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