About 18 months in the making, Home is Sony’s “Hail Mary” play in the console battle with Nintendo and Microsoft. It will test whether gamers really want a layer of social networking served on top of the games they play on the PlayStation 3 game console. By contrast, Microsoft and Nintendo believe that gamers might talk to each other via cute little characters. But Sony has built a full-blown virtual online space. The graphics of the characters look good. But they don’t really move their lips or express themselves physically; that’s something that will change over time.
Susan Panico, senior director of the PlayStation Network at Sony’s U.S. game division in Foster City, Calif., said that Sony isn’t the first to market, but it has a big opportunity with Home because consumers already trust the Sony name. While Home could have been many things, Sony decided to focus the content around playing games and the culture around them, said Jack Buser, director of Home for the U.S. game division.Read it here
