While PlayStation Home is Sony’s most hyped strategy when it comes to taking gaming into online and social networking space, there is a fluffier and comfortingly less big brother-esque service that is also due out on the PS3 in the near future. SingStar, a poster child of the late PS2 era, is looking nearly set to make its PS3 debut and will bring with it a host of new features, details of which have been emerging over recent months.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, SingStar for PS3 is going to combine the extremely popular singing game mechanic of the original (sensibly sticking to the tried and tested formula) with an online music store, SingStore, and a social networking website in the form of My SingStar Online. SingStore cleverly means that rather than choosing a boxed game with a selection of preset tracks, you can just browse for, preview and download the ones you like. Regular updates to the store mean that you don’t have to keep buying the discs, you can just check the monthly updates for new stuff you like.

Meanwhile, My SingStar Online, when combined with the PS3 Eye camera, allows users to record and upload their stellar performances to an online space as well as view and rate other users’ recordings.

From the demo we saw, presented by SIngStar’s producer Paulina Bozek, it all looked very technically impressive and without overcomplicating itself. Of course that was within the nice safe confines of a demo video in which all the sample video streaming loaded up instantaneously. It will be much more interesting to see how it really performs when you hook it up to a typically crappy broadband connection over Wi-Fi.

The popularity of so many other social networking sites like YouTube and FaceBook should mean that My SingStar Online is dead cert. But given that the opportunity for mischief is pretty huge, you can expect Sony to keep a close eye on the goings on, although we’re hoping it won’t be in a ‘we know where you live kind of way’.

The prospects for this game are therefore pretty huge. It combines all of the most popular elements of social play from the original game, user generated content mixed with influences from insanely popular musical TV shows like X Factor or American Idol, as well as the lucrative appeal of online music purchases a la iTunes. With all that Web 2.0 Game 3.0 and teeny bopper goodness mixed into one, it has got to be a winner - right?

Yet, there’s one thing that I think could be the undoing of this ambitious strategy – the price. Yes we’ve all been banging on about the PS3’s price tag for so long we’re almost getting bored of it. The fact is that a lot of the writers on this site have bought their own PS3s and I’m guessing a fair proportion of our readers have too. Clearly we’re not all that put off by the retail price. But then we’re all probably quite hard core gaming and/or home entertainment fans.

SingStar’s success came along long after the PS2’s launch, when the console was already much cheaper than its initial price. The leap from that to the current PS3 hardware is a huge one, and will need to be undertaken by more ‘casual’ gamers who are even less inclined to Pony up that amount of cash on hardware. The new SingStar may turn out to be the most impressive of the series so far, but it could still flop if it fails to coax its audience into making such a big financial outlay.

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