Sony Finally Looking to Kick Off “Game 3.0″ Later This Year

You may have heard of the term “Game 3.0″ (not to be confused with web 2.0, and the thousands of people claiming any website that’s shiny to adhere to the principles of web 2.0) because it was a big talking point for Phil Harrison at GDC last year. The idea is centered around games focusing on the community, which is demonstrated with two of Sony’s major projects, Home and LittleBigPlanet.

But Sony is looking to start explore more avenues for Game 3.0 by opening up a number of community websites for first party PS3 games. LittleBigPlanet, Killzone 2, SOCOM: Confrontation, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift and Resistance 2 should all be seeing community websites of some sort. Or, in the case of some of those games, their existing websites will be fleshed out to follow in the steps of some Microsoft games, like Halo 2/3 with Bungie.net and Forza Motorsport 2 with ForzaMotorsport.net.

Joystiq’s Chris Grant was in attendance at a pre-E3 event of Sony’s where some of the plans for the aforementioned games were uncovered:

• LittleBigPlanet – While they’re “not decided yet” on exactly how to integrate the game into a community website, if any mechanic seems ripe for such a project, rankings and stats for LBP’s user-generated content seem like a sure bet.
• Killzone 2 – There already is a my.killzone.com site for Killzone: Liberation, but adding “rankings and statistics” for Killzone 2 is the plan.
• SOCOM: Confrontation – They plan on launching a community site – think “My SOCOM” – on SOCOM.com. There’s nothing there now, and MySOCOM.com is taken.
• MotorStorm: Pacific Rift – The MotorStorm representative wasn’t very interested in providing any details, but she told us that they would have a “community website” as well.
• Resistance 2 – Insomniac has perhaps the most ambitious plans for community content, dedicating an entire development team to the task. They’re “overhauling” MyResistance.net, adding things along the lines of “facebook-like features.”

Personally, while I love the idea behind these things — I used to be on Bungie.net all the time when I was a hardcore Halo player — it just becomes tiresome when you’ve got a dozen different sites tracking different things with different friends lists…

It’s social networking fatigue; there’s no doubt about that. And I won’t deny that the idea of a single website tracking all of my videogame doings is a pipe dream at this point, but I suppose this only becomes more of a problem when you actually choose to participate in all of these different websites, but I just can’t help myself.