Curmudgeon Gamer: Retail PS3 games on PS3: Finally!

25 June 2010

Retail PS3 games on PS3: Finally!

I would never have finished* Burnout Paradise if it hadn't been available as a full-game download on the PlayStation Store. Simply having a game available to play all the time makes it much more likely to get played. Had I stuck with the Blu-Ray version of Burnout Paradise, I'd likely never have enjoyed it as much.

(In a similar way, I really love having two dozen games or so on my PSP Go. That plus the game save-state feature makes the PSP Go one of my favorite handhelds of all time. Regrettably, if I like a handheld, it's probably going to be a loser. See also: Atari Lynx.)

There are only two other important games on the PlayStation Store that are also sold on Blu-Ray disc: Warhawk and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. I've often wondered why this was the case, but it now appears that Sony is going to start putting more full PS3 games on the PS Store.

According to the details of the EU PSN+ program, early adopters will get a downloadable version of LittleBigPlanet as a bonus and will soon have access to a trial version of inFamous which can be converted to the full version with the purchase of a key.

Sony should have been doing this a long time ago. The three existing games on the service showed that the concept can work, and the PSN+ service certainly isn't required to promote full game downloads. Now we just need Sony to make games available online the same day as they're available at retail, and they'll have a real advantage over their competitors.

* For my own ego's sake, achieving the Burnout Paradise License is finishing. I won't ever get the Burnout Elite License, especially since my Burnout Paradise License was lost when my original PS3 60GB died and took the save games with it.

--jvm at 16:49

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While I really like the idea of moving towards everything being available as downloadable content, it is really at loggerheads with the (fairly) standard practice of capping monthly bandwidth usage. One side will eventually have to crack, and I hope for my sake that it is the ISPs.

By Jory, at 26 June, 2010 12:34

Jory, that's a good point. So far we've not hit the cap here on Comcast, but with my family using Netflix and me downloading games, I suspect we'll eventually hit some sort of limit.

I'm frustrated that ISPs like Comcast want me to use their service instead of something like Netflix, and I'm not interested. Netflix is more portable, for one thing. And Comcast will never offer me PlayStation software, so I'll still have to burn bandwidth to get that data.

By jvm, at 26 June, 2010 13:13

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