I am not sure if this was a waste of money, or a sign of my further movement towards the center of the mass market gaming world, but I decided to pick up a Qore subscription ($24.99). Since the PSN subscription currently starts with episode 2, I had to pick up the first one as well ($2.99). I am such a whore.
I am not going to touch on Volume 1 right now (its currently downloading … very slowly downloading), but you can check out PS3 Fanboy for a run down on what is what with the first episode.
This article does not speak favorably about Volume 2 (or for that matter Qore).
“So what can I say about Qore? it’s a bunch of crappy interviews(it’s been a long time since i’ve seen such badly done interviews. really) and it forces you to watch trailers that you probably don’t care about. This is the 3$ i regret wasting the most. If you have 3$ just lying around and don’t know what to do with it, don’t even consider getting a volume of Qore, throwing the money in the sewers would be a much better investment.”
Ouch! That is a pretty damning indictment. At this point it is hard for me to say if Qore is that bad (from a content point of view). I do think the author is being a little harsh. Here are my random impressions.
- You can skip the Hellboy II trailer at any point. Not sure WTF the ScrewAttack dude is fusing about.
- Same for the Veronica Belmont trailer. She is cute; probably a good choice for horny teenagers (or older perverted males).
- Resistance 2 – four videos, an art gallery, and a downloadable theme. This one is sponsored by Monstor Madness: Grave Danger (and you can skip the ad, complete with movie and photo gallery). I did not make it too far with the first Resistance, so this feature set was not very useful to me. Interesting at best.
- Silent Hill: Homecoming – two videos, and an art gallery. This feature is sponsored by a Meta Gear Solid 4 video.
- Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm – two videos, an art gallery, and an exclusive demo. The game looks very pretty, but is not really my cup of tea.
- Madden 09 – random video about how great Madden is, and an art gallery featuring 20 years of Madden covers. I suck; I buy Madden every year.
- Download Center includes an exclusive Naruto Demo, Resistance 2 Theme, and Calling All Cars (the full game for Qore annual subscribers). This section is sponsored by Burger King.
So all of this begs a few questions …
First, how “exclusive” are the Qore demos (in this case Naruto). My guess is that they will be released after the next issue of Qore drops (i.e. 4 weeks exclusive to Qore).
Second, are we going down the path of having to pay for demos and more content? It sure looks like I just did, albeit, I had no idea what Qore was all about before I decided to throw it in my shopping cart.
Third, is Qore really worth the money? Verdict is still out. I was not planning on picking up Calling All Cars ($9.99); maybe future games (that I have yet to purchase) will also be included.
I am not really sure how Sony plans to push content towards Qore. Will publishers start paying for exclusive rights to get content on each month’s edition? My guess is yes. If Sony can get sponsors (i.e. Burger King) to offset the cost of producing Qore, and they can get third party publishers to pay for the privilege of including videos, the Sony marketing machine will have a nice little victory. Dumb nuts like me willingly fork over money for this stuff.
Is Sony really in this for the long haul? In other words, are they really committed to Qore? It is too soon to say. Right now Sony seems to be all over the map. Should they focus on getting firmware updates out the door? Or maybe finally releasing Home? Or how about more games for PSN? My guess is Qore will become the mechanism for pushing additional content to PSN.
How will Sony position Qore against the Official PlayStation Magazine? Why not give print edition subscribers free access to Qore? Or maybe it means that Sony is not very dedicated to the magazine. With Sony, who really knows WTF the powers that be are thinking.
OK, enough about Qore. For now. More to come later as we see how this Qore thing shakes out.
