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Sony Further Details Home, Looks to October Launch
njkid1 writes "According to GameDaily, new details have been revealed about the Home service for the PlayStation 3. Not only will the advertising possibilities be 'limitless,' but the virtual community will also be able to serve as a bustling commerce hub. Transactions will eventually be able to take place within Home itself, and the company refers to the possibility of ticketing for virtual events like developer chats or game previews. At the same time, however, Sony said that advertising will be made 'palatable' so as not to drive away users. A Q&A at the official Sony site states that an October launch is planned (pdf) for the service." GameDaily also has an article looking at reactions from Microsoft and Nintendo on Sony's announcement.
Everything Ive heard from Sony about this so far sounds like they are marketing it as an advertising vehicle. I hope it has something to offer the players.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
... that the advertising possibilities are limitless. After all, that's why people buy the system, right? To be served unique and novel advertisements?
Why is it so damn hard to just make a simple universal lobby/game-connectivity center within a console? I don't have to join some idiotic twelve-year-old-girl's fantasy three-dimensional The Sims world to jump into a game of CounterStrike or Civilization IV on my PC. Why do I have to do that on my consoles? This is seriously one of the most retarded ideas ever and it would cause me to lean toward turning on my 360 instead of my PS3 when I sit down on the sofa for a bit of gaming, just because I don't want to play "Second Life" just to get to my damned Company of Heroes.
Not only will the advertising possibilities be 'limitless,'
That does it for me right there. Sign me up!
This guy's the limit!
I don't understand how this is supposed to be appealing. It appears to be basically a Second Life ripoff, except they've taken out most of the customization ability and replaced it with the ability to purchase someone else's customizations (unless you have a developers license).
The whole idea of a "virtual community" sounds great on paper, but this looks like they're basically trying to create a virtual shopping mall. But if I want to shop online, I'll use google or amazon or something like that and find what I need a lot quicker. Why would I want to make my little avatar walk down some virtual hallway to get to the virtual store I want to virtually buy shit from? Isn't that just a waste of time? People need to stop trying to make "virtual communities" look like the real world, and start designing them to take advantage of the strengths the online world has over the real world.
Sony wants this to be a new and revolutionary vehicle for advertising. But for advertising to be effective, you need people to look at the advertisements. If all people get from this is a place to go look at advertisements, they won't stick around for very long. And giving them some private "apartment" where they can change the color of the walls just isn't going to hold anyone's interest for long.
Maybe it is just me, but I had to read that headline five times before it made sense. Worse yet, it isn't even /.'s fault - the headline is straight from the article. Alex, may I buy a verb?
Sony is not a communist organization. They need to make money to keep the shareholders happy. If they want something to be free to their users, they have to pay for it somehow. Advertising is the most obvious way. I don't think I'll mind the adverts as long as the service remains free. And they really won't want to charge for a service that is so core to their console especially after they've pledged to keep it free. I bet the cost of operating HOME outweighs the cost of a low subscription fee ala XBox Live.
I think the fact that they're going to make it available on PSP and Mobile Devices like Cell Phones says that's it's less an advertising vehicle and more of an attempt to create a kind of Portal specifically for Sony products and worlds. It might even be possible for them to integrate this into their other electronics lines at some point, although televisions might defeat the purpose of a PS3 I guess...
This document wasn't made for public consumption, although neither the summary nor the linked article state this. It was designed to pitch HOME to Developers and Publishers of games (note that the document's URL is "Third Party Relations.pdf" and on the SCE Developers website). If you want to get a business to sign onto something, you have to show them how to make money. That explains the hyped advertising talk.
Shouldn't they just have delayed the PS3 launch till October, when the selling point of the game was released? Microsoft released the 360 before many headline games so that they would have the console marketshare. Would have been nice to have a reason to buy the PS3 when it came out, not a year later.
ads.sony.com -> 127.0.0.1
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why poo-poo something that's going to be free and optional? Don't like it? Don't have to use it.
Heck, item creation http://youtube.com/watch?v=a91ZzOMEwYY looks like it's going to be easy and fun. Here's another video in real-time: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nuoOosTdFiY
I just wanted to say that you should take the document with a grain of salt...it's obviously been handed over to the marketing department to sell the product.
I think you're kind of missing the point of the criticism. Nobody thinks Sony should not be allowed to make money. However, I, as a customer, don't care about whether they make money or not. It does not influence my decisions. I evaluate their product based on whether I enjoy it. If it's an ad-filled piece of marketing, I will avoid it.
Not because I hate the fact that Sony makes money, but because it simply does not appeal to me.
I pretty much agree with what you're writing.
When the Internet first started to become popular, people always expected things to become threedimensional. Boo.com allowed users to show 3D versions of their wares. VRML was supposed to replace HTML and turn the Internet into some kind of 3D cyberspace. Everyone thought file browsers would become 3D - remember Jurassic Park? Apple had this weird 3D web browser (I think it was called Soap or something). And Apple, always trying to be the innovator, even gave out CDs with virtual stores in them: You could walk through an Apple store, look at computers and talk to weird avatars. When creating online shops, customers always wanted to recreate their own real shops. "Can we have a 3D version of our shop where the user walks through the aisles and puts things into a virtual shopping cart?"
Guess what, that idea is broken. For games, 3D can add something to the experience. But if you actually want something done, like talking to somebody, or buying something, or joining a game, you need to have an interface that suits the device you're using. Namely, the TV. Your TV is 2D, not 3D. You wanna buy a book on amazon? You enter the title or author, and there it is. No need to walk through a 3D store and get lost because you ended up in the wrong section. Wanna chat with somebody? Click on their name in your chat app of choice and start typing. No need to walk through a 3D world, trying to find them. Wanna watch a movie? Hit youtube, enter what you like, click, watch. You don't want to go to a virtual cinema, figure out which room your movie is playing, and find a place where you can actually see the screen.
Don't reproduce the worst parts of real life in a computer interface!
Games can be 3D because the creator intentionally creates obstacles for the user. Gamers want to have "hard" interfaces. Otherwise, the game would not be fun (and even so, people complain about 3D jump-n-runs - timing jumps is much easier in 2D!). But if you actually want to get things done, 3D just gets in your way.
Home looks like the wet dream of a Sony executive right out of the early 90s. Maybe they invented the time machine or something, but I really thought we had finally figured out that 3D interfaces are not a good idea for most types of software.