Last week Sony’s Playstation Home finally emerged from its cave into an open beta for all Sony PS3 owners. Over 1.5 years after its initial unveiling at GDC 2007 and in development supposedly from 2005, Sony Home is still highly unfinished. It’s still under development. There are features that will be added in the upcoming weeks and month that will surely improve its current state. Someday even it may move from beta into a glorious 1.0 (or equivalent) state.
But even then, I’m sure Home would be terrible. Just like how Home is terrible right now. True, it may be less terrible than its current state of complete and utter pointlessness. With the addition of promised features like trophy rooms, a variety of minigames (as opposed to the single digits right now), and additional accessories to personalize your avatar and virtual spaces Home may even approach being something vaguely useful when one is bored and only has access to a PS3 with an internet connection.
And it’s not just me who has been turned off Playstation Home. Tycho at Penny-Arcade has posted his own scathing review of Home. The editors at IGN PS3 have found Home underwhelming. And the general response over the internet on forums like NeoGAF have been less than wonderful.
The execution of Home has been abysmal. Ignoring the current server problems that are expected anytime a new persistent online world scales up radically, there’s a dearth of features and content originally promised by Sony for Home. The ability to customize your avatar to fit your own style means nothing when there are so few clothing choices. The ability to pimp your apartment/villa/condo means nothing when the number of furniture pieces to decorate your home reside in the single digits. And Home simply isn’t fun right now to hang out in since there’s nothing to do. The few games that are available are primitive and simplistic. And its hurt by the addition of virtual scarcity (as bemoaned in the Penny-Arcade post) where the number of bowling lanes and pool tables and arcade machines are limited. Waiting in a real line in the real world is never fun and certainly waiting in a virtual line in a virtual world is even less.
But Home isn’t bad just because of poor execution. If that was merely the case then Home could possibly be something fun and useful in the far future. Home is a terrible piece of software because it fails conceptually. At the design level Sony’s development team completely bungled the job.
Games and software products need to have one or two compelling features to drive the purpose of the product. Having a clear purpose gives people a reason to try it and developers are benchmark to achieve. Home is an example of a product that has no single defining purpose. Is it a social network app? It fails to match the quality of anything like Facebook or even a MySpace. There’s no ability to clearly define and discuss your interests and share them in a simple manner. Is it a virtual chat tool? Well, conversations are awkward with text and voice chat suffers from having too many people and griefers privy to conversations. Is it a place to help push games? Game rooms are nice enough, but so far the incentives to make them interesting are low and they don’t sell the features games in any interesting manner. Is it a place to show off your gaming achievements? Well, when trophies are not even uniformly supported and the trophy room is completely missing in action in the current build of Home says otherwise.
Home does none of these things competently. So instead it tries to do all of them at the same time while mixing in an utterly crass attempt to monetize the entire world and slather everything in marketing. The end result is as jumbled and confused as one might expect. All of these features in their current state are half-implemented afterthoughts that aren’t worth the time and effort to utilize. Home from the get go is neutered.
Home is still incomplete. The absence of basic promised features is baffling. Yet even with those features patched in over time, the kinks worked out, and the entire experience improved Home would still be a boring product. Every facet of the game feels devoid of soul and meaning right down to the glassy-eyed avatars. Until Sony and Home itself can justify its own existence in a compelling way then I see little reason why gamers and consumers need to waste their time with this terrible experience.
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