I think that Home would be nice.....IF
-They upgrade things like avatar anamations to make them look a bit more lifelike than just figures with their arms at side
-They add enough freebies, like Sony's music playing around the place, enough movies being played in the theatre, old reruns of serials that Sony owns such as Seinfeld, etc
-Sony successfully integrates advertising within the Home service. The majority of the users will be HS, college and the tweens. Will they be able to not only find companies that want to advertise to these markets, but be able to get enough $$$ to make the Home service cost-effective? What kinds of things would gamers want to buy? Energy drinks? Sneakers? Maxim? Secondly, will Sony be able to find advertisng for its movies that it plans to play? So, the very act of Sony bringing $$$ in from Home would probably encourage them to add a lot more onto the service. Perhaps, with a good enough marketing effort, Sony could come close to breaking even eventually from all of this, not to mention the increased sales that sony will be getting from the advertising that they will be able to do for BD movies, upcoming games, dig cameras, etc.
-Better games. I realize that to some extent that Home is being purposefully limited by the addition of PSP being a device to play Home from. With the PSP's smaller and cheaper CPU, that will limit what Home can do for the PC and PS3 crowd, as Sony won't want the PSP consumers to have a bad playing experience. But, has Sony at least looked at making the PSP home people stay by themselves so that the PS3/PC Home people aren't limited by what a handheld can handle?
-Sony sponsored and inspired activity. Remember, the whole point of Home to have an interactive experience that console gaming lacks at the moment. They need to make Home a social area if possible. What about Sony hosting something like a trivia contest once in a while? What about other contests or things to get people to come to Home? What about Sony bringing in a celebrity with a cool kind of image to take a few questions which would later be put on a youtube video? I could see keanu reeves or brad pitt or mabey even that chick from the 5th element coming on. If celebrities are cool enough to do this, then hopefully other people might get interested in checking Home out.
It would be cool to put in a randomly generated power-up kind of thing that would actually be a coupon for a free BD movie or whatever. That would get the people using Home to hang around and mabey get into the whole Home thing.
