PlayStation suite

[Shifty Geezer]

Why would Sony allow it on non Sony products?. If it's not a differentiator what's the point?

It's a software platform, like Java or Flash. If it proves popular, Sony will have a massive ecosystem built around their technology. They can create their excellent 1st party titles and release them not only to the PS install base, but the many-times-larger Android install base too. And in doing so they add value to their PS platform, where a potential console buyer can see buying a PS allows them to play their existing mobile games on the big screen. And they can also license the PS brand and gain revenues from other people's hardware. It's exactly the same as MS releasing Windows on console, PC and phone, with a unified Live! network, only for Sony it's platform independent. Same as Music and Movie Unlimited but for games.

It's one of the few clever moves of Sony in recent years where they've let their network fall by the wayside. It may not work, but at least it's a forward thinking, aggressive strategy.

 

[boommoob1]

It's a software platform, like Java or Flash. If it proves popular, Sony will have a massive ecosystem built around their technology. They can create their excellent 1st party titles and release them not only to the PS install base, but the many-times-larger Android install base too. And in doing so they add value to their PS platform, where a potential console buyer can see buying a PS allows them to play their existing mobile games on the big screen. And they can also license the PS brand and gain revenues from other people's hardware. It's exactly the same as MS releasing Windows on console, PC and phone, with a unified Live! network, only for Sony it's platform independent. Same as Music and Movie Unlimited but for games.

It's one of the few clever moves of Sony in recent years where they've let their network fall by the wayside. It may not work, but at least it's a forward thinking, aggressive strategy.

Why would Sony help it's rivals?. Samsung for example makes $billions from mobile phones. Sony makes losses. At best suite would likely generate in the $100's of millions in profit. It's sideshow as a potential profit generator unless it's a differentiator. Even when these people get something right they get it wrong.10 years and counting since Sony's last hit product.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why would Sony help it's rivals?. Samsung for example makes $billions from mobile phones.

Option 1) Sony only make PSS available on Sony devices. The world is divided into closed ecosystem with MS, Apple, Sony and Samsung and whoever else all ahving their own discrete platforms. Buyers have to choose based on existing compatible hardware (I'l buy an iOS device to use my Apple services, or a Windows mobile to share my Live content, or a Sony mobile to tie in with my PS account). Sony has to fight tooth and nail in a market where it's no longer possible to completely outclass the compeition like Sony's golden age, for a small piece of the pie.

Option 2) Sony makes PSS available to lots of devices. They can compete on the hardware front with hardware features, same as everyone else, but whether they do well or badly in that field, their devices and services are open to all, the whole pie. Along with Music and Movies Unlimited, consumers with non-Sony devices can still buy into the Sony content. This splits the market into two complementary fields - hardware and softare - and no-one's trying what Sony is trying in software. For once they actually got a new idea!

For all your incessant vitriol, you haven't presented a better alternate plan. What can Sony do otherwise? You think yet-another-tablet with yet-another-touchscreen and all the other generic hardware that everyone's putting together will have massive appeal to the typical mobile user because it can uniquely play hardcore PS games? By locking PSS to Sony only devices, Sony limit their appeal to existing PS users. That's a market of maybe 50-60 million users, many of whom already have Android and iOS devices. By being open, they can sell Sony content to b8illions of users and in selling content, give those same mobile users a reason to buy Sony hardware in future that is PSS compatible. "Should I buy the next XBox or PlayStation? The next PlayStation will play al the movies and music and games I've bought on my Samsung mobile, whereas the XBox doesn't - sounds good to me."

I guess your response here is that Sony should give up software and services and invest in hardware, but there are no avenues open to them to compete in the next few years. Even if they find some incredible new technology like a screen technology or 3D retina projection or thoguht control or something that they can offer uniquely, they'll never be able to fund that without a decent company base to serve the RnD. the technological landscape has changed from Sony of old, and no-one can just compete on having the best tech alone any more.

 

[Arwin]

What Shifty said.

 

[boommoob1]

Option 1) Sony only make PSS available on Sony devices. The world is divided into closed ecosystem with MS, Apple, Sony and Samsung and whoever else all ahving their own discrete platforms. Buyers have to choose based on existing compatible hardware (I'l buy an iOS device to use my Apple services, or a Windows mobile to share my Live content, or a Sony mobile to tie in with my PS account). Sony has to fight tooth and nail in a market where it's no longer possible to completely outclass the compeition like Sony's golden age, for a small piece of the pie.

Option 2) Sony makes PSS available to lots of devices. They can compete on the hardware front with hardware features, same as everyone else, but whether they do well or badly in that field, their devices and services are open to all, the whole pie. Along with Music and Movies Unlimited, consumers with non-Sony devices can still buy into the Sony content. This splits the market into two complementary fields - hardware and softare - and no-one's trying what Sony is trying in software. For once they actually got a new idea!

