Sony registers PlayStationArc domain

By Robert Purchese Published 25 January, 2010

Expecting heavy rain?

Who built the Arc? Sony, apparently - the company has just been revealed as the owner of PlayStationArc.com.

VGChartz made the discovery, and found that Sony acquired the domain on 6th October 2009. Dun dun dun.

However, Sony does not own www.ps3arc.com - a website depicting the PS3 wand, autumn release date and promise of a "Kownage Expansion Pack", which sounds suspicious.

Arc is of course the rumoured name of Sony's motion-sensing PS3 wand, which was delayed recently from a spring 2010 release and moved to an autumn launch.

With GDC in March and E3 this summer, there are two golden opportunities for a big-splash name reveal. Whether Microsoft has had the same idea for codename Natal, we'll have to wait and see.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (23) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • MORZTAN #1 2 years ago

    You are lacking a "dun".

    Man, that name is boring and un-casual...

  • kangarootoo #2 2 years ago

    After a while, the name won't mean anything. Eventually it just becomes a word that means the thing we are talking about. We all got over the Wii name in the end didn't we.

  • GamesConnoisseur #3 2 years ago

    Yes re Wii, still Arc doesn't sit well with range of Sony's product in my view. Seemed whatever company or department they uses for the name could have done better!

  • MORZTAN #4 2 years ago

    @ kangarootoo
    Wii was also a name that shook up a lot of publicity and HUGE arguments across the boards. It still is an amazingly cool name.

    Arc is already "bleh"...

  • Doctor_What #5 2 years ago

    Wii. *snigger*

  • schematik #6 2 years ago

    God almighty. Motion controls should be so much better. Nintendo have a gimped system and now Sony and MS bring out controllers with no joystick and in MS case no buttons!!! They are going to be games even more casual than the wii offerings!

    Would it hurt to put a few more buttons and a dpad or analog stick on the wand Sony? that way if good developers want to we can get some decent games? as for Natal... gawd I am sure it will see buckets to the KMart shoppers

  • DrDamn #7 2 years ago

    Ah PlaystationArc eh? Well it would have to be with "someone" else already having a controller with the TM on Arc ... guess who.

    @Schematik
    I don't think Sony have released the finished design of the Arc yet have they? So availability of a joystick is still unknown.

  • penhalion #8 2 years ago

    @kangarootoo

    I thought we had all simply accepted that Wii was indeed an piss poor excuse for a next gen console and realised the name was entirely appropriate.

  • drumbaby #9 2 years ago

    "Would it hurt to put a few more buttons and a dpad or analog stick on the wand Sony? that way if good developers want to we can get some decent games? as for Natal... gawd I am sure it will see buckets to the KMart shoppers "

    Casual gamers get what they deserve. If you want to play a decent game then just use a standard controller...it's been keeping actual gamers happy for decades now.

  • solidSnake04 #10 2 years ago

    I like NATAL. wouldnt mind they keeping the name...interestingly, in Portuguese NATAL == Christmas.
    hmmm now i dont know if i like it more or less :p
    Edited by 1 at 25/01/10 @ 12:28

  • kangarootoo #11 2 years ago

    @MORTZAN

    "It still is an amazingly cool name."

    I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that one. To me, its no cooler a name than Milk or Clouds. Its just a word that means Nintendo's home console.

    However, your drmatic suggestion that Arc is "bleh" (rather than just sounding benign) suggests you were never feeling that objective about it anyway ;)

  • kangarootoo #12 2 years ago

    @drumbaby

    "Casual gamers get what they deserve. If you want to play a decent game then just use a standard controller...it's been keeping actual gamers happy for decades now."

    Yeah, like on the Atari 2600, the console which changed the face of home video gaming forever. Which as we all know has 1 button.... oh.

  • MORZTAN #13 2 years ago

    @kangarootoo

    I am trying to look at it objectively. I seriously don't see this name is something the casual will "get". And believe me, the casuals are what Sony is after. The hardcore have abandonen the Wii because of the focus on motion technology, so Sony sure as hell doesn't have them in mind (forgive me for using the casual/hardcore descriptions, but they are getting more and more relevant)

    Arc is, in my humble opinion, a terrible name for something aimed at casuals/mainstreamers.

  • kangarootoo #14 2 years ago

    @MORZTAN

    Ok, my dig about objectivity was a bit cheeky :)

    I'm honestly not convinced a name is really that important. What really counts is "the message" (to use feeble marketing terms). Your message is the picture you portray when you describe the product to the customer.

    Those Wii adverts with happy looking families having fun, or with celebrities we recognise improving their mind, or with Ant and Dec challenging people to a round of "shakey rabbit strangle"... it is the scene that is the message, that is what the mainstream "get". Not the name of the console.

    I know Nintendo told us that Wii symbolised "we" as in, "all of us together"... but we all know that is marketing waffle. They could just as well have called it "Tog" or "Crowd", and once we had chuckled a bit, we would have forgotten all about it.

    I agree on on the face of it, Arc seems like a more techy less friendly name than Wii, but that never stopped the DS being on the shopping list of every 40 something Xmas before last. Turht be told, Sony's pitch probably does lean more toward the hardcore than Ninty's, but I don't think the name is part of that plan (even if perhaps they think it is).

