Sony, Microsoft mixed on console-PC cooperation

Ben Berkowitz

LOS ANGELES: The console gaming arm of Microsoft Corp. will make use of

online facilities established by the company's PC gaming arm, while Sony's

console games group will do it alone in online gaming, the two companies said on

Friday.

In separate interviews on the last day of the game industry's annual trade

show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, executives of the two companies

also said online console gaming would not eat into the established PC online

business.

Representatives from Sony Computer Entertainment of America, which runs Sony

Corp.'s PlayStation 2 business in the US, met with engineers from Sony Online

Entertainment, a separate division, but decided to use their own resources for

the PS2's upcoming online offerings, according to Scott McDaniel, vice president

of marketing at Sony Online.

SCEA will release an adapter in late August to enable online play for the

PS2, allowing publishers to operate their own networks for each individual game,

rather than having one large, closed network for the entire service. That model

is the one being used by Microsoft for "Xbox Live," their online

gaming initiative launching this fall.

Stuart Moulder, general manager of Microsoft's PC games division, said the

designers of Xbox Live were working with the PC game division to incorporate

elements of the PC online services into the new console platform. Moulder said

nearly 30 million people have registered for "The Zone," the online

game service on Microsoft's MSN portal, and that the developers of the console

network were taking advantage of that experience.

But despite the growing anticipation for online console gaming, both

executives said their business was as strong as ever. "The content is still

in demand," McDaniel said. Moulder said Microsoft's PC division expects

double-digit percentage growth in its business this year.

"I don't think it's going to cannibalize or mitigate growth,"

McDaniel added, noting that Sony's flagship online game, "EverQuest,"

has grown to 430,000 paying subscribers. According to a survey released this

week by the Interactive Digital Software Association, the video game industry's

trade group, 31 per cent of frequent game players play online, with one-third of

those people preferring online play to offline.