Home

Redigerat av londonjohan, 12 mars 2007 - 10:44.

Home explained

We put some questions to Sony about Home, one of the main revelations of Phil Harrison’s keynote speech at GDC. Here’s the substantial set of answers we got back…

First up, here’s some key points about Home that they provided us with:

• Is the first of its kind on a computer entertainment console
• A unique blend of community, user-generated content, collaboration and commerce that is the future of computer entertainment.
• Will broaden the online community market in the same way that the PlayStation brand has broadened the gaming market
• Will take the mystery and the geekiness out of online interaction, and make it as easy as text messaging or picking up the phone
• Is inclusive and welcoming, not exclusive and daunting like current offerings
• Is the gateway and start point for a whole raft of future PlayStation Network services

Can you define Home for us?
“Home is a real-time online 3D, networked community available on PS3 and the Network. It allows PS3 users to interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share private content and even build and show off their own personal spaces to others in real time. Home will be available as a free download from the PlayStation Store and will launch directly from the XMB (XrossMediaBar) on PS3.”

Why are you creating this service?
“The power of PS3 and the Network afford us the opportunity to create a unique user service that will define the future of community on computer entertainment platforms. We feel it is important to foster not only user-interaction, but increased, ongoing contact between users, first and third party publishers and other partners.”

What’s the cost?
“Home is free to download and free to use. The user will be able to purchase items from the Store (Home supports the Playstation wallet) to further customise their Home Space, as well as make purchases from other third party partners.”

Is it global?
“Yes, when it launches Home will be a global network service.”

And when is it launching?
“We will be executing a closed beta this spring. The official launch date will be later this year.”

What languages will it support?
“It will support multiple languages including Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Because it is a network service, it is easy to extend the language support in the future after the initial beta trial. In the full service, we will support local languages consistent with the way we localise our game titles.”

What’s your ambition with Home?
“The ambition is to create a highly interactive 3D environment that will bring millions of people together from around the globe to share common interests, build friendships and explore the world of SCE PlayStation.”

Here’s some key aspects:
HOME Space
• Design and build your own apartment, house or even neighbourhood.
• Purchase new landscapes, apartments and furniture
World
• Purchase new clothing sets, pets and accessories for your character
• Purchase functional items to add value to your private Home experience
• Leave your mark on the world with premium player-created content tools.
Entertainment
• Share photos, movies and music from your PS3 HDD with friends in your personal space.
Gaming
• Meeting game-specific lobbies to discuss games, get new content or team up for online gameplay
Lobbies
• Individual lobbies created by first and third parties allow for consumer interaction, commerce

But isn’t Home a rip-off of Xbox Live?
“Home is a first of its kind 3D community that allows for open interaction between consumers, SCE and third party partners. It is a truly interactive, global community of users. Xbox Live is a static, 2D, text-heavy environment that can’t match the rich community features found in Home. Xbox Live community interaction is much more passive and limited to the members on that friend’s list.”

Sounds a bit like Second Life?
“Home is a much more rich, user friendly experience than Second Life, allowing for ease of entry and use, as well as being fully-functional with the technology and capabilities of PS3.”

And how are you going to make money from it?
“The business model for Home is based on a combination of ecommerce and advertising revenue, but we will not discuss the exact details of our business model.”

Can third party partners get involved?
“They’ll be able to build their own custom lobbies for their products, where they can present information to users, provide downloadable content and implement various ecommerce models. Advertising options will also be made available through Home, in addition to sponsorship of in-world events and Home real estate.”

What is the difference between Home and PS Store?
“Home is a real-time online 3D, networked community available on the Network, while the Store offers free and premium digital goods delivered directly to your PS3.”

How big is the Home download?
“The Home download is targeted to be under 500 MBs.”

More of this to follow in a second piece. Images/videos also set to follow.

Redigerat av Unregistereddc471864, 07 mars 2007 - 23:03.

jag undrar hur bio funktionen kommer fungera?
Kommer man kunna köpa en biobiljett i home och sedan gå in i biosalongen och sen se filmen i fullskärm eller vad?

