Home 'soft launch' confirmed
- Posted September 13th, 2007 at 04:49 EDT by
- 9,045 views
- 21 Comments
PSU reported a few days ago on the possibility of a 'soft launch' of Home. It appears that the report was indeed correct, as GamesIndustry.biz is now reporting that Sony has confirmed a soft launch for the touted social networking product.
"In the past we'd make a game, put it on a disc and launch it in the shops. But this is so different," Jamie MacDonald, VP of Sony Worldwide Studios explained. "It's a constantly evolving thing. Week by week and month by month it evolves. There isn't going to be this 'big bang' launch. That's how you do it in the Web 2.0 world, if you're familiar with the launch of Gmail or something like that."
Home is a social setting which Sony has built on top of their network, featuring elaborate world designs in which your avatar can chill in your apartment, go to the arcade, or catch a movie. It has drawn many comparisons to Second Life, but as Peter Edward, Director of the PlayStation Home Platform Group, explained to ThreeSpeech recently, the comparison should be an intellectual one only -- Sony did not draw on Second Life for inspiration.
"When we started work on this, Second Life didn’t exist," Peter explained. "Our motivation, originally, right from the word go, was that we fed up with going into online games for five seconds before dying, and we thought there must be a better, more congenial way of leading an online existence."
Reports have been circulating on a 'launch' date for Home in early October or late September, but with the comments from Sony, it appears that 'launch' will be quite a fluid term.
"At the moment the closed beta is employees, trusted third-parties and people like that," MacDonald said. "An open beta will be a wider audience but it won't be open to everybody. We haven't worked out the exact way of doing it but it will be invites to people to ask if they want to be part of it, and then depending on what the response is, we'll have to have some way of deciding who can and who can't take part."
We'll be sure to bring you any fresh news on how to get into Home as soon as possible, as we're sure many are waiting patiently for its arrival in their XMB. Be sure to check back for any news right here on PSU.
Gamesindustry.biz Interview: Here
ThreeSpeech Interview: Here
Comments
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mystik4l06 |
mystikal06- 5:59am BST - September 13th, 2007
- 3
alfie...put it this way the FIRST ppl to get into the home open beta will be sony's G.A.P members which u can only join by invite. so yea who ever is a member of that is 100% in so they have nothing to worry about.
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Kojiro000 |
ShinKojiro- 10:25am BST - September 13th, 2007
- 7
"When we started work on this, Second Life didn’t exist," Peter explained. "Our motivation, originally, right from the word go, was that we fed up with going into online games for five seconds before dying, and we thought there must be a better, more congenial way of leading an online existence."
Well its an obvious answer. - MMO's! -
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Tha_Last_Romeo |
Tha_Last_Romeo- 11:31am BST - September 13th, 2007
- 12
HOME probably wont be out until November... Something to boost their sales in the holiday season.
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Syphon_Filter |
Syphon_filter2- 11:25pm BST - September 13th, 2007
- 17
ALFIE-UHE, Mee too man i dont no what is this $hit, when i login i just see the earth is moving and thats all where is the home thing i dont no. lol
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Anim3Fr33K |
Anim3Fr33K- 5:42am BST - September 14th, 2007
- 19
Why are the PAL people alwase forgotten? we dont even get GAP cr@p because that whole side of things is US only
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Mattchewie |
Mattchewie- 5:21am BST - September 15th, 2007
- 20
Second life didn't exsist huh? SL has been out for some time now and so has THERE and I see alot of both in HOME. Not thats a bad thing but....even if they "thought" of it before THERE and SL, i'm sure they have "borrowed" some things lol. Also, this is great news but kinda lame at the same time since I was expecting full launch in fall. Going from what I know of games etc, I feel as if the full release won't be until after christmas
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MasterDJJM
- 1:00pm GMT - November 24th, 2007
- 21
Well this really sucks D!ck because I was hoping for The Home open beta to come out November 29 with the game Pain in the PSN store.This really blows and blows!
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