A
new report by British newspaper The Guardian has examined the impending November launch of Sony's PlayStation 3, featuring comments from Phil Harrison, Sony’s increasingly high profile president of SCE Worldwide Studios, on "more than 100 games" in development for the console.
According to the report, Harrison, helping refute some of the negative PS3 buzz noted in the article, has indicated that Sony's efforts with regard to the PlayStation 3 are “going well”, and that the company is “in full swing, from a developer point of view, and over 10,000 development kits have been shipped.”
He added: “Developers now have final hardware in their hands, though there will be some upgrades to the operating system - there's nothing unusual about that. The new controller is now in developers' hands, so all the pieces of the puzzle are there.”
The report also notes that the hardware currently available to companies developing software for the PlayStation 3 features functioning Blu-ray drives, and that by using available Blu-ray burners on their PCs, developers “are now doing their first iterations of games running off [Blu-ray] discs,” as opposed to running from the hard drive or some other media in the interim.
However, the Blu-ray format has in recent months
also become the focus of questionable press, following initial delays in its attempts to beat Toshiba's rival HD-DVD next-gen optical disc player to market.
But Harrison was quick to downplay any negativity surrounding PlayStation 3, as well the Blu-ray format itself, of which his company has a significant vested interest, stating that “right now there are more than 100 Blu-ray movies available today, in the US. More than 100 games are in development, and all the major third-party publishers have pledged their strategic support for the platform.”
