Sony Further Details Home, Looks to October Launch 37
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.
Home is Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
I just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not for Public Consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I know it is not designed to appeal to me
I suspect they're trying to aim this service at the Casual or Non-gamer market but what they fail to realize is that no casual gamer will spend $500 for a gaming system
Re:Sounds good but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft released the Xbox 360 so early it forced the other players to hurry up and get their consoles on the market.
Nintendo could survive being later to market than Xbox because they have by far the cheapest offering in this generation. Sony has the most expensive. They couldn't be expensive AND late.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yes it does. You get to roam public and private spaces, play the mini games, talk shit with other PS3 owners, make friends, form groups, congregate in special interest areas etc. Of course it's got advertising, but then it's free so what do you expect? The danger to Sony is that all of the above has to be attractive to players - it has to load fast and offer compelling functionality despite the ads. If it's just a hollow exercise halls in flogging billboard space (and metric tracking reports of how often they're in view etc.) then the thing will tank and rightly so.
More concerning is the trend to put advertising into things you've already paid for. For example Crackdown has live advertising thanks to Massive - Microsoft's in-game marketing functionality.
Remember the first online stores? 3D doesn't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.