PlayStation Home Transforming Into Social Platform 55
donniebaseball23 writes "Sony's virtual world, PlayStation Home, has seen over 23 million users since launching in December 2008, and now the service is about to undergo its biggest change yet. Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, says Sony is planning a 'total redesign of the heart of PlayStation Home' for this Fall. The idea is to put games (particularly free-to-play games) front and center on Home, utilizing a central Hub with a theme park design. The Hub will 'integrate games, quests, community events and user-generated content, while providing players with additional navigation, shopping, socialization and entertainment options.'"
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This is their priority? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, this is great and all (at least, I think it is - I've never used Home and have no interest in starting), but I'd much rather Sony focussed on a few other issues around the PS3's online service. Let's try these for starters:
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
- Reducing the number of mandatory firmware updates to something sensible (one every 4 months or so at most), so that my PS3 actually feels like a "switch on and play" console rather than a Windows 98 machine that needs a (lengthy) reset process every few days whenever there's an update.
- Getting a UI for the Playstation Store that can be navigated at a sensible pace. At the moment, the storefront is so far behind the Xbox Live storefront (which is not part of the subscription package over in Xbox-land) that it's just ridiculous.
- Upping the game on Playstation Plus a bit. I actually picked up a 1 year sub for this on a "give it a try" basis and it is wildly inconsistent. There's been some good stuff available, but it increasingly feels like another avenue for pushing demos, with a few mobile-phone style games thrown in around the margins. Sony needs to prove that this wasn't a bait-and-switch.
Still, at least it's better than the 3DS online services...
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You post no data whatsoever supporting your claim that Sony is actually making a ton, or any, money out of it. Just because people log on doesn't mean they spend a cent.
This reads like a Don Adams set-up... (Score:2)
Home is by far one of their best revenue generators. It's literally a free-to-play MMO with tons of paid virtual content that people actually buy.
I find that incredibly difficult to believe.
Would you believe "moderately popular time-killer with great potential"?
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There is the odd nice surprise, like getting my own Batcave, when I played Arkham Asylum, but otherwise I have found it less than compelling.
It
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Look, this is great and all (at least, I think it is - I've never used Home and have no interest in starting), but I'd much rather Sony focussed on a few other issues around the PS3's online service. Let's try these for starters:
- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
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Maybe that's part of the plan!
By converting PlayStation Home into a social networking portal they can claim sharing personal information is a feature. /snarky
Sony is a giant corporation (Score:1)
EVERYONE STOP WORKING! Security needs to be hardened and the UI needs some polish. Home team get on it.
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Indeed.
We live in a world where sub-second rendering-times for webpages is the norm, and sub 250ms is common on high-profile well-optimised sites. (for those of us with bandwith)
In this world, it's ridicolous that doing something like clicking a category in the playstation-store, that contains perhaps 30 articles, can take 5 or 10 seconds to display. It feels like being on a modem -- even when you're actually on a 100Mbps link.
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- Making very, very, very sure that they have decent security around any and all personal data they hold.
It's secured by McAfee [mcafeesecure.com]! How much more secure do you want them to be?
(Actually, I suppose that little badge on us.playstation.com [playstation.com] could have predated the whole PSN fiasco. And presumably doesn't apply to the actual PS3 online services, just the PlayStation website. Especially because it's notably missing from the PlayStation blog [playstation.com] and forums [playstation.com] sites, where you do use your PSN account to log in. Which is more amusing than it being on the PlayStation portal website in the first place, now that I think about it.)
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The director of Playstation Home is focused on Playstation Home?
Gahh! The ignorant bastards!
Buck Rodgers (Score:1)
It should streamline their identity theft feature. (Score:1)
Sony should Prioritize (Score:2)
I've never gotten the appeal of the Playstation Home - it always felt like a heavily commercialized and far more limited version of Second Life. Personally, I wish Sony would prioritize their approach with their PS3. Rather than offering something gimmicky like Home, why not upgrade the ancient browser? How about having an app store for cool PS3 apps? How about putting a few bucks towards real security?
The PS3 always feels like a machine with a lot of potential. But Sony's obsession with locking down and co
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They already have that. It's called the PlayStation Store(tm).
Of course, to develop for the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Store requires a fair bit more work and more money and more restrictions than the Apple App Store. (You think the Apple App Store is bad and controlling? Try developing for consoles...).
However, right now only Microsoft has something a bit more open than the Apple App Store in the Xbox Live Indie arcade.
"Has seen over 23 million users"? (Score:1)
What does "has seen" signify? I suppose it "has seen" me as well, when I spent 5 minutes there, doing nothing.
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...again. (Score:2)
Every year Sony comes up with some lame bullshit plan to make "Home" your social hub. How does that meeting go? Some new guy says "Wait,
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Another one? (Score:2)
Don't we have enough of these social services already?
And more importantly, when will we get our own SlashSpot?
Yes, another one. And likely more after that. (Score:2)
That's right. We have enough social services already. But they—the marketers and salesmen who want more channels to push their product through in order to make a sale—won't rest until you can't spit in your online social space (so to speak) without hitting an advertisement. And if this means creating more social spaces then so be it: Let a thousand cheesy Facebook-knockoffs bloom!
Because we are groaning under social internet overload, there's a good chance that those newer services won't be look
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I'm both looking forward to and dreading the day they figure out how to advertise in our dreams. It could be terrible for people with no willpower as they'd just buy everything that was subliminally advertised to them. Me? I don't waste my money, but I'd be willing to stomach some ads in my dreams if they also let me use the system to dream lucidly. That'd be a pretty fair trade.
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Translation: More Ads (Score:2)
I've always had high hopes for Home. Social worlds are one of those areas (along with MMO's) where consoles have always lagged WAY behind PC's. Personally, I think that consoles need to move beyond the same-old FPS-with-a-slightly-new-skin strategy and expand the horizons a bit. Unfortunately, Home in implementation was pretty weak tea. In typical Sony fashion, they locked it down early on to where there wasn't a whole lot to do (cutting off voice chat, for example, and limiting customization) and, of cours
Good (Score:2)
because currently it's pretty useless.
Everything Old .... (Score:1)
Sounds a lot like a reintroduction of TSN/INN (The Sierra Network. ImagiNation Network - pre-Internet) and CyberPark. With updates for newer technology of course.