This week brings good news and bad news for PlayStation 3 owners.
The good news is that on Thursday, Sony will debut Qore, an interactive online magazine that will give PS3 gamers a monthly dose of news, interviews, and other exclusive PS3-related video and game content.
The bad news? Qore will now be the home of the hottest PlayStation 3 game betas and demos, and what used to be served up for free will now carry a $3/month price tag -- and interstitial ads for Burger King, who is sponsoring the new download center.
Demoing the service to Wired.com Monday afternoon, PlayStation Network senior director Susan Panico implied that while the PlayStation Store would still get game demos, the big ones would go on Qore: "Qore is like the network broadcast" of a TV show, she said, and PlayStation Store is like "syndication."
Users can pay $3 for each monthly "episode" of Qore, or $25 for a one-year, 13-episode subscription. As an added bonus, early subscribers will get a copy of the downloadable game Calling All Cars for free.
The inaugural episode, set to launch on Thursday, will contain interviews and preview videos for SOCOM: Confrontation, plus an exclusive invite to the game's open beta, scheduled for later this year.
Other content lined up for launch includes an exclusive six-minute trailer for the upcoming Incredible Hulk movie, a preview of Secret Agent Clank for PSP, and exclusive pages from an upcoming Star Wars: Force Unleashed graphic novel.
Sony is even hiding Easter Eggs in each issue -- apparently, there's a mini-game hidden somewhere in the first issue. Sony has partnered with game developer Backbone to create this half-game, half-TV show experience. The content will be provided by Future, publishers of PlayStation: The Official Magazine.
Panico says that 80 to 90 percent of the content in each issue of Qore will be exclusive.
It'll also be ad-supported. In my brief demo of the service I saw ads for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Metal Gear Solid 4, and the aforementioned Home of the Whopper. You can skip the ads, but only after they've run for about five seconds.
Sony still offers more for free than its nearest competitor: While PlayStation Network doesn't offer nearly as many features as Xbox Live, Microsoft's service costs $50 a year while online gameplay is free on PlayStation 3.
My only question is whether the value-add over what Sony was already providing for free justifies the minimum $25/year cost for the information. Although wrapping it in the very pretty package of an interactive magazine does make it seem a lot less like Sony is backpedaling on their stance of a largely free online environment, they'd be silly to release any really good demos, trailers, or interviews in the free section of PS3's network from here on out -- not when any halfway decent piece of content is another potential carrot to get users to pay them $3.
Image: Sony
