Despite 3.4 million downloads, PlayStation Home announced too early
The new virtual world we've written about at Massively, PlayStation Home, seems to have garnered itself a large user base despite getting off to a rocky start. Kaz Hirai of Sony Computer Entertainment mentioned in his Consumer Electronics Show speech that 3.4 million PlayStation 3 users have downloaded Home. It was, however, announced too early according to key members of the Home team in an interview with Develop.
Announcing Home back at the 2007 Game Developer's Conference had the effect of stoking the interest of third parties (not to mention gamers and virtual world residents), but there was no where to run with their projects, given the early stage of Home's development at that time. Indeed, Home's Game Director Peter Edward feels that initially some developers were reluctant to get involved, but that situation is beginning to change. Edward says, "The feedback we've been getting is that, in the early days, it was a bit thin on the ground in terms of support and tools, but now it's mature and everybody's starting to produce some really interesting stuff."
Also worth noting is what Lead Programmer Mitch Goodwin has to say about Home's origins."Originally it was a lobby interface for The Getaway: Black Monday on PS2 -- that was the original goal of it. The decision at the time was that there wasn't enough of a PS2 online userbase to justify it, so we were kind of left to explore and take this idea of a lobby system forward," he says.
Check out the full interview at Develop for more on the shortcomings and successes of PlayStation Home, straight from the devs themselves.
[Via Eurogamer]
