competition with DVD rental chain Tsutaya, iTunes and other digital video distributors is a huge move and one who’s significance should not be underestimated.
For now the store may as well be called the anime-store, as all of the early content was exactly that; a collection of previously televised anime priced at ¥400 and a selection of other animated content at various price brackets. This does not display a lack of foresight or imagination on Sony’s behalf. It is more accurately a sign that Sony knows its users and what they spend their hard-earned yen on.
Thanks to web 2.0 that information is readily available at anyone’s fingertips. Do an Amazon search on the company’s Japanese site for the best-selling game Metal Gear Solid 4 and one will immediately be informed that buyers of Kojima’s PS3 debut also too the plunge on Macross F and Toki wo Kakeru Shojo (“The Girl Who Leaped Through Time”). It should come as no surprise that a range of Macross and Gundam anime is among the small selection that appeared among the first wave on the new video download store.
Content can be downloaded once from the Sony store and will be provided once more by customer services in the event of loss, but that’s your limit until the Playstation 3 is obsolete. Consumers who rent a movie from the video delivery service have 14 days to watch the content. Once content playback is started, consumers have a full 24 hours to enjoy their rental. Let’s hope your eikaiwa don’t call and request you do some emergency overtime then.
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Lots of good stuff over here, I am confused to choose any particular game