Those waiting for a taste of God of War III before the year ends may have to make do with the God of War I & II Blu-ray compilation to get their fix. According to John Hight, the director of production development at Sony’s Santa Monica Studio, it's unlikely that a God of War III demo would be included in the compilation due out later this year.

If you frequent the PlayStation Network Store, don't be surprised when you suddenly find it's gone through a makeover in the next few weeks. SCEA's director of product development John Hight revealed this and other interesting pieces of info which you can read about in the full article.

 SCEA's John High was grabbed for an interview recently to give his two cents on the PlayStation 3's growing PSN service. Among other details, Hight explained PSN's apparent lack of game demos, and their plans for this 2008. The Interview details are readable over in the full article.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) director John Hight announced episodic content for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) in the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). A little background on Mr. Hight: He is responsible for some of the big changes in Sony such as the Santa Monica Sony team that produced the first PlayStation Network game BlastFactor and signing thatgamecompany which developed the game flOw.

The release of these episodic content is slated for this year around mid-summer. There are no announcements regarding what the games will be although John Hight has hinted that some will be more like interactive TV while other releases will be taking existing content and spreading it out a bit. In the end, he also mentioned the fact that some fairly small games which will become available in the future may have hundreds of hours of play. This sounds like more value for your money if they can pull it off.

This move is also like a direct challenge to the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). It might be that SCEA is looking to break the stranglehold that Microsoft has had in the online console gaming market. Whether this will be a success or not depends on the quality of the releases. If it does take off, we can expect Microsoft to strike back with new innovations. Thus, the console wars continue.

John Hight, director of external development at Sony's Santa Monica studio recently said this interesting bit:

Sony's third party publishers will undoubtedly provide updated versions of classic arcade games.

He said this during an interview at FiringSquad. Of course don't expect Sony to have the initiative to get people to put their arcade classics on their Network. You see, in the same interview he also says this:

First party development wants stylish games that are fun. Our goal is to provide gamers with cool experiences that they’ve never seen before.

Of course they're giving third party people lots of incentives to develop for the PS3, for one thing they've got a huge 500MB download limit at the end of their fishing poles. It seems that they're making an effort at welcoming third party devs when they are developing downloadable games for the PS3, this despite the recent rumors about them being a bit too greedy.

If you've got a good concept for a downloadable game that you'd want to let people download on the PlayStation Store, Hight gave these instructions for you to follow (yes we're repeating this quote just because some of you may be sick already of "bad" news regarding the PS3):

Register on our site www.playstation.com/beyond. We’re looking for teams that have good ideas for games. Again, we want fresh new concepts – some aspects may be found in other games and genres but the core game experience should be unique. Games should be easy to pick up and play – we don’t ship a manual!

Now if only they'd hurry with coming up with a firmware update that allows you to download while playing.

Okay, Sony Computer Entertainment's John Hight tells FiringSquad, there are no plans for pre-PSOne retro on the PS3 (a la Virtual Console on the Wii). On the other hand, he says that unlike Live Arcade's 50MB download file limit (because of the Memory Card), Sony's "arbitrarily" set the DL limit to 500MB gulps.

Excellent, especially if those rumors surrounding downloadable Killzone expansions turn out to be true.

Here's another interesting aspect of PS3 downloads John tells Firing - although it raises a few unanswered questions. Players can transfer the downloaded games to up to five PS3s. "Our customers don’t always stay in one spot – they’re on the move." Cool, but like we said, a few unanswered questions. Exactly what does this mean? Do we copy the game to the five other PS3s or are we allowed to move the file from one PS3 to another, which is another thing entirely?

If you're an indie games developer, or belong to a rather professional dev outfit, this would be a very good time to take notes. Says John,

Register on our site www.playstation.com/beyond. We’re looking for teams that have good ideas for games. Again, we want fresh new concepts – some aspects may be found in other games and genres but the core game experience should be unique. Games should be easy to pick up and play – we don’t ship a manual!

Maybe a help/instructions page before game's start, then? Something else to take note of: when FiringSquad asked John if Sony would have their equivalent to Microsoft's XNA kits, John replied, "Nothing official." Which means we don't know what, or if there are any, integrated development kits for indie developers to use to create those up-to-500MB downloadable games.