Sony: Expect more PlayStation classics on PSN

Sony has told PS3 owners they can expect more PS1 and PS2 classics to make it to PlayStation Network.

Speaking in an interview with IGN, Sony’s senior vice president of marketing and PSN boss Peter Dille said: “We’re working really hard on it.”

PSN has bolstered its line-up in recent months with the release of role-playing classics Final Fantasy VII and Vagrant Story.

But fans want more.

“We’re pushing the third-party community and evangelizing this as a terrific opportunity both commercially as well as from a brand perspective to keep people interested in some of these older IPs,” said Dille.

“By all means, I think people can look for more of that because once the third-parties see how this works, it’s just found money. There’s not a whole lot of work that has to go into it and once we can get it up on the network, it finds an audience pretty quickly.”

Those hoping for full PS3 games to be made available for download, however, are set for disappointment.

“No, I don’t think so — at least, not any time soon,” said Dille.

“Part of the reason for that is broadband. We have an advantage with PlayStation 3 from an optical media perspective because a Blu-ray disc contains 50 gigs. Maybe this point will come at some time, but today to download 50 gigs of data before you play a game, you could probably go buy a car, bring it home, put your family into it, drive to the store by and bring the game home by the time you [could download it]. I think we’re on the forefront of digital distribution.

“The notion of getting all your games digitally, I just don’t see it happening. There are games you’re going to get at the store, there are games you’re going to get on PlayStation Network and there are some you’ll get in both places, and then there’s also opportunity to enhance the micro-transactions and add-on content, of course, but getting God of War III digitally? That’s just not something you’ll be seeing anytime soon.”