Sony's president confirmed a November release for the PlayStation 3 and said the company is also committed to a simultaneous worldwide launch of the PS3 in Japan, the rest of Asia, North America, Europe and Australia.

SCE President Phil Harrison told an audience at the Game Developers Conference here that Sony will produce about a million PS3s per month and capacity will ramp up quickly.

The platform will be an ecosystem similar to Microsoft's Xbox Live. It will allow players to play against each other online, as well as communicate via text and video chat.

Harrison said, the network platform will be the center of "wheel of fortune"- a collection of revenue producers that will include mobile games, incremental sales of game objects, merchandising, packaged games, network sales, in-game ads, subscriptions, and episodic content that could include audio or video of any kind.

One of the most exciting things about the network platform will be how it enables players and users to interact with each other as if in a traditional social network. Members of the network would be able to chat, create friends lists and do other social networking activities.

Community members would be able to create their own content for uploading and selling to the larger community, something that could turn the network into an open-ended marketplace similar to what exists for in-game weapons, clothing, buildings and vehicles in online games like "EverQuest," "Second Life" and others.

"The power of the network is the construct of the people in that network," Harrison said. What makes services like Amazon and eBay powerful is consumers, as well as the owners of the platform creating content "and we (plan) exactly the same metaphor."

Source: News.com and SJMN