Sony Clarifies Details About PS3 Home 64
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."
Re:Never happen (Score:3, Informative)
ESRB Notice: Game Experience May Change During Online Play
Re:Home Just Keeps Getting Better And Better (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Is there anyone home? (Score:3, Informative)
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?