For all your incessant vitriol, you haven't presented a better alternate plan. What can Sony do otherwise? You think yet-another-tablet with yet-another-touchscreen and all the other generic hardware that everyone's putting together will have massive appeal to the typical mobile user because it can uniquely play hardcore PS games? By locking PSS to Sony only devices, Sony limit their appeal to existing PS users. That's a market of maybe 50-60 million users, many of whom already have Android and iOS devices. By being open, they can sell Sony content to b8illions of users and in selling content, give those same mobile users a reason to buy Sony hardware in future that is PSS compatible. "Should I buy the next XBox or PlayStation? The next PlayStation will play al the movies and music and games I've bought on my Samsung mobile, whereas the XBox doesn't - sounds good to me."

I guess your response here is that Sony should give up software and services and invest in hardware, but there are no avenues open to them to compete in the next few years. Even if they find some incredible new technology like a screen technology or 3D retina projection or thoguht control or something that they can offer uniquely, they'll never be able to fund that without a decent company base to serve the RnD. the technological landscape has changed from Sony of old, and no-one can just compete on having the best tech alone any more.

Eh?. All Sony's problems are down to having management that is a fish out of water at a tech company. It's why the silo's exist. An example that everyone can understand is Sony invented the ipad/airboard but Stringer binned it. Idei created the mess his mate made it 10 times worse. Movies, music will almost certainly be gone under the next ceo's watch the pressure for really radical change will be immense . You dont need to own movie, music companies to have movie, music stores/streaming. The old Sony wouldn't of been beaten by Apple, Samsung. The new Sony of Idei , Stringer, Hirai turned Sony into a shambles.

 

[Arwin]

The old Sony wouldn't of been beaten by Apple, Samsung.

It is exactly the old Sony that couldn't unify its various divisions, couldn't make the transition to software and services that has been beaten by Apple and Samsung. How obvious is that? How far back are we talking here about Sony anyway? Casette player Sony? Playstation 1 Sony? Personally I think Sony's success with Playstation 1 was partly luck. Playstation 2 however were when Sony's game division really hit its stride. But it overreached with Playstation 3. That is fine - everyone needs to learn lessons, and in a highly competitive market you can still make some mistakes, as long as you learn from them.

The new Sony of Idei , Stringer, Hirai turned Sony into a shambles.

What you are seeing right now is still for a large part the result of decisions made 5-10 years ago. Personally I can't judge what Stringer has done, though he does seem to have done some important political work at the very least, working hard to allow a culture change. But I'm not versed enough into Sony politics to judge.

I can however see that Idei and Hirai at the very least appear to be doing what is necessary. Whether Sony is doing it well enough, I cannot judge. This will have to play out over time. Vita will basically be the first important fruit of the 'new' Sony, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. They have some catching up to do, which is hard in a competitive market.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Eh?. All Sony's problems are down to having management that is a fish out of water at a tech company.

I've already warned you about off topic into just ranting against Sony's management. This thread is about Sony PSS. There are explanations about how PSS can make Sony money on other platforms. If you're not capable of discussing a broader view of Sony than "Hirai and Stringer suck" then please stop wasting our time with irrelevant replies.

If you actually want to engage in a proper discussion, outline a business strategy for Sony for the next few years using PSS and explaining a case where not releasing on Android will do wonders for Sony's business.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Non-PSS business talk moved here.

 

[patsu]

Thanks to jeff_rigby's digging again...

PlayStation SUITE GDC Online 2011 - Part 1

...says Playstation Suite is based on a Mono VM. ^_^

EDIT:
Part 2:

Part 3:

 

[xexuxjy]

Good news that they're doing a homebrew c# option on there , half tempted to try and get my xna bullet physics library port running on suite as well

 

[patsu]

I watched the videos. A few things caught my attention:

* The Mono VM is said to perform well. Many developers already have their hands on it. Sony added their own classes (derived from Playstation SDK) to the standard class library. Also considering low level audio API. Many things are still in the pipeline, or undecided yet (e.g., Additional language support). They are hoping for more dev feedback.

* They intend to have the same or similar gameplay + purchase experience across platforms (touchscreen, dual stick, etc.). They are considering "Return Policy" for PS Suite Store.

* We can test on a PC software simulator or on the device (just like iPhone dev model). No need to buy a dev kit, but we probably need to pay some software & support license.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

* They intend to have the same or similar gameplay + purchase experience across platforms (touchscreen, dual stick, etc.). They are considering "Return Policy" for PS Suite Store.

That's a good idea. for games that don't have demos, people will be more willing to give them a go if a few hours of play later they could request a refund for games they don't like (or are broken, which shouldn't happen with proper QA...). They also need a standardised shop-front, with previews for all games. Some you have to buy blind! They should also be uniform across nations. I hope PSS is ushering in a proper unified Sony network experience, but they really need to get this one right, unlike other projects that have been released in a very ricketty state and done more harm than good (Home, original PSN, early PSN store, etc.).

