PlayStation Home Core Users are Gamers

Key members of the development team behind PlayStation Home have suggested that people's expectations of the service may be ahead of what it will actually provide at launch.

Speaking in an interview, Ron Festejo, creative director of Home, said of conversations with Home's potential business partners, “It is just about managing expectations, right, because we're showing them what Home is right now, but in their minds, they see what Home is five to seven years from now.”

The message about “managing expectations” was a recurring theme throughout the interview.

Speaking about the actual potential users of the service, Festejo said that in demos gamers were seeing things they were surprised weren't on the PS3 already. “Our core audience are the people that are there with the PlayStation 3 – the gamers”, he said.

“So in that sense, we are managing their expectations. The feature that we've been displaying recently was 'game launching' which is absolutely an expectation, and from what we've showed, people were quite surprised that it wasn't something that was available on the PlayStation 3 before. For them to see that working within home is really good.”

Festejo was keen to point out that Home will continuously evolve, saying that the service won't be limited to one platform. “We don't see this as being tied to a particular console. We see this as tied into the PlayStation Network; with every console iteration, the online portion of that will only get bigger and bigger. I think Home is there to stay, and it's a great project to work on when you can see the kind of areas it'll go on to expand to.”

Beyond that, John Venables, Lead Artist on Home, also discussed how Home will emerge beyond the PS3. “Home will eventually touch other areas; I think we've just got to make sure we find the right kinds of experiences that tie it to the core client”, he said. “Personally, I don't want to see something released on PSP that doesn't really replicate the experience that you have on PS3. But it's about thinking about those right experiences with the core client and how it adds value to that; absolutely, it's something that'll be considered in the future.”

Both Festejo and Venables seem very keen to focus on how Home will change over time. If that sounds like cover for a thin service, however, it might be worth reading how Home started life four years ago and thinking about how far it has come from there. “...Originally it was some online technology for another one of our franchises that we were looking at. There was a small team – a handful of people - who looked at that technology and prototyped some things up on the PS2. It was more like an R&D project, almost”, said Venables.

^{Source: IGN}