Sony: 40 Downloadable PS3 Games In Development

According to a new interview, Sony's Phil Harrison has revealed that around 40 titles are currently in development for the Playstation Store, the Xbox Live-like service that will deliver fully digitally distributed games to PS3 owners. In the interview, from semi-official Sony blog Threespeech, Worldwide Studios head Harrison said Sony was overseeing development on "about 40 products" that fit its strategy to "create games specifically for us, that we would fund, that we would publish, in the online sense of the word, and distribute online." Through the arrangement, titles revealed this far have included a console version of Jenova Chen's flOw, as well as titles such as God of War creator David Jaffe's recently renamed vehicular combat title Calling All Cars (formerly known as Criminal Crackdown). “My strategy," said Harrison, "was to encourage developers to push the machine technically, creatively, artistically - to innovate in lots of different ways. But don’t be restricted by ghettoising games into a particular genre, or a particular display mechanic, because what we’ve seen on other systems tend to be retro 2D games and we’re pushing the 3D capabilities of the PlayStation 3." Obviously referring to the recent influx of arcade classics on Xbox Live, Harrison continued on the differences of PS3's e-distribution strategy by adding, "the fact that every PS3 has a hard disc drive means that we’re not restricted by the size of the download, and that has a huge impact on the kind of game design that you can do.” In addition to the 40 titles in development for the service, Harrison has previously stated that over 100 titles are currently being developed for retail release on the Playstation 3, and that "over 10,000 development kits have been shipped.”