With all the fits and starts customary to Sony, the long-awaited and -maligned and -mocked Home online social service opened it’s expensive polygon gates yesterday to the PS3-owning masses. They tend to call these things a roll-out, and roll-out it did, in exactly the manner a flaming earthbound meteor would roll-out, which is to say, there was extended silence and trepidation and doubt followed by a calamitous explosion, and fire, and runnning and screaming.

Not unexpected. Nary an online service can launch these days without the million-monkey-army (that’s you and me) pounding anything mildly interesting into so much molten slag, at launch. So even though Sony’s announcement specified yesterday morning’ish, it really wasn’t until around 10pm EST that you could reliably log into the thing.

What we have in the end is a mixed facsimile of what was presented at GDC 2007. Certainly not as capable, nor as full-featured – and yes, incredibly late. But I will not look too deeply into the shortcomings of this admittedly beta product. Oh sure, it’s beta like Gmail is beta, but it’s also free the way Gmail is free, and between those two words we can cut them a lot of slack. It’s not like anyone is getting ripped off here, so it’s hard to get ornery about missing promised features in this nearly-entirely gratis service.

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As foretold in the ancient prophecy: if you are in on the Sony Home beta, you can currently go pillage the Mall stores and their newly-arrived virtual goods for the low low price of free. I verified this by purchasing a summer home for nothing, as well as some surprisingly attractive tchockes. Don’t know how long the situation will last, so, if you happen to be in that ridiculously fractional proportion of humanity that is a) in the beta and b) interested in such things – by all means, go forth and enrich your life with hallucinatory bling. I know I will.

Subject: Home rumors
From: Ryan
Date: November 27, 2008 3:51:40 PM GMT-05:00
To: Dan, Kevin, Jimmy the Bastard

Some rumours coming out from people (GAFfers) who claim they talked with the Sony Home developers during the last “virtual event”.

Now I know the interest in avatar-related things in the group here ranges from middling to non-existent, but bear with me a sec ’cause this is a fascinating possibility. IMO.

“yup, they also said there will be random weather, there will be a money system. you earn money from collecting trophies. and you will get money for the trophies you already have. Right now there is a censor on swearing, but will be taken off in the full beta. The open beta will also be 18+ only…still trying to think of everything that was mentioned.”

Note that these rumors are being corroborated on the official playstation forums by other posters as well.

So Here’s the rumor rundown

Release Date - Anytime between Dec. 15-30th

Trophies may earn you Home CURRENCY

There will be random weather

Swearing censor will be pulled

Now if that’s right (huge IF) - it sort of boggles my mind a bit, because honestly I could see that being extremely popular. Weather and swearing aside, this would mean Sony is making a huge cross-game meta-MMO where your skill points translate into furniture and bling, just like winning gear in WoW, but with a sort of Animal Crossing vibe, but also with all the social networking hooks… I know I’m rambling here but I do hope its true, because reading that blurb was the first time I have envisioned a clear point to Home that you can explain to someone in two sentences; it sounds actually pretty fun as an activity in and of itself.

It also makes sense as a cross-game lobby system because ideally you want to encourage people to bump into each other (as it were) in a positive way while doing something else that they might doing anyways, if you follow my meaning. (And of course, get advertised-at in the course of proceedings.)

Sorry for the long email, I just keep seeing these possibilities in this Home thing, but I can never tell if Sony is actually going to do them. The pieces are there. The pace just seems glacial, but what the hell do I know. I hear launching MMOs can be tricky…?

I suppose I should have just posted this.

.r

p.s. I really should have posted this

1UP is reporting that the Sony Home project has been delayed again, fortheluvagod, until “Fall”:

“We understand that we are asking PS3 and prospective PS3 users to wait a bit longer, but we have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience than what it is today,” said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. “Our overarching objective is to provide users with new gaming experiences that are available only on PlayStation Home. Spending more time on the development and on the Closed Beta testing reaffirms our commitment to bringing a quality service, maintaining the PlayStation tradition.”

Asking? We don’t exactly have much of a choice.

At this point I’ve almost forgotten what Home is even about. It sounded magical when they announced it. I do remember that it was way back in that same year that we learned to extract sap from the nearby trees to fortify our huts, an important task to be completed before the daily mammoth hunt.