In his keynote speech at GDC Europe, SCEE's head honcho confirmed to the gaming press that Sony wants to keep the publishers and developers in charge of the commercial possibilities with their next-generation console's online structure.
He was quoted by Next-gen.biz as saying, "We want to provide an open platform wherever possible. We want to create a platform on which publishers can exploit their services. We are happy for publishers to form their own commercial relationships directly with the consumer."
Clearly an indication that Sony wants to create their own way with things and keep it distinct from their competitors[read Microsoft]. When asked to comment about Xbox Live's success over PS2's online, he pointed out that Sony is also working towards making PS3 have significant online capabilities while maintaining an 'open-platform'.
The keynote started with Harrison calling for developers to follow a trend similar to TV where he emphasized, "We should begin to move away from putting 20 hours of content onto a disk and move towards a more episodic model. Games should become more like a soap opera, not in terms of plot but in terms of how the experience changes dynamically over time."
Some other important highlights of the keynote include Harrison admitting that Sony had presumed middleware support for PS2 to appear with time, which never happened. In contrast, he explained that PS3 SDK will include high-level middleware such as Ageia's Novodex, Havok and Epic's acclaimed Unreal Engine 3 and thousands of libraries to be available for developers by the end of this year.