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jag undrar hur bio funktionen kommer fungera?
Kommer man kunna köpa en biobiljett i home och sedan gå in i biosalongen och sen se filmen i fullskärm eller vad?

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Antagligen ja. Som att gå på bio fast man stannar hemma och slipper alla mobiltelefoner och prasslande påsar

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jag undrar hur bio funktionen kommer fungera?
Kommer man kunna köpa en biobiljett i home och sedan gå in i biosalongen och sen se filmen i fullskärm eller vad?

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Antagligen ja. Som att gå på bio fast man stannar hemma och slipper alla mobiltelefoner och prasslande påsar

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Är det någon mer än jag som undrar om man får ha några vapen i Home?

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Modsen kanske. De får beställningsjobb på offer som inte sköter sig. Permban så kanske man blir offentligt avrättad av MIB. Tempban så får man sitta inlåst på sitt hrum...

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Redigerat av Zoiler, 08 mars 2007 - 00:13.

Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 08 mars 2007 - 23:47.

Undrar hur mycket censur Sony kommer ha i Home.

Kommer det tex vara möjligt att hänga upp massa bilder på Mohammed på väggarna?
Kommer man kunna hänga upp feta porrbilder, spela upp porr på displayerna?

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Redigerat av Zebra, 09 mars 2007 - 22:11.

Sony's Playstation HOME service has only just been announced, but it seems it has been in the works for a long time. There have been reports that it has been in development for two years or more. This post from 2005 confirms that Sony was working on this way before Wii's Mii social network was announced:

"SCEA and SOE are developing MMORPG(something similiar to ffxi) style online service for PS3 right now. It will have online pack which it comes with HDD and the online software. You can go online and chat with people like mmorpg style. Your stats will have the list of games you have and scores(or ranks) for each game, and other great things. And if you want to look for someone to play online for certain game, you have to go to this certain area(or town) for that specific game or the game will automatically takes you to that town. Sony thinks "hyper links" technology is a history. They want to create a "virtual world" for PS3 online service where people can actually interact eachother like mmorpg style. There are more great details, but this is all I can get for now. I'm not expecting you to believe me"

Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 10 mars 2007 - 16:53.

Det är synd att det bara går att ha en avatar per PS3. Om flera spelar PS3 i familjen vore det ju roligt om var och en kunde skapa sin egen identitet i HOME.

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i framtiden så vi får se en offentlig avrättning av Hummi... diverse forumiter  ?

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Det är synd att det bara går att ha en avatar per PS3. Om flera spelar PS3 i familjen vore det ju roligt om var och en kunde skapa sin egen identitet i HOME.

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Ja det är ju helt klart en betydande begränsning. Vart har du läst att det enbart gäller ett "home" per maskin och inte per användare?

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Jag läste det i faq:en som det länkas till i första inlägget i den här tråden.

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Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 11 mars 2007 - 20:01.

Redigerat av Fredag, 11 mars 2007 - 20:49.

Aha, hur lyckades jag missa den? 

Q: How many Home avatars can I have?
A: The current plan is for each user to have one avatar.

Man kan väl ha flera users, och således flera avatarer?

What’s the function of the lobby and what is the maximum number of users that can be in a lobby?
“The lobby is the central meeting place where you can meet new friends or arrange to meet old friends, before transferring to a private meeting place. The current maximum of concurrent users in a lobby is 64.”

So how do you make sure friends are present in the same space?
“You can invite them via your friends list or invite them to your personal Home space.”

How will we all go about finding people within the Home world?
“We will have search functions for finding people online and offline, and for finding lobbies.”

Will you create lobbies by countries/regions?
“Yes, although users can choose where they want to go.”

How many avatars can I have?
“The current plan is for each Network account to be able to build one avatar, although you can have as many accounts as you like, giving you endless avatar options. Home is the human face of PlayStation Network, and your avatar is how you represent yourself. However, it will be possible to change your appearance, through customising your character and adding accessories, so you’ll be able to constantly re-invent yourself should you so desire.”

