It was on March 7, 2007 that Sony teased us with news of the upcoming release of a new social network that would, at no cost, give PlayStation 3 owners the gift of a customizable virtual world – PlayStation Home. The idea alone was enough to shake the knees of the most avid gamer; a world where console gamers wouldn’t have to rely on text messages or voice chat any longer; where we are able to freely explore and converse with people that share our same passion and playing games like pool and chess and pimping out our homes and characters to raise our egos a bit higher. It was right then and there where the social network of console gaming changed forever.
We all know Sony by now. Although they are one of greatest pioneers of gaming in console history, Sony has consistently promised their supporters unfathomed promises that seemed out of reach, yet they were believable because of their name and prior success. Screwing over the first wave of consumers by omitting rumble support on their SIXAXIS controller to later implement the same technology they, supposedly, would look past was a shot in the foot and they provided absolutely no ultimatum, or trading system, that would compensate for their incompetence. That was a dick head move, but whatever.
After the riveting announcement regarding Home, Sony did what they usually do – put their fat foots in their mouths. I sat as antsy as any other person who heard the release date of September/October 2007 and, suddenly, tears trickled down my cheeks and hit my lips leaving the taste of ocean in my mouth. I must have been consuming too much sodium that week. While gagging on my own tears of joy, I called my gaming counterparts and shared the exciting news. However, I should have seen the disappointment coming from a mile away.
Tokyo Game Show 2007 was when Sony would bitch-slap everyone with the delay of Home until “Spring 2008”. Many cried and whined at the delay while others, like myself, sighed in disappointment at a tactic that has become the norm with the gaming juggernaut. This is when you know who the diehard supporters are - the people that easily brush-off a fist in the ass and a slap in the face; the Jesus Christs of gaming - the ones that forgive the unforgivable. These people waved off the pessimistic utterances that filled their personal ozone and held their chins up high with pride: Sony will come through in the spring of the following year. Yea fucking right.
The groundhog saw his shadow cast a couple of months later and shat on it signifying the commencement of spring. Bird songs crowded the sunny skies and squirrels fed of the hands of whomever they saw eating. Snow White and the seven dwarfs helped me pick apples and PS3 owners began to giggle as their day would finally arrive and their social network would sodomize Xbox Live in the most painful of ways. Oh look, here comes Kazuo Hirai. Delay! Fall 2008 was now the target release date for Sony’s massive online community. It was on this day that Home just became another name and a “blah” of thought within the gaming community.
It’s not the constant delay that upsets the gaming community. It is inconsistency. What Sony did was it threw Home out before planning. Was it to increase revenues? Probably. But by mentioning and showing off this system, it felt like Sony wanted to justify a reason to purchase the PS3 over 360’s Xbox Live service without delivering the actual product. In a way, trying to cast a shadow of intimidation on Xbox Live subscribers and Microsoft’s game studios. It took them over a year to deliver an incomplete in-game XMB, and has taken them over two years to release a public beta/final release of Home. I’m in no way trying to belittle PlayStation’s overall service because, when it does deliver, it delivers strong. I appreciate the very fact that Sony provides its users with a free online system and is constantly building on top of it in order to improve and add on. But what I dislike is the misleading path that Sony places their consumers on by continuously failing to deliver on their promises. One time is fine, two times is forgivable, three times, however, is just abusing the trust of your supporters.
Home was, by far, one of the most anticipated goods in Sony’s catalog. Many will still stand by Home and patiently wait for its release. I, unfortunately, like most PS3 owners, have just decided to care less about it. The hype has just died down for me. The inconsistency in delivery time has just left a distasteful flavor of sour cabbage in my mouth (could just be sauerkraut) that is hard to get rid of. Sony needs to stop trying to be the first to do everything and just worry about getting it done. Xbox 360 has just finished their NXE system which completely redesigns the 360 dashboard to a mock-up 3D version of Sony’s XrossMediaBar (XMB) with customizable avatars and a new online system for playing games with your friends. It’s not Home in scale, but Microsoft has delivered what they put on the table when they said they would.
