[darkpuppet]

Been debating whether to post this all morning, but as some of you gamers may know, March 15 was a big press day in Japan for Sony.

Among PSP and PS2 details, they've finally set a release date for release of the PS3.. which, as recently implied by namco will be in November.

Final Development kits will be available in June and going on sale to 3rd party developers in July (a little late for a spring release IMO).


Some other PS3 developments.
- the PS3 will have an online service akin to xbox Live, only the basic service will be free
- developers are told to develop with a 60GB HDD in mind
- games should be bootable by the hdd, and it should support linux
- all games will be published to blue-ray, no intermediate step here

the online component will feature much of the xbox live's feature set..
Communication/Community:
Voice/Video chat
Messaging
Lobby/Matchmaking
Score/Ranking
Friend list/Avatar
Game data upload/download

Commerce:
Shop (accessible from inside games)
Content Download
Micro Payment
Subscription
Entitlement (user access rights) management

Account:
User Registration
Login ID/Handling of name issues