And I’ll be able to customise my avatar?
“Avatars are fully customisable with different facial features, height, weight, sex, hair styles, clothing, accessories, etc.”

What about using game characters as my avatar? Or can I use photo data to personalise my avatar (such as using photo data as the skin for my avatar’s face)?
“Not initially - however, we will extend the variety and selection of characters over time, including game characters and pets. Photo data is not supported at this time - however, the face customisation is very detailed and allows an almost infinite variety of faces to be created.”

Can you enter a game like MotorStorm quickly through Home without having to travel to the specific MotorStorm lobby?
“Currently, users can find each other in Home, and then arrange to go off and play MotorStorm at the same time. Eventually, users will be able to meet in Home and seamlessly launch into a game of MotorStorm. Similarly, users will be able to exit to Home directly from the game.”

What about the Hall Of Fame rewards - how are they going to work?
“Users receive points for in-game achievements. More details regarding this will be made available closer to launch.”

What is the policy on acceptable behaviour?
“Within our public spaces, Home follows the same rules and guidelines as the Network with regard to age stipulations and acceptable behaviour. Home uses all the same age controls as the PS3 system software. Private spaces will not be monitored unless abuses or violations to our policies are reported by a user.”

Will we be able to make complaints about other users?
“Of course. We will operate a system of logging complaints with our moderators, which will then be investigated. If necessary we are able to take away a user’s login rights and ban them from the service.”

How much freedom will people have in their private spaces?
“Our policy is not to actively police private areas, and a user cannot be invited to another user’s private space until they have accepted an invitation to be on their buddy list. However, the complaints process will still operate in these private spaces, so if people feel that they have been subjected to inappropriate behaviour while in someone’s private space, they will be able to lodge a complaint by the usual process.”

What means of moderation will be in place for abusive language?
“We will have a basic text profanity filter, though, as noted above, text and voice will be turned off for users not of age.”

“The lobby is the central meeting place where you can meet new friends or arrange to meet old friends, before transferring to a private meeting place. The current maximum of concurrent users in a lobby is 64.”

“The lobby is the central meeting place where you can meet new friends or arrange to meet old friends, before transferring to a private meeting place. The current maximum of concurrent users in a lobby is 64.”

Med ett max antal på 64 användare per lobby så måste det finns fler tusen lobbys, hur vet man att man hamnar i rätt lobby så man kan träffa sina polare tro?

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So how do you make sure friends are present in the same space?
“You can invite them via your friends list or invite them to your personal Home space.”

How will we all go about finding people within the Home world?
“We will have search functions for finding people online and offline, and for finding lobbies.”

Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 12 mars 2007 - 14:25.

Ska bli spännande det här. Man kanske borde försöka ta sig in i closed-beta testet.

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Jag tror att detta kommer att känns trångt när typ hela europa ska vara inne i en värld samtidigt men man får ju se när man testar de men det ser ju bra ut=)

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Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 14 mars 2007 - 19:05.

Från och med att Home visades upp (7 Mars) tills idag så har Home-trailern laddats hem 623,916 gånger från gametrailers.com, plus 119,228 av samma trailer fast i HD.

Inte illa...

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Otroligt hype'at. Återstår att se om det är ngt att ha. Hade dock hellre sett integration av friendslist mellan alla spel samt voicechat. Men det kanske kommer det också.

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De flesta spel verkar dessutom inte ha några listor.

Redigerat av Unregisteredf64a5233, 19 mars 2007 - 10:12.

Nej. Då måste man avsluta spelet först.

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Q: Home looks great, but it begs a few questions. Presumably there will be moderation, at least in the public spaces?

PH: Exactly right. Public spaces will be moderated, and we’ll use the same rules of parental control as we do for the PlayStation Network, so parents can control whether people have access to the network or not. Then, in the private spaces, it’s unmoderated - exactly in the same way that you can send an e-mail to somebody with an attachment on it, or you could have a video chat with somebody.

