So James, on a scale of 1–10 how excited are you about PlayStation Home, the virtual world for PS3 users?
Next question, please.
You’re not excited? The blogosphere is goobing out about it.
Goobing out is the blogosphere’s job. PS Home is a virtual world for console-games players, with no provision for player-generated content and houses that you can only customise by giving money to Sony. It is the wrong product for the PS3, which will mostly be bought by people who want to either play games or watch Blu-ray DVDs. It will be heavily policed to remove any of the kind of activity that drives Second Life. It will be stuffed with ’dynamic advertising’. It will be ten tons of pain to use without a keyboard. In short, eh.
This is Sony’s first attempt to do a game based in a primarily social world, and remember we’re talking Sony, the company that couldn’t work out how to give a Star Wars MMORPG any longevity, for heaven’s sake. If it was Nintendo I’d say they’d probably pull it off: they have the right experience and the right audience. Judging by sales charts Playstation players like sports sims, EA racing-game franchises, wrestling games, shooting people in the face and then teabagging them. They are not going to spend time in a nice virtual world just because it’s there. They are not community-oriented gamers, and even if they are this isn’t the kind of community they’re looking for.
I don’t think that Second Life has anything to fear. This is not Second Life on the PS3. It’s Habbo Hotel with 3D graphics, and if there’s one thing Habbo Hotel doesn’t need it’s 3D graphics.
I have to agree that Home doesn’t look like something that would interest me. But LittleBigPlanet, that looks really really fun.
It’s seriously denting my resolve to not buy a PS3, not that I can afford one right now.
Little Big Planet… the video looks lovely but I watched it with one of the guys from Linden Labs (YKWYA) and we were both wondering if there’s any “there” there. Strip off the visual gorgeousness and it boils down to a 2D platformer construction set: those have been around for decades and I don’t think that the collaborative aspects and real-world physics really make that much difference. We’ve had net-distributed user-generated levels before too, notably for Doom and Quake, and the vast majority of them were uninteresting (edit: replaced my previous curmugeonly descriptor “unplayable”).
The one thing that’s essential in a game like that seemed to be missing: the ability to pick up items and whack other players with them.
To be honest, when I heard about it I was hoping it was a sequel to Little Big Adventure
(Edited to remove jetlag-induced lousy grammar.)
You may have a point. And the wife is putting her foot down on my plans to but a PS3 any time soon anyhow.
I’m too busy waiting for Spore anyway.