Rumours are swirling that PlayStation Home will be made available next month at the same time as LittleBigPlanet. So it looks like Home is almost upon us. I know Tosh has made it into the beta and has both good things and bad things to say. I, unfortunately, have not been so lucky to make it into the Home beta, and I would give up both my R2 and SOCOM beta invites for the chance (I didn’t enjoy either beta). Ah well, such is life.

The in-game launch feature requires that the game supports it if you want to end up in the game together, otherwise it’s just like launching a game from the XMB. Is this going to limit Home’s usefulness? I think so, for the foreseeable future at least. Games need to support Home for Home to be worth using!

So anyway, are you looking forward to Home? Vote in the sidebar as always.

Previous poll results:

Do you use a headset?

* Bluetooth: 45% (69)
* Will get the official Sony one: 23% (35)
* Nope: 21% (33)
* USB: 12% (18)

Total Votes : 155

Check your inbox people the invites have been sent! And this time I finally got in The “Open” beta is set for Autumn, so either October or November everyone will be let into home.

This is only the first wave of invites so more will be arriving in inbox’s in coming weeks. So good luck PS3Blog.net readers!

PlayStation Home Beta Extended Today

[Update]

Looks like the open beta should arrive in late October along with firmware 2.50. This image was posted on the official Home beta forums.

Home Manager says firmware 2.50, Home 1.00 set for October

It has been a LONG wait for Home, it’s been delayed again and again. But the wait is almost over. It “should” be coming sometime in 2008. The expanded private Home beta should be available this week, or at least more info on it. I’m guessing Friday or maybe in today’s PSN update. In fact Asia will be getting some details on the expanded Home beta tomorrow. See here.

I try not to think about Home much anymore to make the wait less painful. But I think for it to be really popular it needs to be continually updated with new info.

Home Producer Van der Meulen told IGN “without hesitation” that there is a “100 percent guarantee” that the oft-delayed Home will be released by “the end of this calendar year.” Not 2009. Not 2010. This year. “He has absolutely no doubt that this will be the case.”

You are ‘100 percent’ going Home this year

Later today you can download a PlayStation Home theme from the PlayStation Store. This will submit a application to join the Home Beta.

We will be using a variety of criteria including activity on the PLAYSTATION Network to determine eligibility for the Beta community. Existing beta testers have automatically qualified to be part of the expanded beta.

Japan had this happen a week or so ago, and I entered to try my luck, but I didn’t get in. So good luck to all the PS3Blog.net writers and readers!

Want into the PlayStation Home Closed Beta test? Here’s How to Apply

We were tantalized with a small bit of Home during the keynote, but here’s more!

Gametrailers.com - Home (PSN) - E3 2008: Developer Walkthrough HD

There’s a lot of both excitement and skepticism about PlayStation Home. Here’s a list of common reasons for each. What’s your take on the issue?

Reasons to Get Excited for Home

• Character avatars provide informal non-verbal communication that you don’t get with plain text/voice chat.
• The Second Life or Web3D type concept has untapped potential and PlayStation Home looks like a much more polished and accessible system
• Platform-wide lobby and community.
• Attend E3-like press events yourself virtually rather than read media coverage off of a web site.
• Game or movie promotional web sites might be more interesting as a virtual place that you can actually walk into and observe the vibe of the crowd.

Reasons to be Skeptical of Home

• 3D avatar centric interface is unnecessarily bulky compared to a simple menu-driven interface. Even if both style of interfaces are available, why bother with the 3D version?
• What’s the point? Feature set doesn’t look compelling compared to existing socialization and community systems.
• Lofty concepts like this often look amazing on paper when everything is in your imagination, but the finished products usually never meet those ambitions.
• Reports from beta users are rather underwhelming.

UPDATE: Minor additions to skeptical list.

Honestly it’s hard to stay excited about home when it’s been in Beta for what 1 1/2 - 2 years? They are expanding the closed Beta it in July, so good luck to you all. The Open Beta is November last I heard. I try not to think about it much, to make the wait less painful. E3 will be very interesting this year.

As home gets pushed further and further out, the only thing we can do is wait and read about it. Like this interview with IGN!

After reading the interview I had a hard time trying to pinpoint anything that was new and interesting, or just new for that matter.

But in case you’re new to the PS3 world, you might want to check it out.

