In a recent interview with GamesIndustry, Sony’s Jamie MacDonald discussed the online network/virtual world Home, and how it would be delivered to the public. As it turns out, October will not be a full-scale launch of the service, but more of an expansion of the current beta.
MacDonald answered GI’s questions about the service in a very vague way, but it was enough to let the gaming community know that they won’t be going Home anytime soon:
When do you intend to release Home to the public?
Well that’s the interesting thing. One of the challenges that we have is to get over the mentality of Home being your typical product launch. In the past we’d make a game, put it on a disc and launch it in the shops. But this is so different. It’s already out there in a closed beta and we’re going to an open beta in the next couple of months and then it will be available on the Cross Media Bar soon after. But it’s a constantly evolving thing. Week by week and month by month it evolves. There isn’t going to be this big bang launch. That’s how you do it in the Web 2.0 world, if you’re familiar with the launch of Gmail or something like that.
Are you going to have an open beta for everyday PlayStation 3 users?
At the moment the closed beta is employees, trusted third-parties and people like that. An open beta will be a wider audience but it won’t be open to everybody. We haven’t worked out the exact way of doing it but it will be invites to people to ask if they want to be part of it, and then depending on what the response is, we’ll have to have some way of deciding who can and who can’t take part.