Q: In terms of some of the actions you can do within the world, presumably there’s no adult content there?

PH: Well, it’s absolutely deliberate that there is no physical impact between characters, between avatars. We are going to have animations that will allow you to shake somebody’s hand or to have some social touch but in a very, you know, appropriate way. But no, we’re not going to have ‘those’ kind of animations that I’m imagining that you’re thinking about.

Q: What about uploading porn from your PS3’s hard-disk to your private space? And maybe inviting people you don’t necessarily know back and them being slightly offended by what they see, then going to a moderator?

PH: Well I’m disappointed that you would use those as the first questions. I think Home should be used for a much wider and more beneficial scope than that, but I think that people can express their creativity inside Home in a wide variety of ways and it’s not necessarily for us to dictate what that should be. However, if somebody feels uncomfortable about an encounter on Home, it’s very easy for them to ban that person from their friends list…

Q: So if people offend you, you’ll be able to blacklist them?

PH: Your friends list is here just the same way as it is on the PlayStation network, it appears inside the virtual PSP and you can make all the same changes to it.

Q: Is there an area where you can just get a list of all the things you want to go to in Home without having to physically walk to all the areas?

PH: You’ve got shortcuts which are built into the virtual PSP. You’ll be able to go to what — this is a working title – is called the World Map. this is just our internal model. This is still being worked on, but there’ll be search in here, there will be ways to filter, there will be ways to group, there will be ways to identify particular spaces that you want to go to. This will be a lot more sophisticated than what we’re showing at the moment – it was intended just to give a sense of a vast galaxy of connected spaces where you can find a new space and download it, check it out and, if you like it, it’s just like bookmarking a webpage. So you can dictate that the Socom barracks, or whatever, would be your landing point every time you come back into Home.

It’s exactly like a Web browser, but it has a very clever twist, in that when you create the bookmark, it renders a 3D screenshot of the place you were standing when you bookmarked it, and then the next time you come back into Home it will populate a list of favourites. When the service is up-and-running and new spaces are being added on a daily, or even hourly, basis, you’ll want to be able to check back into the world map to see the new spaces that have been added. There’ll be a sort, search and filter control over this, and your friends can also recommend spaces to you.

Q: In terms of the virtual cinema, you talked a lot about trailers, that kind of thing, will you be showing full films in there?

PH: No. The best place to show a film is running off the Cross Media Bar. But short clip content yes, user-created content definitely and possibly news and daily programming.

Q: But no TV shows?

PH: I wouldn’t say no TV shows, but I don’t think you would want to stand there for an hour watching a TV show when the best way is to watch it from the Cross Media Bar.

Q: But I assume that’ll be linked, if the film is available, on the online store, then there’ll be a one-click buy?

PH: That’s exactly the intention. You would be able to preview something in the preview theatre and then link to the store to be able to download it, exactly right.

Q: Do you think different types of PS3 owners will use Home in different ways, maybe hang out in different places? Can you give examples? I can see the hardcore guys sort of maybe spending more time in the private apartments than the public areas for example.

PH: Absolutely. We’re creating a platform, and populating that platform with a few content ideas ourselves, but ultimately we want to democratise it and allow anybody to build spaces in Home, and those would be the kind of extremes of experience that you would get on the platform anyway. There might be a SpongeBob space in Home, and there might be a Killzone space, and you know, everything in between. I think that when non-game brands come into the space as well and offer particular themed areas which appeal to particular groups of people – girls as well as boys, older people as well as younger people – then you’ll start to see that difference be more pronounced.

Q: Are you going to charge brands for having a space on Home?

PH: We’ve not made announcements on the specific business model, but the three basic sources of revenue for us are in advertising, in item sales, and what we loosely call B-to-B, selling opportunities to different brands, but I’m not going to go into any more details today on that.

Q: Will there be incentives for users to run adverts in their private apartments, like ‘run this ad, show it to your mates and we’ll give you something,’ say?

