Home is Where the Console Is
By Wade Forst on Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Playstation just announced their new Social Networking tool for the PS3 gaming console called “Home”. The new offering will be found within every console in the “cross media bar” and will give the users a Second Life experience within the PS3 world.
As a member you can personalize your avatar, customize your own apartment within your Private Space, purchase premium items to decorate and even play “your” media on a Sony Bravia television. These are all things that are currently available within Second Life, but the new offerings that I find personally interesting are within the “Public Spaces.”
These Public Spaces house everything from virtual arcades to movie theatres, where you can watch HD quality movies and even user generated content. The social media content is being provided by Grouper; so it should be interesting how they feed in and filter the content. Even future non-social content within Home is not only about Sony, but also game publishers, developers and even non-industry corporations (Starbucks anyone?).
With Sony’s new effort to dive into the virtual world marketplace, it makes me wonder about the audience that it will attract to this experience. Second Life has a free experience (less the $600 needed for a console) with 4.5 million people from around the world. But with Sony’s 2 million consoles sold in 2006, it seems that they are not too far behind.
This said, I do not see Home being as much a competitor to Second Life as they are simply emulating their environment to create a better sense of community. What really matters is that Microsoft has over 1 million subscribers to their online community, Xbox Live, and has already entered into the media gateway for your household entertainment, communications and storage.
Now that consoles are becoming gateways into whole home media centers, it will only be a matter of time when your favorite movies, your virtual conference call, your vacation slide show and all of your entertainment, will be available to you and “your friends” at the touch of a button.
So sit back, relax, and watch Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony battle it out within their community games.
To learn a litle more, check our Sony’s Video Presentation about Home (wait for the commercial to pass, the presenation is very informative).
I actually think this is a fairly tactical move on Sony’s part (and agreed, one that Microsoft and Nintendo are likely to emulate). The console platforms like this that allow people to communicate and play games with other users already have an audience that gains a lot of value from social networking. This is a logical extension; allow them to get to know the other people in the environment, find people similar to them, etc. The more their customers see the PS3 as a way to engage with their “friends”, the more loyal they will be to the product and the more likely they will be to try to get their other friends to join the fun.
It will get very interesting once they start really opening up the platform the way Second Life has done.