No Place Like Home

There are three key software titles pushing Sony's online networking initiatives for the PlayStation 3. LittleBigPlanet, SingStar and Home are not only the most anticipated titles for consumers, but flagship projects that should allow Sony to prove to the industry what online console entertainment can achieve.

While SingStar's potential for micro transactions and personalisation is as obvious as it is exciting, and Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet looks to be one of the most charming and original games for consoles in years, it's Home that will be scrutinised and picked apart. The potential it holds as a social environment, online gaming space and business outlet is immense, with even Sony itself admitting it's an ambitious project the likes of which it hasn't attempted before.

Here, GamesIndustry.biz talks to Jamie MacDonald, vice president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, to discuss the scale of Home and the challenges it's throwing at the company on a week by week basis.

Jamie MacDonald: It was really about putting some sort of context to the network initiatives that we're doing at London Studio for the PlayStation Network and focusing really on these "four C's" that we describe as community, competition, creativity and commerce. And how SingStar PS3 and PlayStation Home address those four areas and what that means to the consumer, the publisher and the wider commercial environment.

Yes I think we are. These things are described as revolutionary but they're more of an evolution. The disc-based business for PlayStation 3 will continue to be far and away the biggest part of our business for sometime to come. But we're really excited by these initiatives into the online network space because we can talk all we like about what the future will bring and all about digitally delivered content, but unless you provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms then it's not going to happen. With SingStar for the PS3 and PlayStation Home that's what we're doing. It's the beginning of a journey.

I don't think there's a finite number of consumers. There will always be the guys who love playing their football games and fighting games but I think what we have demonstrated with the social gaming products that we've brought out like EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz is that they expand and broaden the market and bring more people in to the PlayStation world. And I think it's going to be the same, if not more so, with these social network products. There's a real appetite for these kinds of products.

We're immensely proud of being involved in the early, on-going development of the social gaming genre with EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz, and other products such as Guitar Hero and Wii Sports have built on that. Our brief as an internal studio is to go on to the next big thing — we'll continue to support PS2 and disc-based social games, but with PlayStation Home and SingStar PS3 we want to move onto the next exciting thing. We're trying to bring to life the next big trend in gaming.

What's the biggest challenge? Well, how long have you got? It's all immensely challenging in the way you've just said yourself — it's never been done before. But also from our point of view it's never been attempted by us internally. At Sony Computer Entertainment what we do historically is we build hardware platforms, and that takes a lot of engineers and a lot of time and investment. What we're doing with Home is essentially a new software platform, and that's never been done at either Sony or anywhere else. So that's the really challenging aspect.

The actual consumer experience itself is probably the least challenging part because essentially it's doing the kind of stuff that we know how to do. It's a virtual 3D world where players explore and play, so it's just an extension of what games already are. The challenging thing is establishing the infrastructure like the grief reporting procedures and building and developing relationships with publishers and other brands within Home.

It's more high profile because it's a Sony PlayStation initiative. And we are describing it as a safe place to go. It's not going to be the like the Wild West in internet terms. I'm a great supporter and believer in having a Wild West aspect to the Web, but Home isn't that. It's a challenge to make sure we create an environment that's safe for users and safe commercially for our publisher partners.

PlayStation Home, as its name suggests, is something which enhances the experience of the PlayStation 3. I would like to think that it might be one of a number of reasons why a consumers might buy a PlayStation 3 in the first place. But the most important thing is that once a consumer has bought a PS3, an always on and connected right out of the box machine, Home becomes part of that good consumer experience. And a PS3 is cheaper than a lot of PCs anyway.

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.

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.