Sony Clarifies Details About PS3 Home

Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog has a few new details on the future of the Home project, as gleaned from the ThreeSpeech website. Among the tidbits of information: they'll be rolling out the service slowly, ramping up the number of servers as gradually as possible. They're really looking to make money with this, via advertising and microtransactions. And they're not really worried about porn. "For instance, a casino or even somewhere you can go and see 18-rated trailers for games. That isn't anything particularly sinister, but obviously, you'd have to prevent 12-year-olds going in there. Obviously, there are other 18-plus areas that you could imagine, but some of those might not come to fruition."

Comments

Never happen

[Reason58]

Areas requiring the user to be 18 will earn this game an AO rating. It will never happen.

Re:Never happen

[DrXym]

Areas requiring the user to be 18 will earn this game an AO rating. It will never happen.

I see plenty of AO content every time I browse the internet. Some sites, including game sites ask my age everytime I view a clip. If they can exist without a rating, why do you assume that some Sony service cannot. Especially when it proactively attempts to enforce age restrictions unlike most websites.

Re:Never happen

[ucblockhead]

It's not a game and will thus not be rated at all.

Re:Never happen

[king-manic]

Areas requiring the user to be 18 will earn this game an AO rating. It will never happen.

The reason why AO games don't occur is because big box stores like Walmart/Best buy have taken it upon themselves to act as a moral agent of their customers and limit more controversial content. Doing so proactively to avoid hassles with their predominantly older and more conservative customer base. Sony's online store is currently and likely permanently populated by a younger more liberal crowd (all 6 of us). They may be able to get away with adult content with ID tied to credit card or some other verification method (you must be 18 for a credit card so user with a registered one is fine. )

Re:Never happen

[Conception]

Actually, if you've never seen it before, they'll just do what every other game that touches the net does:

ESRB Notice: Game Experience May Change During Online Play

Re:Never happen

[DrXym]

It sounds like you've identified a far more broken model than Sony. It's not unreasonable to think that Sony could proactively enforce 18+ by requiring the person to hold a PSN account that has made at least 1 credit card transaction. They could even require a user to enter some nominal transaction such as 1c to enter a site for the first time. While it isn't impossible for some kid to have faked their parent's credit card details, I think Sony would have a reasonable defence if they they were sued because because of it.

After all, how is it any different from any other adult pay service on the web?

Re:Never happen

[DrXym]

PSN doesn't require a credit card on every account. You can have a master account (the parent's account) that can add funds to sub accounts (the kids). So even if Home had micro transactions, there is no need for a kid to have a credit card to use it. Sub accounts can also be age restricted by the master account so that they can't play inappropriate content, whether it is games, movies or (I assume) Home zones. So it's really about parental responsibility.

Re:Never happen

[Seumas]

It's sad that at the age of 30, I am still forced by industry and society to have the content and entertainment I consume dumbed down to the acceptability level of a fourth grade child.

Home Just Keeps Getting Better And Better

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people are just grasping how long and how extensive Home is. Sony says they have been working on Home since the start of the PS2 development and if you go back and read interviews over the past 5-7 years you can actually see them talking about what would later be called Home. It's funny to see some of the reactions people had to Sony's 'crazy online world talk'.

The amount of effort must be staggering when you look at Home and the roadmap Sony has talked about for the PS3 over the next five years. Home is built on or will implement:

* The base MMORPG engine - the basis for home for world rendering, avatar management, and all the other things that every game like EQ and WoW implement for allowing people to exist in a virtual world

* The video streaming technology - I believe Sony bought a video streaming company some time back. In home videos are streaming all over the place. Both from Sony's servers and in PS3 owner's personal video collection.

* The whole avatar customization tech Sony has so far is the most extensive I've seen - it is weird to be able to make avatars that look exactly like you or see your friends actually running around in a virtual world

* All of the social games they have and will be adding to Home - bowling, video game cabinets, pool just to start. Tons more sound like they are planned ahead

* The party system for meeting people inside of Home and then all being able to jump into a multiplayer PS3 game together and then all return to the same spot in Home.

* The support for game companies(and actually anyone) to create custom spaces. All you need is a copy of Maya and the Sony Home export tools to create your company's own space inside of Home. EA, Activision, and any other developer or publisher can easily take existing game art and tag surfaces to stream videos of their games or whatever they want up on the wall and create virtual stores for their games. Custom third party spaces in Home are essentially live 3D webpages for companies.

