Under a week after its open beta launch, Playstation Home is that social networking addition that Sony promised PS3 owners nearly a year and a half ago.
Functioning much like the PC simulation "Second Life," Home is a 3D avatar-based social environment where PS3 owners can chat, play, and share content via
the Playstation Network.Sony representatives have identified Home as an open beta because its environments and content will be ever changing and molding to the needs of the Playstation Home community.
Five days after launch, it doesn't seem to be evolving much.
Sure players can rearrange furniture in their own personal space as well as lay down $5 in real cash for a beach-front home, but who wants to spend real money for something that doesn't exist.
Oh, I forgot about the real Second Life and WoW for a moment.
Aside from dressing and manipulating your avatar from a mind-boggling variety of options - thank god there are preset options - you can travel to only a handful of environments such as a home theater that only plays previews for "Twilight" or you can spend time in the bowling alley where you can meet new people, shoot pool, play about three different arcade games, or play bowling.
That's right: you can PLAY bowling. Or that is what Sony wants to call it.
When you have a hankering to spend some of your hard earned cash for a sweatshirt or a new lamp, you can head over to the mall and choose from a selection as limited as the library of great Richard Simmons workout videos.
Inside the mall, you can also play chess against other Home users or watch some woman talk about new video game releases on a giant screen. The convergence is pretty cool and looks like an interesting venue for advertisers, but the surface hasn't even been scratched yet.
That seems to be the key issue with Home as of now.
Where is the personal space where you can show off trophies, how can you share music and movies, where are the other exciting options were we promised a year and a half ago?
It seems Sony's hand was forced to launch a bear-bones version of Home to fulfill its promise of launching it in that fourth quarter 2008. I just thought they would want to introduce new content or events to get gamers excited about their new excuse for not seeing actual people.
Instead, all gamers are welcomed with is a message saying "sorry, it took you seven tries to log in, we are working on it."
Feels like a waste of the mandatory 3 GB of hard drive partitioning for content that does not exist yet.
Home is an exciting and excellent idea for Sony, but if they do not rapidly expand it soon, I'm afraid many PS3 owners may be vacating on their own.
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