Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s (SCEE) Darren Cairns and Liam Wickham are in the forefront of PlayStation Home development. While in a developer conference in Brighton, the two took the chance to clarify a common but wrong notion about Sony’s virtual world to come. Cairns and Wickham have stated that Home is not for social networking, but for gaming. "Home is not a social network – it’s focused on games. It’s a visual representation of the PlayStation community," they said in the conference.
The focus, they say, is on creating a virtual representation of the PS3’s online community. More than socialization, Home is geared towards enhancing online play and other facets of PS3 gaming. Home is a service for starting sessions of online play, with features like virtual lobbies and match setup screens while inside Home and the ability to launch games themselves from within the virtual world. Once the game is over, players are returned to the virtual world where they can discuss the events of the last game played.
The closed beta will be extended as new features are added, and the open beta launch is still scheduled for later this year.