Playstation Home - If it ever appears on PS3, will it be worth the wait?

By Dave Parrack

Playstation Home is the long awaited and oft delayed online community-based service meant to rival not only Xbox Live, but also avatar-based virtual worlds such as Second Life. However, with the closed beta still ongoing, and reports still leaking of the disappointment faced upon first viewing, the question has to be asked: will it be worth the wait?

Xbox Live is brilliant: easy to use, fun, intuitive and most importantly - present from the beginning of the Xbox 360’s life. Playstation Home on the other hand seems to promise much, and has been for what feels like years, but delivers little.

The virtual world for the Playstation 3 has been in development since 2005, and here we are, three years later, and there’s still no sign of it emerging from beta in to the cruel hard world of the Sony die-hards. The problem is that the lucky few who have been in and had a look around the closed beta are emerging completely unfazed and displeased with what they see.

A writer for Kotaku is amongst the latest to pay a visit and emerge to write a scathingly unexcited review of its contents. The reviewer basically summed up the experience by saying it’s nice in theory but crap in reality. And that is now, after over three years of development time, and just a few months away from the rumoured open beta release date of Fall 2008.

At this stage you have to wonder whether the whole thing is even worth bothering with. The next Playstation 3 Firmware update v2.40, set to arrive in time for E3 in July, is going to have XMB and Trophies included, and that will provide pretty much everything PS3 fans have been asking for. Whether they will actually be bothered with the chance to have an avatar of themselves walking around a slow-loading, always out-of-date environment isn’t clear.

The big problem for Sony now is that Playstation Home has been in development for so Goddamn long, and promised so much hope for PS3 owners sick of getting it in the neck from their Xbox 360 owning buddies, that it now cannot fail to disappoint upon arrival.

Unless Sony includes naked women walking around the virtual environments come Fall, then I can’t see anyone being overly enamoured with the sure-to-disappoint Home.

http://gamer.blorge.com/2008/06/25/playstation-home-if-it-ever-appears-on-ps3-will-it-be-worth-the-wait/

I thought this was an interesting article, especially given these guys tend to lean towards favouring the PS3 at the expense of other consoles (especially the Wii which they seem to despise).