Sony’s Home

Why Sony’s announcement to create its own online community is great big news, I’m not exactly sure. It seems to me that Sony has been consistently working towards placing their consumer electronics at “the center of the living room,” and that the interconnectivity of all those overpriced devices has been the main reason behind their sometimes slow release. What else did you expect from the people behind EQ?
But maybe I’m not reading it correctly. According to this article/press release, Sony’s expansion comes in “the wake of virtual worlds like Second Life and such file-sharing stalwarts as YouTube and Flickr.” But didn’t SOE just recently publish a report [.doc] “to better understand the effect that real money trade has on game play” and “how it gives SOE a window into the potential money that can be derived from the buying and selling of virtual items”? So, I’m pretty sure that Sony wasn’t waiting for YouTube to be bought (and subsequently be sued out of existence by Viacom) as a signal to launch their own social networking venue.

Instead, I think that Sony has been looking into the various ways in which they can address the industry concerns around social networking sites (copyright) and RMT (security). As Sosnik pointed out not too long ago that people will always find a way to trade items and coins, concluding that companies will start running their own marketplaces parallel to the game. By consolidating all their products into one giant happy meal, Sony is just doing what it does best: sell consumer electronics.

Unlike Google and News Corp., Sony’s motivation behind creating content is to sell the devices. Hence they bought up a bunch of movie studios and music labels. It’s the MP3s that sell the iPods, no? From what it looks like, Sony may just have been watching Microsoft spend a bunch of money to see what would work, although that may be stretching it. The whole XBOX Live thing already features profiles and what not, so creating a virtual dimension to it a-la SL with avatars seems like a perfectly logic next step. Owning the platform and hardware that constitute a virtual space is probably the only way to protect your investment in it.