Sony aims to feed Qore gamers with new online ‘zine

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Before there blogs, there were ‘zines: hip, small-circulation magazines that fans of all kinds of subjects created to share their writing and photos. In a new millennium version, Sony is introducing a multimedia Web ‘zine called ‘Qore’ on its PlayStation 3’s digital movie and music marketplace (we wrote about the service’s pending launch six weeks ago).

‘Qore,’ expected this month, will feature usual ‘zine fare such as news, previews and interviews. The monthly will also bring back a popular offering from the old ‘Official PlayStation Magazine’: early game demos and invites to the beta tests of some games. Many fans of the ‘PlayStation’ glossy subscribed simply to get the demo disc glued to the inside pages.

Before you give ‘Qore’ the snore, consider that it’s a tiny step toward Sony’s larger ambitions for the next generation of entertainment. Like the demo disc, CDs and DVDs could eventually be replaced by zeros and ones that stream through connected devices such as the PS3.

‘When you have a console connected to a network, the distribution via disc doesn’t make sense anymore,’ said Peter Dille, Sony’s senior vice president of marketing for PlayStation Network. ‘It’s expensive. We wanted to move past that paradigm. ‘Qore’ is a shift away from the demo disc mentality. This is one of several things we’re doing to enhance the PS3 network. This is just the tip of the iceberg.’

Sony, which has sold 12.8 million PS3s worldwide, is playing catch-up to Microsoft. The maker of the Xbox 360 game console, aka the digital media Trojan Horse, already has more than 350 movies for rent and 5,000 episodes of TV shows for sale on its Xbox Live network. That makes it one of the top 10 purveyors of video-on-demand in the country. Sony, of course, has a few advantages over Microsoft, namely its movie studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and a half-ownership of the Sony BMG music label.

-- Alex Pham

Image courtesy of Sony