Qore

~ the goodbye ~

Qore was North America only at the store layer, which is the kind of border a Turkish PlayStation account ran into constantly in those years. The store you got was the one attached to your region, and a program sold as a monthly download on the American one did not exist anywhere else. I was twenty-four when Qore launched, well inside its audience by age and by interest, with no way to buy a single episode of it.

What it was: a subscription video magazine you downloaded to a PlayStation 3. Sony announced it on 3 June 2008 and put the first episode on the store three days later, describing it as a highly interactive monthly lifestyle gaming program covering the world inside PlayStation. Future Publishing produced it, the same house behind PlayStation: The Official Magazine, so the format came from people who actually made magazines. Each episode carried 25 to 30 minutes of 720p video, previews and interviews and behind-the-scenes footage.

The money was $2.99 for a single episode or $24.99 for a run of thirteen, and when PlayStation Plus arrived in 2010 Qore came free with the subscription. Veronica Belmont and Audrey Cleo hosted the early years. Belmont announced on her blog on 19 October 2011 that she was stepping down, and Jesse Blaze Snider and Tiffany Smith took over for what turned out to be the final stretch.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what you were buying ~

The videos were the wrapper. The reason people subscribed was the Download Center, which handed annual subscribers playable betas, demos ahead of everybody else, PS1 classics and themes. Episode 1 in June 2008 carried a SOCOM: Confrontation beta invitation. Episode 3 had Resistance 2. Episode 6 got annual subscribers into the PlayStation Home closed beta, episode 12 into the Uncharted 2 beta, episode 16 into MAG.

That made the thing contentious from the day it was announced. A paid tier on PlayStation Network with exclusive access attached read to plenty of people as Sony quietly testing the Xbox Live Gold model on a console whose online service had always been free. The complaint was there in the June 2008 comment threads and it never fully went away.

~ the european sibling ~

Europe got its own version instead. FirstPlay launched for SCEE, weekly rather than monthly, and in July 2011 Sony announced it was ending with the 6 July episode, to be replaced by something built around the PlayStation Access events. So the European branch of this idea died nine months ahead of the American one.

~ the last episode ~

Number 47 went up on 10 April 2012. Sony's line, published with it on the PlayStation Blog, was that with this April episode Qore concludes its run on the PlayStation Network. No reason was attached. Across nearly four years it had covered more than 160 games, and the send-off was a download called Qore Ultimate Arcade, eleven mini-games pulled from across the series.

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