In another interview with Sony’s “semi-official” blog three-speech Phil Harrison has again discussed Sony’s E-Distribution Initiative… to the rest of us he means, the PS3 virtual console/arcade.

flOw

Since announcing the concept back in March it is clear that SCE Worldwide Studios has had real success in attracting upcoming developers. The aim is clearly to bring talent to the surface in the industry without the cost of expensive “full-game development” being a barrier. As a result Harrison now believes that there are 40 titles in development that Sony is funding. You would also imagine there are a fair number of titles on top of this that publishers and developers are ploughing their own funds into. This compares very favourably to the xbox360 which currently has around 34 downloadable titles available.

Of the mentioned titles so far, Calling All Cars (previously known as Criminal Crackdown) is destined to be one of the early stand outs along with flOw. Both titles, in my opinion, show developers approaching the concept of console gaming from very different angles- Jaffe’s Calling All Cars is an old school game with a 3D twist, whilst flOw seems to be more about creating an ambient effect and a game you can truly relax to. That’s not to mention other titles, Lemmings is a particularly old-school favourite of mine!

Hopefully Sony’s open approach will avoid the drip-drip approach of Microsoft to arcade.

Eurogamer