Going into overtime: Sony working hard to hit open beta date for Home

During the London Games Festival, it was clarified that Sony is targeting the end of the year for PlayStation Home‘s open beta. Jamie MacDonald, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, expressed confidence that they will meet the target date and that things were going well so far.

Entering into the home stretch for 2008, Sony talked about the status of the PlayStation Home during the London Games Festival.

Although there was much speculation that Home’s open beta would be out by the end of October (to coincide with the release of Home version 1.00 and PS3 firmware 2.50), it was clarified that Sony is actually targeting the end of the year for their open beta.

Jamie MacDonald, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, said that, “It’s going very well. The guys are madly working to make sure that date is hit, and it’s going very well.”

Home is the PSN community’s virtual gathering ground not unlike Second Life in form and function. The origin of such an elaborated social tool was explained by MacDonald during the same conference:

The reason why we even started developing that (PS3 Home) was really a frustration a few years ago that the online experience for most games players was geeky, tedious and short. Certainly in my experience, I got into a first person shooter online and I lasted about 15 seconds. It’s not much fun. So that was really our driving force with Home, to provide an environment where it’s fun to go, you can hang out with like-minded people and talk about games, play games, have a look at the leaderboards, but in an environment that was game centred but not just for these teenage boys, who are fine, but they enjoy very much shooting people, which is fine.

• PlayStation Home appears on PSN registration page
• PlayStation Home v1.0 hitting closed beta, invites available from Qore next month
  
• PlayStation Home: PS3 FW 2.5, Home 1.0 hinted; closed beta extended

Via Videogamer