The “Break it Down” Blog

Well I finally got around to installing the new Playstation Home client that launched yesterday and tried to login to Home for about 20mins where I was only met with the above screen – retry after retry.

At first glance, I’d have to say the avatars and environments seem to be very “Second Life 2.0″ — which I believe Sony fully intended. For folks saying “Who the hell cares about Home?!”, we addressed this in our Controlling the Future of Gaming and Entertainment Starts with Game Consoles article.

Home is not a competitor to Xbox Live, Home is a platform that Sony is using to launch a unified social and more specifically sales-driven vision forward over the next 10+ years. It’s just that it’s launching way before anything else out there even remotely resembles it, so no one understands what you could possibly want with “Second Life 2.0″…

From what I’ve seen online some of the areas in Home are pretty incredible and nicely detailed. The level of avatar customization looks impressive, but without getting a chance to get into the system and play around it’s really hard to tell how much of that is at your fingertips right away, and how much of that is the result of micro-payments.

The real bread and butter (for now and probably the next year) for getting people into Home will be the activities. The pool, bowling, classic arcade games and other bits of entertainment that make such a service worth your time when you aren’t feeling like hopping into a full-on Resistance 2 match or battle of Warhawk.

I’d say that was a pretty smart thing of Sony to do, because without the activities there would be no sugar lining the rim of the glass getting people to try the service (and likely stay put).

Give the gallery a peak, it actually looks pretty impressive (and we’ll post our thoughts after we get through the sign-in screen)