Playstation Home Delayed Till Spring
Those of you who were looking forward to connecting to the new Playstation Home virtual world service, an online 3-D virtual world that will double as a social network and gaming site for Sony, are going to have to wait. Not a few days or weeks, but a few months. New PS Home has been delayed till spring of next year due to normal problems that come up when you try to launch something of this magnitude.
Sony disclosed its plans to launch Home, a real-time, avatar-based virtual world, back in March at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Home is to be part of its overarching Game 3.0 strategy, which also includes the game “LittleBigPlanet.” After the April launch of the large-scale beta for “Home,” the company expected to roll out its 3-D destination during the fall and follow that up in the spring with the release of “LittleBigPlanet.”
News of the delay came from Kauo Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCEI), Thursday at his keynote address at the Tokyo Game Show. The delay, however, comes as no shock, Brian O’Rourke, an Instat analyst, told TechNewsWorld. “The delay is not a surprise, considering the immense challenge of creating a complex, graphically rich online community,” he said.
PS Home is touted as a real-time interactive online world, which combines the power of the PS3 with that of networking in a near-real 3D virtual society. Somewhat like Linden Lab’s iconic “Second Life”, which has nearly 4.5-million residents, who can create animated proxies of self called ‘avatars’ and interact among themselves, participate in various activities, and even trade virtual properties and services. However, unlike in “Second Life”, PS Home promises video games, virtual arcades, music, movies, and a whole lot of Sony-approved media downloads.
