Forget about trying to go home again, try going home once. Sony has delayed PlayStation Home’s open beta until the fall of 2008. In case you haven’t been paying attention — and with this many delays I wouldn’t blame you for dozing off — that puts the open beta a full year later than they’d promised to deliver the final code following its unveiling at the 2007 GDC. With the Home beta in the fall that means to me a final release won’t happen until 2009. All that blather about Sony having toyed with online virtual spaces since the PlayStation One hasn’t helped their engineers over in SCEE a tiny little bit, now has it.

I fully expect we won’t see in-game XMB this summer either. They just rolled out firmware 2.20 and have said 2.5 will contain in-game XMB. That’s three more firmware updates to go, and at roughly 30-45 days between updates it all fits in for a Fall release. The firmware engineers aren’t the same people working on Home, so I’m not saying they’re related, I’m just saying that Sony’s recent statements about in-game XMB showing up “in 2008″ don’t say “Summer 2008″ like they used to.

The big loss here is actually very painfully highlighted by the brand new PlayStation Store. By remaking the old Store in a fast, slick new interface Sony has proven that the PS3 can have native apps within the XMB that greatly extend the power of the system and can handle things that they’ve squirreled away into Home. I’m talking about cross-game accomplishments/achievements/trophies/whatevers and group chats to launch games from together. The marketing decisions to do this don’t look so smart when Home lags this far behind.

I’m still in the beta for Home, but nobody on my friends list is. Like many participants I was hoping we’d see the Home open beta happen at E3 this year so I could at least have friends around to kick the tires with.

Via PS3Fanboy