When it comes to videogames I don't think that a good story-line is as big of a motivating factor as some people assume ... If you read the list of the top 50 games from any given year you will see the vast majority of games have pretty marginal story lines, and the games that have good stories (by videogame standards) also have good gameplay which could be argued is the real selling feature of these games.

People choose to play videogames because they're interactive, and it is impossible to tell a good story that is interactive. You can offer a good setting in an interactive way, and you can introduce good characters in an interactive way, but a story implies plot which requires a protagonist, their conflict and the choices they make. In a videogame you are the protagonist and any choice that can be made is yours to make which causes problems for telling a decent story; suppose for a moment that I decided that I didn't want to be a eurotrash low-life criminal and I decided that I wanted to open up a flower shop instead, how can you (as an author) anticipate this choice and work it into a game like Grand Theft Auto 4? We see this limitation in every videogame that trys to allow choice, and your choices are always limited and have a very minimal impact on the story (except for the end cinematics).

In other news...

Food is more popular then books.

Therefore all books should focus less on having good stories and more on being edible.

"For the casual and the hardcore"

Heavy Rain will be HuGe!!!1

Heavy Rain is a niche title, it looks like it will be a great game, but this is even less of a casual-core bridge title than LBP planet was.

Isn't 428 considered an interactive drama? And on top of that it's not new at all... since the genre has been around since oh I'd say early 90s with PC and Sega Genesis and owning a few titles myself, and they were all God awful except for the Power Rangers one on Sega CD cause Power Rangers was the best show ever! :D ... :) ... ): ... D: oh wait it wasn't? And my childhood was wasted playing a horrible game on the Sega CD? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Hmm.

This is ridiculous. Sony is trying to do something different, and everybody is saying it will fail.

I, for one, am hyped for this game. It will be incredible.

2000 pages of script + a huge variety of animations + new genre + truckloads of money spent in development = AWESOME.

And I remember reading a David Cage interview. He said he wanted to make a great game, not a game that would make lots of money.

God I wish there were more developers like this. David Cage and Fumito Ueda seem to be the only ones :(

No-one is saying that Kantor, and if the developer is in this just to make a great game then good on him, We all acknowledge that it should be a great game (provided he doesn't cock it up I suppose), but we are being realistic

429 is of the same genre, and opened to sales of 36k in Japan preview, and it received 40/40 from famitsu, so it's clearly a good game but it's hardly a mainstream title

I can't believe you're serious about this. Gameplay is by far the bigger factor in what makes a game popular.

You even brought up the Wii for christ's sake! MKWii! SSBB! Wii Fit! There is NOTHING in those games that make them great in terms of story. It's the gameplay. And the people you talk about, who don't play games but watch movies and read books, are exactly a part of the audience that these games (with the Wii) appeal to.

Call of Duty 4 has a great singleplayer, but the story doesn't matter one bit when it comes to making the multiplayer popular. It's the gameplay.

If something isn't fun to play, chances are it will fail saleswise.

Haha… these posts make me laugh. I agree with Rainbird... Game play is the reason people play video games.  I don’t care how great the storyline is or how great the visuals are.  If this $60 game is going to be competing on those lines with say a movie like… The Dark Knight then this game is utter fail.  Storyline and Visuals are important to video games but the game play is what makes it fun. 

I am interested to see how they mix and match it with the game play.  I am still looking for enough reasons to buy a PS3 so I am very interested in this.  Reading threads like this scare me into thinking the game is going to be a movie with random button pushes to advance the story.

My point is that this is not a totally new experience by any means and for the developer to claim so is irresponsible and silly.

There are plenty of developers who set out to make great games that won't necessarily make lots of money. Miyamoto does it constantly.