SONY FINALLY GETS IT’S OWN COMPANY BLOG

Yes Virginia, it appears that Sony finally got the message that they needed to join the rest of us in here in the 21st century. After numerous complaints by just about everyone regarding Sony’s lack of communication with it’s customers, the company has finally opened a corporate blog for the PlayStation line of products. It’s about damn time too.

While the opening posts of the blog seem to show that Sony finally gets it – that they finally understand that they can’t just dictate to people what they’re going to want and that they need to keep their customers up to date on what’s going on with the PlayStation Network and PlayStation Store, the real question here is whether or not Sony truly understands the market and plans on embracing the blog concept, or if they’re just trying to appear “hip” once more.

If they can keep the relative candor shown in the introductory post and avoid making any more ridiculous claims, as the early posts and quote below show they at least are making an attempt at doing, than this could be an excellent start for Sony as far as turning things around for the PlayStation 3. If it is just another lame publicity stunt, you can probably expect it to eventually backfire as badly as the “All I want for Christmas is a PSP” viral campaign did. That, my friends, would be a damn shame.

“It’s with enthusiasm, eagerness and, honestly, a little bit of relief that we lift the cover on our first official Sony Computer Entertainment America company blog – welcome and sorry for the wait.

PlayStation.Blog is a bit of work in progress, we see it as a place where we can share with you our company’s collective insights, opinions and perspectives on all things related to SCEA, PlayStation and the industry we play in.

At the moment, we’re thinking about sharing all sorts of things here, ranging from product news and title announcements to developer updates and industry opinion posts – all of which will come straight from the people here inside SCEA who are working, thinking and playing with this stuff every day. Look to the categories on the sidebar for some initial thoughts we have on future post themes.

Now, what we’ve learned, perhaps the hard way, is that a blog like this is really about you and the things you want to hear, share and discuss with us. With that in mind, you’ll notice that comments are enabled – and encouraged – so tell us what you want to see here and we’ll do our best to make it happen. And yes, like most blogs, we have a comment policy, please just keep this in mind when you’re leaving a comment.

We imagine it may take us a short while to find our pace with this, but bear with us as we get underway and we promise we’ll quickly make this blog a valuable stop in your daily info hunt for PlayStation news.

Like we’ve said, we’re excited to finally have a platform for conversation and connection. Much more is in the works too, so we hope you’ll consider sticking around, kicking the tires of our shiny new blog and sharing what you think. – Patrick Seybold, Senior Manager – Public Relations, SCEA

Welcome to the blogosphere Sony, I’m looking forward to having an easier time getting a hold of PlayStation news to report.

• PlayStation.blog – Official SCEA PlayStation blog
• PlayStation.com – Official PlayStation website
• Welcome, You’ve Been Waiting – PlayStation.blog
• Sony: PSP Viral Campaign “Poorly Executed” – Next Generation

GEARS OF WAR DESIGN TEAM BLOGS

Yup, more Gears news, because once you get me going about it, I just can’t stop. The official Gears of War website has been updated with a set of links to the personal blogs of several members of the design team. I’ll be looking over all those sites in the coming days to see if I can find any more juicy tidbits about just what we can expect come Emergence Day. Check it out here.