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SCEA confirms: PlayStation Home launch coming this month in US
We know you aren't going to believe it 'til you see it, but SCEA has confirmed to our brethren at Joystiq that PlayStation Home will hit the US market before 2009 dawns. In the words of PS Home director Jack Buser: "We've been saying it will launch by the end of calendar year 2008, and that's getting very, very close." He continued by affirming that "launch is imminent," but stopped short of giving us a date to mark down in our calendars. Tick, tock.
Cinemassively: The Future of Virtual Worlds
Forget for a minute that this is an advertisement for the virtual worlds development company, Millions of Us. It's also a great video that discusses the future of these emerging platforms. Narrated by Reuben Steiger, the CEO of MoU, we're taken on a journey through the three major past, present, and future developments in virtual worlds this year. From Sony's Home, to Google Lively, all the way to in-browser worlds embedded on your Facebook pages, the road ahead is pretty exciting![Thanks, Eric!]If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.
The war of words for Sony's PlayStation Home and Second Life users begins
Ron Festejo is hardly an unbiased observer, being the creative director of the Sony project that is bringing PlayStation Home out next week, but in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz he explains that, in his opinion Home is the best looking and most user-friendly multiplayer experience he's seen so far.Apparently Second Life is "too garish" and the rest of the MMOs are "too hardcore." Second Life users (we're not players after all) are also too geeky, and Mr. Festejo doesn't think there will be much to interest Second Lifers. Of course I'm happy to be called a geek, and not owning a playstation I won't be checking out PlayStation Home, but what do you think? Do you need to be a geek to cope with Second Life, or is he just aiming at a "cool kids" market? He probably does need to go and read the minimum specs for Second Life page mind: whilst Second Life runs on a much greater range of engines than just PlayStations, he is exaggerating saying it has to support people on Pentium II's.
GDC 08: Entertainment content convergence in online worlds
We spent most of Monday ensconced in the GDC Worlds in Motion summit track, which made "standing room only" seem extremely spacious -- most of the sessions were packed to the gills and then some. It seems like more than a few industry types are interested in the intersections between gaming and virtual worlds. Case in point, the following session we've paraphrased (hopefully not too liberally!) from Reuben Steiger, CEO of Milllions of Us, a company that builds marketing campaigns and content for virtual worlds. Reuben: Storytelling is the bedrock of human culture. (Looking at a slide with a real campfire on the left and a user-created campfire in Second Life on the right) -- users in virtual worlds are recreating this storytelling tradition. I'm going to make a contention: the internet has failed as a storytelling medium. Instead, the norm is bathroom humor and ridiculous jokes. So virtual worlds: are they games or not? What defines a game -- linguists and semioticians get real worked up about it. The audience might say "virtual worlds are games without rules, competition, goals or fun." And it's hard to blame them. Extreme openness has defined virtual worlds, where fun can be in a way you define as opposed to what some game developer feels is fun. But the appeal of virtual worlds is that we can tell stories on a broader and less walled playing field.
Without a clue - why there isn't more competition for Second Life
Actually there's quite a few reasons that there's little competition to Second Life in existance or planned - at least the sort of competition that a Second Life user would think of as a competitor to Second Life (hint: They don't think TSO is, or Kaneva, or Red Light Center, or Project Entropia or IMVU. Many don't count Active Worlds or There as competition either). One of those reasons is that even people who think they're in the same industry or who are pundits and commentators on the industry don't have any idea what Second Life is. They don't use it, so they don't know what people are getting out of it. So when they come to build a 'Second Life Killer', they build something that does not (as far as the average user of Second Life can see) have much of anything that competes.
