Sony’s TGS Keynote

Details are still coming out about Sony’s TGS Keynote. But this is what I am gathering:

-Talk about how wonderful ‘User Generated Content’ is and how no user can play all the levels of ‘Little Big Planet’. (I’m already laughing)

-Singstar is ‘awesome’ because it has a new business model. (I’m laughing harder now.)

-Sony’s Wand is set to be released in Spring 2010. Oh golly, I wonder what software they have for it? They don’t mention any. They just move on to the PSP! (I’m stunned.)

-“PSPGo is really an ultimate choice made for those users who can use the Network conveniently.” (Oh really?)

-Then they start talking about the PS2. (Who cares?)

-From Eurogamer liveblog: “They want to expand the entertainment world to a non-gaming genre.” (The key word is ‘entertainment world’. This is not Nintendo’s mission. Sony is meaning it by ‘media hub’.)

-“Let’s take the element ‘watch’. We introduced a new video distribution service in the US, 300 movie titles at launch and 1200 episodes of TV drama. Today we have more than 13,300 TV dramas and 23,000 movies, and this service is going to be expanded outside the US.” (This isn’t going to help the PS3. People want games, not TV dramas and movies.)

–Maybe games could measure your “heartbeat or body temperature or sweat” but “it’s not realistic to have sensors all over your body”. Take THAT, Mr Iwata. But maybe, says Kaz, some non-intrusive technology could measure that sort of stuff. How about a magic wand, for example? (Iwata’s presentation of the Vitality Sensor was poor in many ways. But one of them was that it gave away the idea to competitors. And this is before Nintendo has developed any software for it.)

-“Emotional input is still not fully developed… I think the games industry can still develop even more. One of its unique characteristics is that as technology develops, the way you express things, the number of colours on the pallette increases as technology develops.” (If Sony truly believes this, then they aren’t going anywhere in 2010. Any time an entertainment company looks at technology as the fountain of value in entertainment content, I want to leave the room.)

And apparently that is it! What I do not understand (and perhaps I missed) is how can Sony release a motion controller without any software? Or is software going to be announced later? It doesn’t make sense. I must have missed some announcement.