Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.