Multi |
by Serban Stokker |
25th January 2007 |
What do you do when you make a console - let's call it "PS3" - that's so expensive, and requires such huge game development investments, that most studios would spit you in the face and go back to making silly Wii games? Easy: you spit them back and make your own games! That's what Sony plans on doing, even more than before (except for the spitting part). Together with fellow Japanese powerhouse Namco Bandai, they are forming a new studio called Cellius, catchingly named after the PlayStation 3's Cell chip.
According to a report on
Bloomberg, Namco Bandai will own 51% of Cellius, with Sony holding the other 49%, and
Joystiq also says that the initial investment jointly made by the two companies is valued at approximately $824,000. The date that Cellius opens for business is currently planned for March 6 of this year.
At that time, the studio is expected to start working not only on PS3 games, but also on content for mobile phones and personal computers, as well as "interactive entertainment" and "business contents", making full use of the Cell chip - which has cost Sony and its partners (IBM and Toshiba) some $1.65 billion to develop.
The Cell chip - and now by extension Cellius - should help Sony combat its rivals Microsoft and Apple in more than just video games. The report also mentions the so-called "digital home", a future network linking televisions, music players, game consoles and other appliances to the Internet, something that all three companies are currently striving to control.
That will be Sony's job. Namco Bandai's job, on the other hand, will be to be bring in the games. They already hold last year's best-selling PS3 games in Japan (Ridge Racer 7 and Mobile Suit Gundam), as well as other big franchises such as Tekken and Ace Combat, so we're instinctively curious to see what this deal will bring us gamers.
Last, but not least, the new company's chairman will be none other than Ken Kutaragi, "the father of the PlayStation", who stopped acting as president of Sony Computer Entertainment after
the whole Sony management reshuffling from last November. A-ha! So there really
was something big going on behind the scenes, after all.
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