Interviews// Sony's Phil Harrison - Beyond Home

SPOnG: Are you going to charge brands for having a space on Home?

Phil Harrison: We’ve not made announcements on the specific business model, but the three basic sources of revenue for us are in advertising, in item sales, and what we loosely call B-to-B, selling opportunities to different brands, but I’m not going to go into any more details today on that.

SPOnG: Will there be incentives for users to run adverts in their private apartments, like ‘run this ad, show it to your mates and we’ll give you something,’ say?

Phil Harrison: We haven’t considered that, but it’s an interesting thought. In the last 48 hours since we’ve shared Home with the world, every time I sit down with somebody to have a discussion like this, the list of ideas gets longer and longer and longer, which is fantastic. That’s what resonates with me so strongly, the fact that we’ve got something here which has sparked everybody’s imagination.

SPOnG: Are you going to allow players to set up their own online businesses? Selling, I don’t know, T-Shirts and that kind of thing.

Phil Harrison: I think, if I’m imagining where that question’s coming from, in the kind of Second Life sense of the word, no. Because Second Life takes a very different approach. It’s all about user generated content, and doesn’t provide any content. We’re all about entertainment, we provide a lot of the framework for entertainment to take place in. Having said that, we do hope to offer some kind of user-to-user transactional elements in the future, but it won’t be day one.

SPOnG: We were discussing outside the prospect of getting bigger apartments in Home and A) how much that might cost and B) whether you’d be able to get an extension to your apartment if you get a certain number of trophies, or something like that. Have you been thinking along those sorts of lines?

Phil Harrison: Yeah, once again we’re not talking specifically at this moment but I’ll give you a general flavour of what we’re going to do, so here we’ve got a patio, but why not have a bigger patio, why not have a patio with a dock that goes down to the lake, and why not have…

SPOnG: A Sunseeker?

Phil Harrison: Yeah, or rather than an alpine mountain scene, why not have a desert island? There are lots of different ways that we can extend that; users will be able to extend their visual experience to customise their apartment through buying items from the store, by being given items through playing PlayStation 3 disk-based games or through items that we ourselves donate into the community.