Home is slowly fading and losing the fire of excitement it once held two years ago. Expectations have just crumbled. I’m not saying that I won’t take part of it when it is released (whenever that is), but I’m pretty sure that I won’t be as excited as I would have been last year. We’re expected to have an open beta by years end. Still, no word has come from the mouths of Sony regarding a Home concrete release as of yet. What a surprise.
Podcast RSS Feed
23 Comments
Write a Comment»I totally agree. The hype has completely died down because of the multiple delays. Even the early beta wasnt all the great. The new game rooms they’ve added are pretty cool, though.
You’re lame. Stop being a crybaby. Home will be out soon.
Yeah Died down ALOT if not at all, no one cares for this anymore
Sony doesn’t rush things that is true. But I will say this at least their stuff works. I bought my first XBOX 360 twoo years ago and went through 5 units with the RED Ring O Death. When they sent me unit six I traded it in and got a PS3 that was in January and it’s been happy gaming ever since. 360 had great games, XBL was great, matchups were a snap but who cares if your system is down and you have to keep calling support, mailing it to Texas every few months for a new unit.So what if the postage is free and they extend the warranty. Down time is down time. I don’t care if Sony takes their time on Home as long as it works when I get access to it. Besides I get a Blu-Ray player, the ability to stream content from my PC and the best feature is replace the Hard Drive with an off the shelf drive. I currently have a 320 GB drive on mine and I can even run YDL (Linux) . You can even hook up a printer to it. I had 10GB of Music on mine 40 GB of MP4’s and can even run DIVX movies. The only true entertainment center.
One thing that still has a lot of hype surrounding it is the Motorola Krave. (motorola.com.krave) With it’s full touch screen keypad, blue tooth connectivity and flip open design, the krave is definitely a phone worth checking out. Has anyone else used or seen the krave?
Sony didn’t intentionally leave out rumble @ launch. They were involved in a law suit with the developers of the rumble technology @ launch and as such, they were forced to not include it it any controllers until the resolution of the case. This information is readily available on the net for those who look into this kinda stuff….about home though, yeah the wait sucks and Sony jumped the gun on announcing it, but I’d rather wait for it and have it actually work, versus getting it now and have it “rrod” on me. (LOL)
Dualshock was left out because of a lawsuit. That is also the reason why the Ps3 had boomerang controllers at the beginning. I do agree though that Home being delayed has got rid of a lot of hype. We were promised it at one point, then another, then another…
Great article.
Hype can kill a product. Perceived hype can be worse (the Android Phone being called the iPhone Killer when it’s definitely not).
As long as they provide a quality product it will probably be worth the wait. It’s getting hard to come quality sometimes.
Home has fizzled which is a big shame. Trophies are getting close to fizzling as well.
Here come the fanboy comments.
Isn’t Fall 2008 in its last month?
So if home doesn’t get released in november we are seeing another delay.
This is truly pathetic, my ps3 is covered in dust. What a waste of money.
Not really missleading and people will still dig it but I agree that they missed their hype window. They pushed it strong and didn’t deliver on time.
In the end they are correct to wait though. Blizzard has shown countless times that a late quality product always beats an on time crappy product.
Even when Home comes out it will be far from fully utilized and still critized for it. It will however be a good long term strategy if it can survive the next few years.
As for Live, overrated. Seamless chat seems to be the only thing Live has over PSN at this point. It’s a necessary feature that Sony needs to add but not enough to justify Live as some super service far and beyond PSN. It’s just a little better.
I totally agree. Live is indeed overrated 100%. But it set the stepping stone for online interfacing and gaming as we know it. I really don’t see where paying for a yearly subscription makes sense when you’re, usually, playing your games on a P2P-based network. But Microsoft created a blueprint as to what most - if not all - future consoles will implement in their network services.
