Sony NGP Aiming at Same Day Retail and Digital Sales

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s  Andrew House spoke to MCV about Sony’s plans for the NGP.

One of the major things is the fact that they are aiming to have games available for digital distribution on the platform the same day as they hit retail shelves.  Aside from getting rid of the UMD disc and switching to flash memory (for both power and physical reasons).

In the MCV interview Mr. House states:

One thing we learnt from PSP, is that we want to have simultaneous delivery in digital and physical for NGP. Just to clarify that, all games that appear physically will be made available digitally. Not necessarily all games have to be made available physically. And having the option of a digital-only method affords more creative risk-taking, and that’s because you don’t-have that in-built risk of physical inventory.

That definitely shows that Sony is fully committed to digital distribution, and rightly so. They have put a lot of effort into making the Playstation Network a viable delivery system for not only games but also add-on content and multimedia like video, music and digital comics. So it should be no surprise that they are on the download bandwagon.

It’s a nice move. I for one don’t always like to have a physical copy of a game as they tend to create clutter in my gaming and work spaces. However, there is something to be said about them as they are able to be resold. Granted, the industry is against reselling games because they feel it cuts into their bottom lines, but if they made games with more than 4-6 hours of gameplay, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to sell them.

I also like the fact that Sony is leaving it up to the publishers to determine the media and are not dictating that all games need to have physical as well as digital distribution. This could open the platform up to a lot of cool new indie games where they developers or publishers aren’t large enough to get their physical products to all the markets, much like the Playstation Minis has done.