PS3 'PlayStation Home' launches fall '07, confirms NY Times
The New York Times has confirmed rumors that Sony will today reveal "PlayStation Home," an online service for PlayStation 3. The news was leaked by an anonymous senior game industry executive who was not authorized to discuss the service. Besides the confirmation, scant details suggest that PlayStation Home will apparently blend elements of Xbox 360's Gamertags and Wii's Miis, namely 'achievements' and 'virtual avatars'; PlayStation Home will allegedly allow "users to create persisting online identities that record players' achievements in different games," reports NY Times. "As players progress through a game, they will unlock various virtual prizes that they can then show off to friends and rivals," said the anonymous source. PlayStation Home is currently scheduled to launch in the US this fall.
While expected to disclose full details during a GDC keynote later today, Sony's Phil Harrison briefly detailed the new initiative -- er,Game 3.0 -- in a statement published by NY Times: "The packaged media approach on its own offers a closed experience," he said. "You can only enjoy the game experience that the game developer put on that disc. But with the increase in adoption for the Internet and also the increased bandwidth, the Internet has democratized the audience to become content creators, as well as content consumers, and create what I call emergent entertainment. We've seen that with things like MySpace and YouTube and Flickr. Now we want to take those kinds of collaborative experiences and make them more central to the gameplay experience."