PlayStation Home Dissected

I try not to think to much about Home. I don’t want to make the wait any more painful than it already is. But now Sony will be focusing on the “gaming” aspect of Home and not the advertising part of it. That should have been like that from the start …. oh well.

I was looking forward to seeing all the game spaces. Now that wait has become much longer. More people will be let into the closed beta in July, with a open beta in November. So good luck to everyone.

Home slated for November release as open beta

I had a feeling it wasn’t going to fully ready by spring. I was thinking there was going to be a open beta at least. Now it’s pushed back until fall. I can see delaying it because it’s not ready. But at least let us look at it. We know it’s Beta, and everything isn’t 100% yet. Home has great potential but Sony sure is taking their time.

“We understand that we are asking PS3 and prospective PS3 users to wait a bit longer, but we have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience than what it is today,” said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “Our overarching objective is to provide users with new gaming experiences that are available only on PLAYSTATION Home. Spending more time on the development and on the Closed Beta testing reaffirms our commitment to bringing a quality service, maintaining the PlayStation tradition.”

Home gets delayed again, open beta scheduled for Fall

Kotaku is reporting that Sony is showing off just what Home integration could mean for PS3 videogames.

First up, Kotaku mentions this:

Resistance is said to provide Home visitors with an interesting room to explore, one that will let PlayStation 3 owners visit unseen areas of the game and tap into bonus content in the form of “intercepted” radio communications between European and U.S. forces.

These hidden transmissions will help to flesh out the Resistance story, giving players a better understanding of the game’s conflict. We hear that Home avatars will have free roam of unpopulated levels, not unlike a virtual Resistance museum.

But it gets better! Uncharted will supposedly get a similar feature - allowing your avatar to walk through Uncharted levels, but they also add this:

According to our sources, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune comes to Home armed with a side-scrolling 2D arcade game, described to us as reminiscent of both Contra and Out Of This World. Sounds kind of like Capcom’s 2D remake of Bionic Commando in its execution, full of enemies and exploding barrels to shoot.

But it gets even better! Warhawk / Home integration sounds the coolest of all:

Sure, you could do that with text or voice chat, but it sounds like the developers have gone the extra mile to make planning your battles even cooler.

Using a three-dimensional “sand table” replication of the level, Warhawk players are said to be able to lay out their strategies in a properly scaled space. They’ll even be able to place little army men avatars around the map to envision their formations, something we hope they can also do with teeny tiny Warhawk planes, tanks and Jeeps.

The Warhawk war room is said to also serve as a launchpad for games, thankfully, so jumping into a match shouldn’t require leaving the Home interface.

I’ve admitted before to being somewhat skeptical about the actual usefulness of Home. But if this is a portent of things to come, I’m totally there!

[via PS3 Fanboy]

The update will arrive next week and will include a lot of things. The user interface is better and graphics have been upgraded too. You can check who’s online from your friends list and you can tell if there just online or in Home.

But the most interesting part is the new Marketplace in the main square. Once you’re inside you can get clothes, furniture and other things. Maybe the PlayStation Store will be moved in there eventually? Also they are working on Game Launching, and some games work some don’t. But it’s a start. I hope there is a open Home beta soon.

Check out the full update below:

Read the rest of this entry »

At E3 this year Sony also showed off some new PlayStation Home features. Check out the video to see!

Home (PSN)

Here are some user-created videos of PlayStation Home. Note that the first link has two videos (only the first one is in english). The second link has a longer, non-english, video. Weird how many people are using their PS3’s on old televisions.

One of the narrators mentioned how boring it is to walk around, which I never really thought about before. It does look like a pain to spend all that time walking to where you want to go. Hopefully they’ll add the ability to run at some point.

Sony Protection Group
New PlayStation Home Beta Video

Here’s a somewhat boring article over at Gamasutra that discusses Sony’s DevStation conference. It tells us basically nothing, and has almost no interesting facts for those of us searching out interesting tids of bits to share.

Well, except for this tiny little morsel near the end:

the first generation of Home content creation tools will start being rolled out to developers later this month

So they’re saying that developers don’t even have Home dev kits yet. In other words, don’t expect any games released in the near future to have any Home support once Home makes its way into your, uh, home (small ‘h’).

Ah well. Let’s just hope that all developers will support Home with gusto once they do get these kits…

Sony’s DevStation Focuses On Home