You Can’t Go Home Until 2009
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
Tags: beta, home, in-game xmb, playstation, PS3, scee, Sony, xmb
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what are you impressions of the beta? From the outside looking in I see zero reason to be interested (other than the inexplicable hype surrounding Home). It looks like wrapping Second Life around Live, and seems cumbersome and if it takes after second life…creepy.
Sorry thekranz, I’m under non-disclosure agreement in the beta and can’t talk about it. People have been leaking information and Sony has also talked about features recently on their blog and elsewhere so it shouldn’t be hard to piece together a feature set they’re shooting for, possibly by the time the beta opens up.
when we first saw this it looked really cool now i just dont care anymore about it. because they keep delaying it so much they are putting all their eggs in to one basket and dropping it off the roof of a house and hoping it survives.
I really don’t think Home will add anything special to the PS3 besides improving the general function of its online. All the stuff that it comes with seems like time wasting nonsense. I guess some people will like that stuff, but I just want decent online integration, something the PS3 lacks in spades.
oh, i wasn’t looking for specifics or anything, just wondering if you enjoyed it.
It’s like a slimmed down version of Second Life.
these delays will just be a bad turn form home think of games like haze
Anyone guess how well this will help the PS3?