 

[patsu]

Yeah... don't do demoes. It looks like demoes for full fledge games are hard to do right under pressure. Use the real game. Either let them play X minutes and pay more to play the entire game, or some form of limited return. IMHO of course.

EDIT: Oh yes, the speaker also confirmed that Playstation Vita runs a custom OS. Not Android.

 

[patsu]

Thanks to Titanio's finding...

Xperia Arc and Acro also certified for PS Suite now:
http://translate.google.com/transla....html&hl=en&biw=1399&bih=856&gbv=2&prmd=imvns


Closed beta registration here:
http://www.playstation.com/pss/closedbeta/index_e.html

 

[Arwin]

Closed beta registration here:
http://www.playstation.com/pss/closedbeta/index_e.html

So far it's ticking all the right boxes for me ... individual developers, PC Simulator ...

 

[patsu]

I am more interested in very specific capabilities like controls API (How do they abstract touchscreen, dual stick, motion control ?). What about camera input say... for head tracking ? And what about 3D ?

I bought my son Snap Circuits and Lego Mindstorm. We wired up a few things. Am toying with the idea of using DS3, Move and iPad to control them.

 

[patsu]

Amazing jeff_rigby's investigative work... Too bad he seldom visit us anymore.

He found this 2009 link on PhyreEngine# on Mono running on PS3:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jun-08.html

A few weeks ago we learned about Sony's developer event in the West Coast. Michael, Zoltan and myself worked very hard to put together a demo to show the virtues of C# and the CIL to developers. So we cranked on some record time some code:

PhyreEngine#
Static compiler for PowerPC for Mono on PS3
A yield-based co-routine framework.
We picked Sony's PhyreEngine to demostrate how to use Mono to write the high-level code for a game using Sony's finely tuned engine. We figured this was better than showing a for loop printing the numbers 1 to 10 on the screen.

PhyreEngine# wraps PhyreEngine using the same techniques that we used in Gtk# and Moonlight. The resulting API is glorious and by letting PhyreEngine do all the heavy lifting while driving all the high-level from C# there is no way of telling that the driving force is not C++. All you get is pure unadultered productivity.

...

We were also working on completing Mono's port to the PlayStation 3's native operating system (this is different than running Mono on Linux on the PS3: that already works, and it was used for developing CellDotNet, a JIT for the PS3's SPUs). Zoltan developed the static compiler for PowerPC and I did the platform support.

Mono can now run "Hello World" on the PS3 native OS. There are still lots of ins, lots of outs and lots of whathaveyous that need to be tied up before this fully works and before we are able to run PhyreEngine# on the PS3.

This was clearly from the PS3 Linux days...

jeff_rigby also got part of the Gnome + PS3 tie-in right (Not bad for being brave enough to talk about PS3 + Mono):

Miguel De Icaza, one of the Co-authors of the Gnome initiative and developer of Mono, tweeted:
http://twitter.com/#!/migueldeicaza

EGO JUICY PlayStation Suite talk from GDC: C#-based, Open, Xplat (Android, Vita, PS3), AppStore model: youtube.com/watch?v=clk3uu… (via @SoftSavage)
18 hours ago

 

[V3]

I got to play around with the new Sony S1 Tablet. I tried the Crash Bandicoot demo that was on it, I guess using this PS Suite to emulate. The graphic was ba... well PS1 standard, the game is nothing spectacular. The only interesting bit is the control, overlay giant PS d-pad and buttons via touchscreen.

I played for about an hour trying to give it a chance, it sort of work but very wonky. The d-pad is horrible. The buttons are so so. I think something is lost when you can't feel the pads or the buttons. I just didn't have any fun playing with the control. I think games for the touchscreen only generation need a redesign, you can't just use control pad overlay. All I can say is thankgoodness Vita has buttons.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PSS suite will come into is own one new content. I just hope Sony get enough of that rather than just PS1 games that clearly aren't going to translate well to pad.

 

[patsu]

I got to play around with the new Sony S1 Tablet. I tried the Crash Bandicoot demo that was on it, I guess using this PS Suite to emulate. The graphic was ba... well PS1 standard, the game is nothing spectacular. The only interesting bit is the control, overlay giant PS d-pad and buttons via touchscreen.

I played for about an hour trying to give it a chance, it sort of work but very wonky. The d-pad is horrible. The buttons are so so. I think something is lost when you can't feel the pads or the buttons. I just didn't have any fun playing with the control. I think games for the touchscreen only generation need a redesign, you can't just use control pad overlay. All I can say is thankgoodness Vita has buttons.

Tablet S's Android UI feels flakey even without PS Suite. ^_^
Sometimes, it's a little jerky even with simple swipes on the "Desktop".

I tested it in SonyStyle. They should fix the basic product first. PS Suite won't make it more attractive.

I think as part of PS Suite, they should abstract the input mechanism somewhat so that developers can make games for touch screen and dual sticks easier.