PH: We haven’t considered that, but it’s an interesting thought. In the last 48 hours since we’ve shared Home with the world, every time I sit down with somebody to have a discussion like this, the list of ideas gets longer and longer and longer, which is fantastic. That’s what resonates with me so strongly, the fact that we’ve got something here which has sparked everybody’s imagination.

Q: Are you going to allow players to set up their own online businesses? Selling, I don’t know, T-Shirts and that kind of thing.

PH: I think, if I’m imagining where that question’s coming from, in the kind of Second Life sense of the word, no. Because Second Life takes a very different approach. It’s all about user generated content, and doesn’t provide any content. We’re all about entertainment, we provide a lot of the framework for entertainment to take place in. Having said that, we do hope to offer some kind of user-to-user transactional elements in the future, but it won’t be day one.

Q: We were discussing outside the prospect of getting bigger apartments in Home and A) how much that might cost and whether you’d be able to get an extension to your apartment if you get a certain number of trophies, or something like that. Have you been thinking along those sorts of lines?

PH: Yeah, once again we’re not talking specifically at this moment but I’ll give you a general flavour of what we’re going to do, so here we’ve got a patio, but why not have a bigger patio, why not have a patio with a dock that goes down to the lake, and why not have…

Q: A Sunseeker?

PH: Yeah, or rather than an alpine mountain scene, why not have a desert island? There are lots of different ways that we can extend that; users will be able to extend their visual experience to customise their apartment through buying items from the store, by being given items through playing PlayStation 3 disk-based games or through items that we ourselves donate into the community.

Q: Regarding LittleBigPlanet, how much pre-made content will go out with it? And secondly, how important would a tutorial be, for example?

PH: We’re going to debut the product on the PlayStation Network first, as a commercial release, and then it’ll be on Blu-Ray disk in 2008 — hopefully early 2008 — and our goal is to be able to access some of the user-generated levels onto the disk when we sell it at retail. Maybe not the first version that we sell at retail, but future versions that we sell at retail can have user-aggregated content on them.

As far as a tutorial is concerned, I’m sure we’ll do something to make it easy for people to start off, but that’s also part of the interesting cross-over between Home and LittleBigPlanet; we could have a LittleBigPlanet space in Home where you can show expert user videos — imagine that in a classroom setting where you’ve got people sat down who are LittleBigPlanet designers and somebody going: “This is how you make boxes, this is how you make spheres, this is how you assign behaviours to them.” That’s really interesting.

Q: What’s the reward system going to be — what will you get if you make the number one played level?

PH: We’ve got some interesting ideas on that which we’ll share a little bit later, but we hope that star creators will be recognised and rewarded for their efforts.

Q: Maybe with jobs in the games industry?

PH: Why not? Why not? If that is one of the side benefits of what we do with LittleBigPlanet then I will be extremely happy, because that will help address some fundamental challenges that we have in training and creating new human resources to take our business forward.

Q: And I assume if your level is put on the Blu-ray disk you’ll be paid as well?

Q: Like I said, we’re not ready to talk about the specifics and I’d really prefer not to get drawn into that too much right now, but we’ve got some cool ideas.

Q: It seems to me the key to a game like that is finding out all the best things you can do that maybe not everyone else knows about?

PH: But that’s the great thing about the social element of audience-created content or user-created content. The fact that somebody makes an innovation, they upload it to the network and instantly everybody can see that innovation and it filters to the entire network. That’s the emergent entertainment that we’re most excited about, that we are not going to define, we’re not going to set the rules, so we’ll just see where people run with it.

Redigerat av Anti Turmoil, 25 mars 2007 - 19:31.

Sony har nu börjat att skicka ut inbjudningar till den stängda betan av sitt kommande 3D-community Home för Playstation 3.

Hittills är det dock enbart amerikaner som kan delta i betan. Det känns dock betryggande att Sony faktiskt verkar hålla schemat för Home-plattformen.

En kommande öppen beta av Home kommer med största sannolikhet att även inkludera oss här i Sverige.

Redigerat av Unregistered8147b14e, 02 maj 2007 - 20:46.