By Stephen Duetzmann, Editor-in-Chief
Sony held their GamesCom press conference today. They were under a lot of pressure to follow-up their strong showing at E3 earlier this year. Below is my list of the five most important things I took away.
1. We finally have a release date for the PS4!
The Playstation 4 is set to release in North America on Friday November 15, 2013. This is likely the biggest piece of news to come out of the press conference. There were reportedly over 1 million PS4’s pre-ordered and we now know when they will be going to their new homes.
This is a great move for Sony because they could not afford to miss Black Friday. (It doesn’t hurt that they put their release date out before Microsoft did theirs.)
2. The PSVita is getting a price cut.
The PSVita is quietly gaining steam. It might never gain the popularity of the Nintendo 3DS. But, it has a LOT of great games and it has a remote play feature with the soon to launch PS4. There are both great selling points.
Dropping the price to $199 is an excellent move. This is a great value for someone looking for a handheld system with a bit more power than the 3DS.
3. Sony is getting Minecraft.
This one pretty much explains itself. People have been able to play this game on their tablets, PCs, and Xbox 360s. This lets people play it on their PS4, PS3 and PSVita .
I don’t know how much of a difference this will make for families since people buying any of these products will likely already have a device capable of playing it. But, it is great to see that Sony has taken steps to try and bring so many things that they think their audience might want onto their platform.
4. LittleBigPlanet Hub will be a new free-to-play LBP experience on PS4.
We’re big fans of the LittleBigPlanet franchise here at EFG. The LittleBigPlanet Hub is meant to be a great source for additional content. The service will provide access to new level creation tools as well as user created experiences
Sony didn’t give a lot of information, but anything designed to enhance the LBP experience is a good thing.
5. Sony spent almost 45 minutes talking about independently developed games.
This is, simply put, a big deal. Sony has clearly demonstrated to the development community that they are interested in supporting indie games. This means that the PS4 and PSVita will be great consoles to own if you enjoy these types of games.
This also means that the games available on these consoles will be more diverse and innovative. There is no way that this can be a bad thing.
