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PlayStation Home Beta Opens to the Public
Yesterday Sony launched the open beta for PlayStation Home, the virtual world designed for PlayStation Network community members. Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the features of Home. They point out some glaring weaknesses, such as a poor communication system, a flawed business model, and the inability to form groups without entering games, something the recently revamped Xbox interface does better. "It's not alienating, it's easy to identify with, and the socialising and advertising are entirely in context. But you're left pondering the inevitable question: why would you want to spend any time here?" Home's debut to the public saw a few typical launch-day problems, but Sony was quick to address them and get things back on track. Gizmodo has some screenshots and basic information available.
There are 18 million PS3 already worldwide with 14 million PSN accounts. So the massive amount of traffic on the Home servers yesterday was understandable. No other MMORPG or online world has ever been build to handle such a gigantic userbase.
And about 1% have even heard of Home.. and even then at 3am it was so full it was unusable.
Of course, give it a week or two and it'll be empty.
One gigantic party? LOL. Sounds like you've never even seen it. It's loads of people wandering around aimlessly using their 'hello' macro and looking at dumb psp adverts.
I just bought my second PS3. I'm a PS3 advocate, but frankly Home is two years too late. I think Sony went into this generation expecting to coast on their reputation from previous generations, and didn't do enough to actually win people over. The PS3 is the best BluRay player on the market, and a solid console, but frankly I'm not sure it even matters anymore.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
*looks for the "Disclaimer: I am employed by Sony" and finding none assumes it was a forgetful mistake and moves on*
It can be legitimately criticized, despite being a 'free' product. Notably, an obviously large amount of time and money was invested into this. Instead of considering Home 'free', one could wonder what they could have alternatively done with the servers, developers, or simply the money. Maybe they could have not had those servers and developers and lowered the console price. Or they could have pieced something compelling together. As someone who purchased a PS3, I'm interested in evaluating all the Sony offerings that are being provided free of additional charge, as my purchase contributed revenue they used to do this.
Looking back since they first started teasing Home, it has been a very long time. Now that we've had a chance to see what it has taken so long to piece together, a lot of people may rightly say "that's it?". I know, it's "beta", but few projects with this degree of uncertainty would survive so long without declaring a 'release'.
In my view, there is something actually interesting about the fundamental concept. I could see how the experience could be relaxing. It's obviously comparable in Second Life. Both have yet to hold my attention longer than a first impression, so maybe it isn't as interesting to me as I would think.
Compared to Second Life, I think Sony's Home has done a good job of looking significantly better. The best of second life doesn't look as good, and the prominence of objects designed with all the design talent of the average MySpace page author clutters that landscape with ugly atrocities. Of course, if trying for the social networking aspect, to date the popular ones have been those to allow maximum creativity, for better or for worse.
What they have done worse is aim for too much realism. The avatars move painfully slow. The 'bowling alley' is all but useless because all the slots are pretty much always in use. They could (and should) mitigate this through more instances of 'bowling alleys', I guess it is a matter of them determining the best balance between too sparse and uselessly dense. I would wager if they doubled the instances of bowling alleys, people wouldn't be bothered by the immediate appearance of limited supply, since they wouldn't have any hard time finding an empty lane or whatever. Also, the ability to import such attractions into a personal space could help, so a group of friends would always know where/how they could pass the time. It's clearly a casual gaming play here, which is a proven genre of interest.
I remain dubious of Sony's direction in general. They did this 'Qore' thing in which users are expected to buy pure advertising. Then they realized they wanted to advertise and so they did this 'Pulse' thing. Then they released this 'Home' thing. All the while not seeming to deliver what PS1 and PS2 had achieved success with, a solid set of games.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My worry is that Sony will make Home the preferred way to create groups, have multi-user chat, set up private games, use the Store and so on.
If they do that, the PS3 will die as a multiplayer platform.
When I play a game, I want to play a game. More specifically, I want to play this game. I do not want to play Second Life to be able to play $multiplayergame. Someone might enjoy 2nd life. I don't. I don't want to be forced to move through some pseudo-multiuser virtual world to do what I want to do.
If people are anything when it comes to their games, it's impatient. Know what was the first thing that made consoles popular over computer based games, back in the good ol' days when computer came with floppy discs and consoles with cartridges? Load speed. It took seconds at most to load a console game, it could take a minute to load a computer game. Right behind it was ease to use. Push the cartridge in and play. No booting, no disk swapping, no searching for the right executable.
When people now have to meander through some virtual world to finally do what they wanted to do in the first place, they will most likely ponder whether it's worth the hassle in the first place. When I fire up a game and select multiplayer, I expect to be in a multiplayer lobby where I may pick my partners/enemies and go on to play it. A system that does not offer this is going to be replaced with one that offers is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That a pretty bold statement given that the business model hasn't actually been tested yet.
Maybe not