Nordic Game: PS3 SingStar inspired by "mass customisation", says Bozek

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

"We are on the cusp of a big shift in media consumption and media production," said Bozek, who is executive producer and game director for the franchise. "We are already living and working in these kinds of conditions and this will permeate our work even further."

Her speech, 'My Everything: From playlists to profiles and virtual worlds, mass customisation and explosion of choice and creativity', 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 showed "the coolest powerpoint in the world" to the audience in Malmo, Sweden, flashing up brands such as Second Life, PlayStation Home, NikeiD, iPod, Starbucks, Facebook, EA's Tiger Woods, and Media Molecule's recently announced PlayStation 3 community game, Little Big Planet. She spoke at length about the âunbundlingâ of content for users before showing off the new 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,â she said. âThis is a community platform for SingStar fans to upload photos and video and audio to share with friends."

SingStore was shown working, while Bozek laboured the point 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 Eyeds Peas and Atomic by Blondie running on SingStore, flicking through tracks by Cindy Lauper, Destiny's Chield, KT Tunstall and Gwen Stafani.

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

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