Kutaragi Talks Downloadable Future

And some time in the future you might not even need a hard drive for all that delicious downloadable content.

Digital distribution has gone mainstream. More than a billion songs have been downloaded from Apple's iTunes music store and now other entertainment vendors are going the same way. Half-Life developer Valve is sorting things out on the PC side of things, and PlayStation chief Ken Kutaragi says the PlayStation 3 is going to do the same for consoles.

"It's about time we made our move, too," Kutaragi told Japanese site PC Watch, as translated by GameSpot.

Cost is an issue, but Kutaragi said that PlayStation 3 owners are not going to be charged for using the infrastructure Sony puts in place.

"You can't charge money for network matching and other basic services. These things are just taken for granted on the PC," he said. "On the PS3, basic services will be taken for granted while content will be the bread and butter of our business."

Crucial to this model is the hard drive, where you store downloaded content, but Kutaragi is thinking further, to a future where all your content is stored on servers.

"I expect even the hard disk to disappear eventually. If you have all the data on servers, you probably no longer need disk drives."

Another player in this performance is online play, something Sony has been reluctant to speak about. The company has talked up the parts that PlayStation 3 owners will be getting for free and online play has yet to make an appearance. This suggests that, like Microsoft, Sony will introduce various levels of membership to the PlayStation Network Platform or simply leave it up to the publishers themselves.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games