  • ignatiusjreilly #15 2 years ago

    Nintendo will have spent a lot of money on that "Wii" name, just like Microsoft would have done coming up with "360" or Sony with "Bravia". People and press like to think that money is all wasted, but that simply isn't true.

    Brand names do matter, and they matter a lot if you want your business to be successful.

  • sneetch #16 2 years ago

    @farticusmaximus

    Well, I do drink a lot more Cif than I used to when it was called Jif. ;) You're probably right about the mid-cycle changes being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things but I'm not sure it's quite the same thing, this is just Sony adding a product called Arc to the PS3 rather than them replacing the PS3 name with Arc. On the whole Wii vs Arc thing, I personally thought the switch from Revolution to Wii was a terrible idea, now I couldn't care less.

    I've also "abandoned" the Wii because of the games not the motion controllers (although I haven't actually abandoned it, I'm keeping mine for Mario Galaxy 2 and other games by Nintendo but I don't tend to buy third party games on it).

  • ignatiusjreilly #17 2 years ago

    Remember the disasters that were Coco Pops to Choco Krispies, or Royal Mail to Consignia?

    If not, it's probably because they went so badly they changed the names back again.

    [link url=http: //news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2002480.stm
    ]http://ne ws.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2002...[/link]

    From Wikipedia re: Marathon/Snickers:

    "In the UK and Ireland, it was originally sold under the name Marathon. Mars standardized many of its global brand names and the name was changed to Snickers in 1990. For 18 months before the name changed, the words "Internationally known as Snickers" were printed on the side of the Marathon wrapper. Following the name change, the bar moved from being Britain's ninth most popular bar to the third most popular."
    Edited by 1 at 25/01/10 @ 16:07

  • kangarootoo #18 2 years ago

    @ignatiusjreilly

    I'm sure you can get a name badly wrong (calling the Arc controller "Space Knob" would probably cause an instafail), but I don't believe that one tolerable name is any better than another. Equally, if "the message" is bad a great name won't save your product.

    I agree that BRANDING is hugely important and if done well is worth the dosh piles that get spent on it, but I don't agree that a brand name is a crucial part of that branding process. "A picture tells a thousand words" I believe the saying goes?

    Look at speech writing, 70% how you look, 20% how you sound, 10% what you say. The Wii is a great example. If the name actually mattered, and if all the jokes about the name really mattered, it would have died on its ass. NOBODY in Europe or the US thought that was a good name when they first heard it. But the product was strong, the brand was even stronger, and in the end the name didn't matter (in fact in the end, the strength of the brand actually changed the mind of people on the name, who now mysterious think it is a great name even though they mocked it months back).

  • kangarootoo #19 2 years ago

    @ignatiusjreilly

    "Remember the disasters that were Coco Pops to Choco Krispies, or Royal Mail to Consignia?"

    That is a completely different subject. Those brands didn't fail because they chose a bad name, they failed because all of the work done previously to build up a brand was no longer ASSOCIATED with their product.

    Marathon became the top selling chocolate bar it was because of a very good branding campaign ran over many years. Writing "the artist formerly known as" on the side of the wrapper is not even remotely in the same league, so of course the product sales declined.

    It is wholly unsafe top assume that any of the products you referenced failed because the new name was worse than the original name. My entire point that the name eventually just becomes "the word that means product X" is EXACTLY the reason those products suffered when the name was changed. It was not the quality of the replacement word that was at fault, it was simply the fact it had been changed without a huge rebranding campaign to follow it.


    "If not, it's probably because they went so badly they changed the names back again."

    Again I feel this makes my point. If I had remembered all of those names, you could assume the names themselves were at fault. That many people DON'T remember the names shows the problem was with how the renaming was publicised, not with choice of words.
    Edited by 1 at 25/01/10 @ 16:19

  • ignatiusjreilly #20 2 years ago

    OK, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

    Every word and sound in the English (or any other language) has connatations and signifiers, and subconsciously those words bring images and feelings to us when we hear them. Any successful brand name should take advantage of that.

    As a very basic example, "X" has connatations of uniqueness, stretching limits, pushing hard - which is why we have so many technology products ending in X, plus the X-Games and of course the Xbox.

    I also don't think it's escaped the marketing guys at MS that the word Natal (even if just a code name) connotes birth, while they are selling Natal as a new type of gaming being born.
    Edited by 1 at 25/01/10 @ 16:25

  • kangarootoo #21 2 years ago

    I'm really not shifting on this one am I, stubborn bugger :)

  • ReaperOscuro #22 2 years ago

    YOU FOOLS SONY IS RE-CREATING THE ARC AND THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR AND WE WILL ONLY LIVE IF WE SIGN UP ON THE WEBSITE OMGDS NOOOOOOO!!!

    I preferred Sphere and Gem, or even better, Blip, or..or...Squiggy!!

    As said it hardly depends the name so lets stop being Anal(tm): if Wii can take off as a name, anything can.

  • shadow1979 #23 2 years ago

    Oh Eurogamer, why do you torture me with sublime heavy rain references.. You probably have the review copy don't you?? DON'T YOoouuhooo??!! Eeeeeeh!!