SingStar producer talks customisation

Speaking in her keynote at this morning's Nordic Game conference, Sony's Paulina Bozek focused on "mass customisation" and how current trends have influenced the development of the PS3 instalment in the SingStar series, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.

Bozek, executive producer and game director for the SingStar franchise, also revealed that no fewer than 350 songs will be available for the game at launch. Her speech focused on the importance of allowing huge amounts of choice to users.

"There have been some big media shifts recently and the landscape of entertainment has changed," she said. "MySpace is really the new MTV. TV is online, music is digital, products are tools and players are becoming creators.

"Clearly there is some kind of a big shift going on. It's a new era of consumer participation."

Bozek namechecked brands like Second Life, NikeiD and Facebook as well as PS3's other community-gaming stars, Home and LittleBigPlanet, before showing SingStar in action.

"Our major innovations for the next gen platform are SingStore, which is an online store that allows players to create their own playlist by downloading songs of their choice, and My SingStar Online," she said. "This is a community platform for SingStar fans to upload photos and video and audio to share with friends."

SingStore was shown working, while Bozek pointed out that many SingStar users are not traditional gamers - so her team was careful to make buying tunes from the service as easy as possible, with the user never having to leave the game.

PS3 Singtar will launch with 350 songs, with more than 100 expected to be added every month. Bozek showed Shut Up by the Black Eyed Peas and Atomic by Blondie running on SingStore, flicking through tracks by Cindy Lauper, Destiny's Child, KT Tunstall and Gwen Stefani.

The game is "nearly finished," said Bozek, and will ship this summer, but she fell short of discussing pricing for downloading tracks.

"We're going to be announcing our pricing quite soon, but I can't announce it today," she said.