Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Phil Harrison has gone on the record in a Gamespot interview to say that PlayStation Home will be opening up its beta to all PS3 owners in late November or early December:

So, the commercial start of Home will be pushed out later, but you will still get the experience this year.

So what does the Spring 2008 delay mentioned by Kaz Hirai and the statements of the SCE VP of Worldwide Studios about the beta staying closed over the nexrt few months mean? EvilAvatar readers make a bit of hay over the word “commercial”, but I’m thinking that’s when they’ll open the doors to publisher spaces and the like. Sony can’t possibly be considering charging for entry into PlayStation Home after saying all along it will be free.

My tirade against Sony not delivering PlayStation Home in 2007 during our last podcast stems from two things, which I’ll go into after the jump.

The first thing is that Sony has robbed itself of a marketing opportunity to differentiate itself from Xbox Live (and the Wii). As promoted by Sony to date, Home is unlike anything else available on the other consoles today. In their original announcement of the system they gave a very strong impression to the gaming press that this isn’t meant to just catch up to Xbox Live, it’s meant to do things like it and be something very different. Home is Sony’s way of giving the perception that it’s going to provide an online service it can spin as better (whether one agrees with dress-up avatars being better or not). To date marketing the PS3′s online capabilities has been pretty much impossible because every game does things differently. Some games do matchmaking poorly, while others excel at it. Without Home this holiday season, Sony loses this marketing opportunity until Spring when the hype does them absolutely the least amount of good in terms of sales potential.

Secondly, time is running out for Sony to find a way to boost sales of its very, very last place PlayStation 3 console. I’d wager that the only thing keeping people with enough cash to own more than one console interested in the PS3 for online play is the 360′s terrible reliability problems. People are just plain afraid of their 360 dying yet again, and frankly if you own one or even buy one off the shelf today, it’s only a matter of time until someone other than Microsoft proves otherwise. When Microsoft finally fixes their system reliability issues and the consoles on the market are all as solid as the Wii and PS3 are, I’d wager that the 360 will start selling the way many people think it should be with its strong library of titles on store shelves. With Home not out this year, more time to prove their value to gamers looking for an excuse to buy a PS3 is lost.

I imagine we will see new functionality in the PS3 firmware before Home launches in the Spring, perhaps even before Home goes open beta in November. Will it give us the cross-game voice chat we want? The way to jump out and at least text message others while in a game? Will these be features in the XMB that Home will become a pretty layer of icing on when it comes out next year?

We’ll have to wait and see, but I’ll tell you now I’m tired of waiting for Sony to execute a winning strategy on a system that we know has loads of potential.

Via EvilAvatar.