Tag Archives: Home

The Dog’s posted on the EU PS boards to confirm that Home will be patched on Thursday in an effort to get rid of the now infamous C-931 connection errors.

The app’s been plagued by the problem since it launched. The SCEE mod described the update as the “first step” in eradicating the issue.

Here we go. PS3-Sense brings word that Home beta invites have been sent out to Qore subscribers.

The piece also says that, as expected, version 1.0 of the app’s client has been put live on the beta servers.

As reported earlier this week, Sony will now bring large amounts of people into the beta in two waves, followed, hopefully, by the open beta.

Find the Qore invite mail after the link.

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Speaking yesterday at the Gamer 3.0 conference in London, Jamie MacDonald, vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, said PlayStation Home will “continue to evolve, change and develop over time”, which is a policy the company was employing with all future titles.

“The thing that I should stress about Home, unlike a typical boxed product it will continue to evolve and change and develop over time, it’s not a one off thing, ” he said.

“Indeed that’s the way we’re developing all of our titles these days. We’re becoming service providers almost rather than product providers.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

According to PSBlog, the Far Cry 2 PlayStation Home space has launched on the closed beta.

“The space will invite players to dig deeper into the game’s vast African landscape,” says the piece. “Users will have the opportunity to investigate in-game environments, including a bombed-out train station that has been converted into the ad hoc office of Reuben Oluwagembi, a journalist caught in the middle of the propaganda conflict between the warring UFLL and APR factions.”

Looks pretty good, if we’re honest. All we need now is that release date.

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

We’ve just overheard some chaps talking about Home on the train to Leipzig from Berlin. This is what was said:

• £40 million has been spent on Home so far.
• Home’s been in development for five years.
• Home was originally a PlayStation 2 initiative.

Home’s likely to make a decent appearance in Sony’s press conference at Games Convention this week.

Please bear in mind this has come from a man on a train in Germany. You didn’t see us here, right?

TheHDRoom’s carrying 17 off-screen movies from the now ongoing Home beta, showing fiddling with furniture on PSP, walking about, the cinema, walking about, clothing options, walking about, and more.

No date for release as yet, but “very soon” is a safe bet.

On Joystiq. They’re camera stills taken during an E3 presentation of Home, but they’re easily good enough. Take a look.

The “new Phil Harrison,” Sony WWS boss Shuhei Yoshida, has said in this ThreeSpeech interview that Home’s current autumn launch is looking “positive”.

“We certainly hope so,” he said when asked if the PS3 online freebie will be ready in time for Christmas. “Every indication is positive.”

He added: “With the timing of the launch, we’ve always set target dates, such as the end of last year or spring of this year, but our problem is always implementing features, testing with beta users, getting feedback and making modifications. When we become confident that it is good enough to make it available to all users, that would be the right time. We have been making good progress, but recently, we have been thinking that this fall is the timing we will work towards.”

There’s loads more through there.

PSN boss Eric Lempel has told Next-Gen that this autumn’s promised Home launch will be the real article – it just won’t be the finished product.

“The reason we’ve been delaying [Home] is so that we can deliver a high quality service that the users will enjoy,” he said. “Even though it will be in beta, it will be a fair representation of what the service can be and its potential, so it won’t be a 0.5 release, it will be a fully robust service.”

Home’s roll-out was described last month by PSN director Susan Panico as being similar in plan to Gmail’s release, where the initial “beta” was in fact the full product with rough edges.

An autumn release for the service is now looking increasingly solid, with no execs commenting on the issue deviating from the time-frame.

Sony Japan has published a teaser site called ‘dress’.

After lots of internet investigating we found this:

“Dress will take advantage of a unique avatar system that operates separately from the regular Home interface. Sony will be working with real-world fashion brands to provide your virtual avatar access to the latest fashions in Dress Town, which is supposed to recreate the feel of buying clothes in a real-world store.”

Follow the link to see we’re not lying.

By Mike Bowden

Gamespot’s posted a hands-on with Home from the SCEE PlayStation Day yesterday. From the piece:

As long as you have a game installed on the hard drive or in the disc tray, you can jump straight into an online lobby from within Home. This means that you skip any of the game’s introductions, and in the case of MotorStorm, you even get a custom loading screen that features the Home logo in the corner. Using the PSP interface, you can customise all of the game rules that you’d expect from an online game, including the number of players, private slots, and laps and tracks. Once you’re ready to go, a small PlayStation control pad icon appears above your head. This indicates to other Home users that you’re ready to play, and they can come over, chat to you, or just join you if they’re interested. The demo that we played was running over the Internet, and even in its beta form, moving between Home and a game of MotorStorm was a completely seamless experience.

So there we are. No date was given for Home yesterday.

Speaking here, leading Home developers have underlined just how important user-generated content will be to the PS3 online service.

“From day one we’re going to give [users] basic customisation, analogous with other games,” lead artist John Venables said. “But we will hopefully be increasing the tools that we give to users over time, to give them more control, maybe to ultimately provide their own content.”

When speaking of how Sony can protect its younger audience, creative director Ron Fajesto warned of the potential hazards of user-generated content but at the same time remained upbeat.

“Obviously the Holy Grail is to give people the tools to create their own things, but it’s a difficult path to tread I think,” he said. “We’ve got some moderation tools in there where you can report people, but I think we’ve got to do this in baby steps. For PlayStation, and the type of audiences we appeal to, I think there’s a certain level of responsibility that we have to ensure that offensive stuff isn’t in the universe that we create.”

The underlining message however, was clear: “User-created content is the Holy Grail, with games like LittleBigPlanet that’s all about user-created content… that’s going to be an interesting litmus test for us to see the kinds of things generated by users, because those guys are also pushing the boundaries in that area.”

Take a look at the full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

According to this, Home is going to be demoed at the Online Game & Community Service Conference 2008 on March 14. We have no idea what that is or whether this is significant in any way, but it’s late and there isn’t any other news.

Right here. As reported yesterday, PlayStation home has been changed significantly from its showings at GDC and E3 last year. The online, virtual space system for PS3 was seen yesterday in its new form at Imagina 08 in France. Home is now slated for a “spring” release, and you should expect a full showing at GDC later this month.

GDC’s site has details of a seminar and demo of PlayStation Home, the virtual PS3 “space” thingy Phil Harrison debuted and the Californian show last year and was susequently delayed past an original autumn 2007 release date. It does all the things Xbox Live does but looks like an MMO, basically, although we doubt Sony will thank us for saying so.

“This presentation will cover an overview of the current Home Tools features and the feature roadmaps for the future,” said this. “Additionally we shall walk through the process of creating a space for Home and show a guide to creating 3D mini-games within the Home environments. Wrapping up we shall take a sneak peak at Home Interactive Item creation.”

Home was seen for the last time at E3 2007. We’re saying nothing apart from, “Hi Kaz!” Expect that demo to be rammed.