* The support for clans. You should be able to setup space for you gaming clans to all have your own custom space that is decked out in whatever theme your clan wants. A place for everyone to meet up before and after matches. Streaming videos of matches and screenshots an images up on the walls

* Online stores - in addition to game companies Sony is saying they are setting things up for anyone to setup of stores or other types of non-game related places inside of Home

* Movie streaming and downloads - watch movies right inside of Home with friends or see streaming clips of movies and buy them to download to your PS3 right there in Home. Or go watch movie previews just like in theaters

I'm sure there is more. Sony says they will be constantly updating Home just like they do with the PS3's firmware which they put out about once a month updates.

Free online gaming for everyone
Dedicated servers for games
Home

Sony is kicking some serious ass in online console gaming.

Re:Home Just Keeps Getting Better And Better

[Kazzahdrane]

I actually modded your post up as Informative but then felt I'd rather reply, so apologies for not helping!

The tone of your post could easily come across as a Sony fanboy spewing out PR talk but frankly it all sound very interesting, and you seem genuinely excited by Home and what it offers. I am too, in theory. I just wonder how much Sony are going to charge for the content and features for Home, and also how many people are really going to use it beyond "see you in Home to form a group for Call of Duty" or whatever.

I think what Sony should do is introduce some sort of "light" MMORPG experience into Home (perhaps this is already planned), letting you level up an Avatar. Perhaps higher level players can access more multiplayer minigames, or go to different areas. You wouldn't want casual players to feel they were getting none of the Home experience of course, but at the right level it might encourage the more hardcore players to spend time in the Home environment.

My feeling is that Home will be really cool and interesting, but that a lot of PS3 owners (who at the moment are mostly hardcore gamers due to the price of the system) will get bored with trying it out after a couple of weeks and unless there is gameplay with Home - or Sony forces them to do straightforward gaming functions through the Home environment - they might not use it beyond that. I think the same thing about LittleBig Planet, lots of people seem excited about it but it's a product that by the looks of things will live or die on the strength of the user created content.

In all honesty I don't see myself owning a PS3 for at least another 18 months, if ever, but I work in games retail and would like the customers who buy PS3s to have a unique and rewarding experience on their consoles. The lack of decent games for the PS3, coupled with the entry price (the main reason for the difference between the Wii and the PS3 success-wise currently), is killing the system at the moment in terms of word-of-mouth advertising, so Sony really need a hook for people to want to sit with their PS3s and tell their friends about it.

Blue Hyperlinks on a blue bar

[atari2600]

Sheer genius and easy on the eyes. Which genius came up with that idea? JFC.

Is there anyone home?

[Fross]

What is Home, aside from Second Life with a better graphics engine, and less user generated content?

You "only" need Maya to make content. So that's, what, $150? Plus the PC to use it on. And mastery of an insanely complicated development environment. Second Life only has the attraction it does because people can *easily* make content for it. Playing online pool and watching videos? What's wrong with youtube and countless existing facebook plugins or flash sites?

I don't see what the attraction for Home is, beyond going into a pretty environment and getting spammed with advertising - if I wanted that, I'd go walk down a main street.

It's an MMORPG engine wrapper for their XBLA equivalent, obviously. But how much time do you spend in XBLA (or whatever your version is... Steam perhaps?) hanging out, rather than actually playing?

TG16's not-so-superior technology

[tepples]

Turbo-Graphics had superior graphics, sound, and a CD-ROM add-on during the cartridge-based days, and they were crushed.

The PC Engine sold well in Japan, but in North America, the TurboGrafx-16 fell victim to superior tech released shortly after its launch. (Compare the later Dreamcast.)

For one thing, the Sega Genesis was better in some ways than the TG16. The Genesis's 32-bit MC68000 CPU on a 16-bit bus could process game logic faster than the 8-bit 65C02-based CPU of the TG16. The Genesis's VDP could display two background layers, unlike the TG16 that relied on the same sprite- and raster-based parallax scrolling methods that were used on the NES. And it started with a decent software library due to quick ports of arcade games that used system boards similar to that of the Genesis.

The Super NES's 65C816 CPU was roughly comparable to that of the TG16, but its PPU was far superior, adding a third layer, an alternate background mode with rotation and scaling of individual scanlines, and sum and difference blending (for semitransparency). In addition, the Super NES had a much more powerful audio chip.