Today’s rant has to do with the constant (and glaring) misconceptions surrounding the upcoming Playstation Home service.  Let me get this out of the way right now, I’m in the Playstation Home beta, but nothing I’m going to discuss in the course of this rant will be derived from any experiences I have (or haven’t) had during said beta; I don’t want to displease the NDA-Gods.

Let me start this out with a simple statement that hopefully the most hard-core Xbox 360 fanboy can understand.  Playstation Home is NOT a counter to Xbox Live.  I posted a while back in one of my rants how I suspected people intentionally emphasize things about another platform that may or may not be true in order to steal (or ruin) their thunder when the truth is known.  This is one of those instances.

Take a good hard look at who exactly is going on and on about Playstation Home… now notice their natural alignment with platforms.  I bet you’ll notice a fair number of loyal Xbox 360 fans talking (out their asses) about how “Once Playstation Home hits, maybe Xbox Live will have some competition!” knowing full well (or not) that that it’s basically the equivalent of saying “Once the new version of Firefox hits, maybe TCP/IP will have some competition!”.  Home is an application, Xbox Live is a platform…  the enhancements people are desperately waiting for will come to the XMB and Playstation Network, not Home.

Home will represent something not implemented on a game console to date.  It is a social tool, first and foremost.  It presents the opportunity of people to meet (or meet up with) others prior to gaming.  There are going to be things worth doing while in the Home application, but first and foremost it will be a socially-geared center for you to share gaming and media with friends (new or old).  Home is also completely optional.  It will eventually garner a place on the XMB, but you won’t have to use it unless you want to access the 3D world (and its services) provided by Home.  Again, putting on my “just going by what I’ve seen outside of the beta and what Sony execs have said” hat, I bet Home will launch as one thing, but grow over time to be something much more impressive.  Do I expect the second coming of videogaming when Home is launched?  No.  Do I expect there to be entertaining and novel things to do there? Yes, yes I do.  But at this point, that’s all speculation because none of us have gotten to experience the Home they’re telling us about and showing us in their press demos.

I’ve noted on several occasions how Microsoft-employed people (like the blogger Ozymandias) have gone out of their way to “leak” or “steal the thunder” from PS3-related announcements and services.  Ozymandias was the first person I heard of to come out and say Sony was releasing a 40GB PS3 with no backwards compatibility.  Without even asking the question of “How did he know?”, ask yourself the question of “What does he gain by publicly making a big deal out of this?”  The answer is he gets to be the first with the info, the first to spin it, the first to make it look bad.  How many times do you see employees of one company publicly spilling the beans on one of their main competitor’s products months before it launches?  I mean Nintendo fires their own people for blogging about their company, why wouldn’t the Microsoft lawyers sew Ozymandias’ mouth shut for fear of repercussions from Sony’s lawyers?  Spin.  It’s all to get the jump on spin.  And I think there are forces at work to get incorrect facts into people’s heads about Playstation Home.

So in conclusion, I think Home will eventually be something quite impressive, I’m willing to bet most of the people that are saying they’re excited for Home to come out are really more accurately referring to the features that will be enabled from firmware 2.0 (and beyond) than actually Playstation Home itself.  Then again, I may be wrong…  millions of people enjoy fairly anonymous avatar-disguised social interaction on the internet every day…  if you have any Playstation Home questions that I can answer from common knowledge (I’m not discussing anything NDA’d) please feel free to ask.  Actually ask whatever you want, I’ll answer what I can.

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