Sony Wants Gran Turismo to Become the MySpace for Auto Enthusiasts
By Chris on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 4:49 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Games, Gran Turismo, Sony, Sony
With Gran Turismo 5 Prologue now in gamers’ hands, Sony and Polyphony Digital have their sights set on really taking the online aspect of Gran Turismo to a whole new level. While online play was an important step forward, we’ve been playing Forza online for years. So what’s so different about their plan for Gran Turismo? How does social networking for car enthusiasts sound?
“Our goal is to become another medium for car companies, like magazines and TVs,” Taku Imasaki, the US senior producer for Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, told Reuters. “We’re the perfect game for that and ideally we could become the MySpace or Facebook for auto enthusiasts.”
I know a few friends who would love something like that, but I’m not sure how a social network could sustain itself on a single game system. If that was expanded to work on PCs, then they might be onto something, but it’ll really come down to execution and hoping that people aren’t suffering from social networking fatigue.
via GameDaily
I think this is a fundamentally flawed approach. PC’s are used for social networking. Consoles are used for playing games offline and online.
Even if the GT5 social network was expanded to work on PC’s it would then be competing with thousands of other auto-related forums and sites.
The thing that makes Facebook and MySpace work is the API that allows aggregation of all sorts of rubbish… er… content from anywhere.
I can’t see Sony being open to anything like that.
It probably won’t turn out like they wish it to be, but nonetheless it might make for a nice gaming community.
Just typical Sony PR spin off GT5 Prologue’s inevitable sales success, of which we’ll no doubt hear no end of soon.
If you look at a few facts (which some people are unaware of or are ignoring) it is obvious there will be some kind of auto enthusiast community built up around this game. It is being integrated into Home which exists purely for social networking and the social networking basics of your Home account will apparently be accessible through a PSP, mobile phone or PC.
What is this mythical Home you speak of?