Home will be great. No questions asked. It is the first of its kind to hit the masses in console gaming. My only problem is how Sony chose to go about it by mentioning a release for an unfinished/unpolished product. I’m in no way hating on Home in general. It will, without a doubt, be the new threshold of how gamers will communicate in the future and I’m looking forward to it… just not as excited. Sony needs to learn from this mistake and apply it in their future endeavors. Regardless of what anyone thinks, it is hurting their credibility. Hopefully, they will answer with a bang when they do decide to release Home.
I think they thought they could pull it off but early on Home got a lot of critizism for being boring and lacking many of the convenience features PSN desperatly needed. I think somewhere along the line they re-designed a large part of it and not just the enviroment but the online infrastructure and software architecture.
Just a guess but it happens a lot in software.
Indeed it does, DJ. Indeed it does. And I agree with you all the way.
Rumble was unavailable at launch due to a lawsuit. Microsoft tried to stitch up Sony by paying for exclusivity on rumble for 360. Sony had to wait while Microsoft dragged Immersion through the courts for letting Sony use the technology.
Home was only announced by Sony way back then because a journo broke an NDA and blabbed about it. They have been criticised unfairly about it being ‘late’ ever since. Give them a break. It’s not as if it’s just a new dashboard they are building. It’s a huge task to get everything working properly.
Unlike Microsoft, Sony don’t deliver until their product is ready and that is how it should be. RRoD anyone?
@Get Real - The RROD was because of M$ trying to save money. They tried to do a lot of manufacturing cheaper and it ended up costing them MORE money. The system would have been out at the same time if they had paid more for manufacturing. The main problem is that they cheaply manufactured the GPU I believe and ran into a problem and then had to spend money to “correct” it which never really happened.
*PREDICTION!!!*
I predict that gamers will only spend about 1/100th of the time that their PS3 is on, meandering around in Home. The other 99% will be actually playing games, which makes Home the equivalent of a beautiful Porsche sitting in your garage and only taking out about once a year for a spin.
XBLIVE>HOME
If Home has great utility for online gaming then it will prosper. Just look at the game specific rooms that will replace lobbies. Imagine the Hot Shots Golf or Resistance 2 lobbies as a part of home. If these ties exist then Home will be a success.
The chat and gaming launching are critical aspects. In regard to home being “leaked”. They actually did announce tentative beta release dates which they’ve missed multiple times.
Thank you DJ for being smart. Home will do well if it tailored to online gaming and integrates it well. They have announced it multiples times and I even have read about it many times in magazines. They definitely have missed their multiple release dates.
Reminds me of 2 days to Vegas (a game that I don’t think is ever coming out) or Huxley which has been delayed for god knows how long (I remember looking at it back in 8th grade).
Home has many pros over cons. The one thing it has over all is the ability to continuously build on top of it. It’s implementation of ideas is basically unlimited because Sony has decided not to mark it as “final” (sort of like Gmail Beta).
What Home needs to bring to the table, besides the awesome social environment, is what the PSN has been lacking since launch (some of which has been addressed with patch updates) such as cross-game invitations, voice chat with friends while in game, etc. Sony is doing the right thing by building on top of a barebone system. It’s easier to take care of and they answer to what their gamers REALLY need… and not just toss unnecessary add-ons.
As for the Six-Axis not having rumble: don’t forget that Sony said both that Rumble was a last generation technology and that it could not work with the motion sensitive controllers. Yes, it was because of the lawsuit, but they just spewed lies about it instead. They have gotten good at promising the world and under delivering and others are starting to notice. When Home is release, will anyone really care? Also, what will be deleivered and how will it differ from what they promised?
Great article. I constantly see things being advertsied before hand. I am in the advertisement business and people really get disappointed when things are announced prematurely. WTF, we hate all things premature. LOL.
I agree with most of you. I believe Sony social networking Home feature is overated. It may be fun for some causal gamers, young bucks (GENY) or girls. Not sure if it will attract GENX nor hardcore gamers.