An open beta of Home, Sony’s rival to the Xbox New Experience (and Nintendo’s Miis), will be available in the “coming weeks”, available to all PS3 owners. In an official post on Sony’s Home forum, Home’s community manager “TedTheDog” has said that the plan is to ramp up numbers in the current closed beta rapidly to “load test” the system, including adding European language testers. Once load testing is complete, Sony will move to an open beta.
Home is Sony’s online space – kind-of like Second Life, where you create your own avatar and socially interact with others. Only without all the divorces, humping animations etc. obviously. And Home also acts as a kind-of lobby/game clan space – gamers can meet up in Home, then enter a game together, and keep a trophy cabinet (trophies are the PS3′s rival to Microsoft’s Achievements).
Ted also said the “Open Beta is the start of a long journey, not the end of one. Home Beta is a service that will grow from the foundation of v1.0 over the coming months and years.” In other words – it’s not all going to work right from day one, folks!
