Sony Worldwide Studios Vice President Jamie MacDonald has said that the platform holder is ‘madly working’ in order to meet it’s projected release date for the PlayStation Home open beta.
"At Tokyo Game Show it was announced that PlayStation Home will be hitting what we’re calling an open beta by the end of the year, which means it will be available to everybody,” said MacDonald, during the Game 3.0 conference in London today.
"And the latest is, it’s going very well. The guys are madly working to make sure that date is hit, and it’s going very well."
MacDonald also revealed that PlayStation Home was originally created in response to the frustrations gamers have with the hardcore online gaming environment, which he described as “geeky, tedious and short.”
“The reason why we even started developing that (PS3 Home) was really a frustration a few years ago that the online experience for most games players was geeky, tedious and short. Certainly in my experience, I got into a first person shooter online and I lasted about 15 seconds. It’s not much fun,” he said.
“So that was really our driving force with Home, to provide an environment where it’s fun to go, you can hang out with like-minded people and talk about games, play games, have a look at the leaderboards, but in an environment that was game centred but not just for these teenage boys, who are fine, but they enjoy very much shooting people, which is fine."
Sony is now saying that the Home open beta will launch at the end of the year, as opposed to a late October date as recent rumours have suggested.