Sony talk about the future of SingStar

Community driving development

SingStar director Dave Ranyard has been talking at the Develop Conference about what the future holds for SingStar and how data provided by the community has helped point them in the right direction.

The most significant upcoming new feature announced was the arrival of a new Clubs mode thats set to allow budding Freddie Mercury's to group together according to interest. Raynard said that players will be able to join groups based on criteria such as high scores or an interest in publishing videos etc. There were also subtle hints about a revival of the career mode that was last seen back in the original PS2 SingStar, however this time with new online features.

The SingStar boss also talked about how the introduction of Playstation Eye support and the ability to upload video clips to the PS3 online community had proved more popular than Sony ever expected. The success of the video clips in particular has directly led to another new feature according to Raynard. "People want to buy the song after they've seen someone else singing it, so we know that we need to implement that feature into the video player"

There was also just enough time to comment on how Sony have coped with the increasing amount of competition in the music game genre, "We didn't really learn that much from Lips." said Raynard "We definitely analyse all competitors, and we've seen Rock Band and Guitar Hero enter our space. But all competition is healthy, as it brings more people to the genre."

By Paul Newcombe