The Wall Street Journal says that SOCOM 4 is to release in April.
Sony Going For the Core with Motion Games By Nick Wingfield
Sony and Microsoft both made big plays for gamer families over the holidays with their respective devices for controlling games with body motions, the PlayStation Move and Xbox 360 Kinect. Sony thinks it now has an edge on Microsoft as it goes after diehard gamers with its motion device.
In an interview, John Koller, director of hardware marketing at Sony’s US games division, says Sony is “layering on more and more core titles” in the coming months, referring to games aimed at “hardcore” players who are the most avid purchasers and players of games. Those players tend to favor more immersive games, often shooters and other titles with especially intense, realistic action.
With PlayStation Move and Kinect, Sony and Microsoft initially both went after more casual players with dancing, light-hearted sports and arcade-style games that exploit their different motion systems. Sony’s Koller, though, says the technology behind Kinect – a camera and sensor-based system that tracks players’ bodies – can’t match the greater precision of PlayStation Move, which uses a camera to track the movement of a handheld controller shaped like an ice cream cone.
That tracking precision is key for doing certain hardcore motion-games like shooters, he says. “The limitations are such that you can’t create all the games you want to do,” Koller says of Kinect, adding that Sony has experimented with its own Kinect-like technology.
One example: Sony in April plans to release an installment of a popular combat game – SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALS – that exploits PlayStation Move to give players a more intuitive way of locking a gun onto a target than the traditional method of moving a gun sight with a joystick. In a demonstration of the game, Travis Steiner, lead designer of SOCOM 4, also shows how a game character quickly switches to a knife attack when a player thrusts the PlayStation Move controller forward.
A Microsoft spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But sales of Kinect so far are brisk, with Microsoft shipping 8 million of the devices in the 60 days after the product went on sale in early November.
Sony said at the end of November that it had shipped 4.1 million PlayStation Moves since the product went on sale in mid-September. Sony’s Koller said Microsoft’s Kinect shipment number is “very impressive” but Sony is “happy where we are in the market.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
