Community is everything
While big businesses are still breathlessly trying to work out ways of cashing in on internet community success stories like MySpace, Facebook and Flickr, Sony has been hard at work creating the first entirely interactive online community withHome. It took precedence at the E3 press briefing with Kaz Hirai, Jack Tretton and Phil Harrison all showing of their online avatars in various hyper real designer bachelor pads.
Further extensions of Home's capabilities included the ability to send pictures taken on you mobile phone to your Home living space, the ability to boot directly into online games from your virtual console and the opportunity for game publishers to create game specific "pavilions" (presumably at a cost).
It all seems exciting, accessible, fully integrated and truly hi-tech in the demos, but we can't help but wonder how effective it'll be with the weight of thousands of PS3 users bearing down on it. We've got images of us cursing lost connections, incompatibility and stuttering loading screens while we wait to be kicked out of another girl's bedroom.
And while we're at it, Home will always be a community owned, policed and sold into by a major corporation (that's Sony). You only have to look at what happened to MySpace when News International took control - the kids got fed up with relentless advertising and moved in droves to the refreshingly un-corporate (for the moment) Facebook. Sure we'll get an avatar and wonder the streets of Home Town, but how strong will Sony resist the pull of the advertising pound? And will we have to push past tens of street salesmen hawking us games and peripherals on our way to the Killzone 2 pavillion?
