Virtual world or game platform, Playstation Home open beta is good at neither yet

In the comments to Darius post on Sony Playstation Home now in open beta Eric Rice asks a great question:

Are you approaching this with a virtual worlds mentality first, or a gamer mentality? The contextual difference and expectations are vast. Sony has a great framework here to a) create mini games in a social/waiting space, b) social spaces around brands (there are others built, not released yet: Watchmen, Red Bull, Warhawk), and c) a tremendous catalog of media between movies and music.

Eric is a smart guy who is well traveled in the virtual world and MMO gaming space. When I saw his comment I nodded thinking yeah, I see where they could go too, but we’ve been down this road with other virtual areas. Kaneva? Lots of potential there too. Don’t recall that materializing yet.

Eric nailed a big problem with Second Life perception that has always plagued them. Interesting noting he also commented on a recent VTOR post saying he was selling “the last of” his sims in Second Life and getting out too. I think patience only goes so far and the amount of time people are willing to give companies who are working on something virtual is shrinking not increasing. Show me how it’s useful now, show me why I spend any time here now, not how you think it could be cool someday. Maybe.

Who does Second Life appeal to? Is it the virtual world crowd who wants limitless creativity? Gamers? Or both? When I got into Second Life I wasn’t thinking of it like a game platform although I went on to create games on it. One of the other VTOR authors ran a casino in world for a little while and became a good customer and supporter of a game I had in world. Success was fairly short-lived there as Linden Lab declared casinos in world as a form of gambling and goodbye to all that. But the point I’m trying to make was Second Life to me was about making it easier to customize a virtual world. While there were other attempts at doing this, Second Life has done the best at this to date.

HOME should promote playing games on the PS3 and it doesn’t do enough of that yet

Conversely, I went into Playstation Home with the impression that it would be more gaming focused. Sure, I expected some commercialism. Nothing is free in the real or virtual world.  I hoped to find a cool, in my dreams revolutionary, interface to replace the somewhat boring but functional Xbox dashboard. As I wandered around Home and saw tons of beautiful scenery that I couldn’t interact with and a store in the mall that had a messages like: “nothing available yet” (the Stuff store) and a scattered few extremely simplistic games (breakout? lol, come on), I could only shake my head.

The most excitement found in my first experience with Home may have been awkwardly searching for ‘secret’ keycodes to enter into some areas. So secret that one could easily find the codes on the web and other people in the area pushing and shoving their virtual avatars to enter the door key codes. By the way, here’s a tip: just have a friend invite you into these secret rooms and then add to your favorites and access without the key codes. You’ll skip the rush.

Someone in the chat suggested you might also receive those codes by playing the game in the area, but I didn’t try that game (they were all being played, naturally). What I really wanted to do was be able to put some arcade game machines, pool table, air hockey, heck, why not a mini-bowling lane in my apartment and invite friends over. Nope, can’t do that. So instead you are supposed to wait in line for what, a small few crowded bowling lanes? Not even the PS3 faithful think that’s enough bowling lanes for the masses.

With that said, I still think there is potential here to do what is described above. This would be cool for gamers, especially if the games are exclusive to be played inside Home that would drive people to their home virtual space. I hope that’s where Sony is headed. Crowded public areas do not appeal to me either virtual or real world. I was impressed with how many avatars were in these public area without any slowdown or lag. Linden Lab needs to contract with the Sony scaling engineers because they got this part figured out. That said, it wasn’t easy or smooth logging into Home with the massive onrush of people checking it out, so that’s where the bottleneck is happening. Once logged in my experience from a lag standpoint was unnoticeable.

Also was able to chat with Darius via bluetooth headset while navigating different menus and even separate areas. You want to “call” your friend to enable that type of persistent chat. That is a useful function but didn’t test to see if it was possible to have multiple people. A keyboard is a necessity in group chat if you can’t do voice. The whole push R2 trigger to talk thing has to go too for phone conversations with friends. I can see the R2 thing making sense in open space conversations but it should be non push to talk in phone calls.

Darius lamented there not being enough brands represented yet. Two games with areas? That’s all? I would have thought they’d have a space set aside for every game in the store. No, not a detailed walk around area, but at least a generic room as a placeholder space.

In these spaces you could teleport in and find a link to the store to download add-ons or trailers and perhaps some Home-only downloads. I see the potential here but they are missing a golden opportunity with the number of people eager to see what they are up to showing them an experience with too little content. I know, I know, it’s open beta, it’s not finished. Guess I’m saying with as long as they’ve been working on this, they should have had more.

Effort feels rushed for holiday season 2008

The Home open beta feels too rushed. Before you say, wait, how can an open beta be rushed? Well, just login and see for yourself.

It’s like the dev team needed another year in closed beta to get this thing closer to the way I described but executive pressure and their own timeline goal of releasing it in the Fall (which they missed anyway, December not Fall) made it a necessity kicking something out now. As much as I was eager to see this – yes, even in beta form – they should have put out a statement saying they were increasing private-only invites but it was still way too unfinished to make it an open beta. I would have been frustrated and maybe even bitched about this in a blog post saying what’s taking so long but you only get one first impression.

I realize this is open to debate. Let people in and test the mass scaling capability. That’s an important part of the testing before adding too much more content, but many of those who see this won’t be as excited about coming back because there wasn’t enough to see and do.  You have to weigh these concerns when rolling out an open public release. Sure, you can chat and pay to setup some virtual club. Whoopie, you can do that from a website for free.

Where does Sony go from here? I hope they stay game-focused with Home. They don’t appear to be going down the Second Life open virtual world path which is good. If Darius somehow did think – and I doubt he did – he was entering some Second Life-like world, he would have been hugely disappointed there too. But if he was looking at it as a cool interface to enhance gaming on the PS3 it’s a bust there as well.

Snake eyes either way

More work needed. More effort. Maybe in a year if Sony doesn’t pull a Google Lively and unplug, we’ll see something useful. I can’t see logging into this game UI to view movie or game trailers in the theater or walk around my apartment that has no games in it or go shopping with real world $$ regularly for fake clothes and furniture. Now if they put games in that Stuff store or create more mini-games that can be playable among the crowds, that changes things.

There is something to be said about making a social area to find people to play games with but they could have done that through their website much more inexpensively. You can’t even go out of Home and do much in the Playstation dashboard while in Home, why not? All the flash, all the cash in an open launch beta decision that was rash.

There is potential here as Eric suggested but it could be so far off from becoming a reality that it will be too late.