HOME development Q&A

[sudzy]

Don't forget the boy-girl relationships. With pre-paid cards, teenage boys can buy virtual stuff for their gals. Sometimes the gals will demand it just to prove a point. In Asia, this dynamics works on many young adults too.

I don't even want to think about that...

 

[crazygambit]

The problem with Horse armor is that even if you did spend $5 no one else would even know you had it.

In an online context like this, where all the noobs are walking around with the generic noob clothing and accessories, you are going to want to distinguish yourself. So I can see people paying for that Resistance flight jacket or MGS bandanna etc.

Of course if you just spent $59.95 on a new game, it would be nice if somehow that automatically made you eligable to download and use new game specific content for your avatar. Maybe after you beat a game on certain difficulty levels it can do a handshake over the network to transfer new items to your avatar.

I believe that was already confirmed by Phil. When you buy a game, you'll get to premium stuff like a t-shirt with the name of the game or some special jacket, whatever.

Hasn't anyone thought on the implications Home would have on cybering? (not that I ever do it mind you). Sony pretty much said they don't care what you do inside your own home, so I see a subset of people very interested in this. I mean custumizing your appartment, putting the right music to create the mood, plus having somewhat realistic looking avatars has to beat the generic text approach of Mirc any time of the day.

I wonder if some will make the ability to take your clothes off?

 

[Nesh]

Here's a very good presentation done in GDC by Phill from gametrailers

http://download.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_ps3_gdc07_home_demo_1.wmv

I am very surprised by the dedicated attempt. They must have been very serious about it years before. I doubt they could have built such an interface and content plus planned so much for it in a matter of a years or two

 

[DJ12]

The interview at gametrailers explains all, it's been on PS3 for 2 1/2 years, and was an idea of some sort on PS2, whether they got far with that he doesn't really say, but I guess they must;ve tried something at least.

 

[patsu]

I don't even want to think about that...

We were all young before... and we survived somehow.

I agree Home is a marketing platform. Should be able to draw in different demographies (e.g., girls are more interested in "social games").

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I've just watched the GameTrailers GDC presentation of Home Part 1 and noticed a few things.

1. The water outside looked great! Shame they didn't have a better view.
2. The World Map uses the styling from flOw. Nice design choice.
3. It all looks okay so far. I can see standing in a virtual lobby has a benefit for meeting people and conversing over a chatroom. What I can't see is how it'll scale and still be sensible. It's basically structured like a sort of Mall at the moment, and yet the potential for expansion is like an Arcology. There were a couple of branches off the cinema. What do you do when there's 200 exhibitors with content to show? How do you find them? Presumably there'll be a map or some way to directly go to a community space, which will nullify the architectural structure of the interface. May as well have detached spaces accessed just by a menu (virutal map or boring list or 'web' address).

 

[Onlooker1]

I'm a little confused how the video streaming will work within Home.

Phil showed off a few examples:
a) playing a video installed on your PS3 on a virtual bravia in your "apartment"
b) having full videos playing in the public area
c) having an auditorium with a streaming video "in hidef" that you can join

Obviously given the public nature of all these video streams it would be possible for 1, 2, 3 or more of your friends or people to "warp" into the room with the video(s) playing.

So how are they going to support this when currently if I go to the playstation PSN online store to download "casino royale" (the trailer that was shown by Phil playing in one of the public spaces) it takes about 20 seconds to navigate to the movie, about 5 seconds for the download to "start", and about 30 minutes for it to download (it being a 1 minute HD preview).

If my video is stored on my PS3 I can see how it could appear in home for me "almost" instantly, but what about for my friends? am I going to blast it to them all individually? how likely is that with upload speeds of about 512kbit typical max in america, and less in some other countries? (The same question applies also to mp3s i want to play in my apartment. But perhaps at 128kbit they are more doable).

What about when sony wants to fill a public space with new game preview movies and movie previews? does entering the space immediately kick off some mega background downloads and we get "buffering" appearing on all the monitors? Will home snarf 10gig of our hard drives to cache video content? we can't even make video happen seamlessly on the web yet (even flash players suck), let alone in hidef, so I'm wondering how they plan to hide all this streaming required for home when people are not all sitting on a 100mbit or gige lan!

 

[archangelmorph]

I'm a little confused how the video streaming will work within Home.

Phil showed off a few examples:
a) playing a video installed on your PS3 on a virtual bravia in your "apartment"
b) having full videos playing in the public area
c) having an auditorium with a streaming video "in hidef" that you can join

Obviously given the public nature of all these video streams it would be possible for 1, 2, 3 or more of your friends or people to "warp" into the room with the video(s) playing.

So how are they going to support this when currently if I go to the playstation PSN online store to download "casino royale" (the trailer that was shown by Phil playing in one of the public spaces) it takes about 20 seconds to navigate to the movie, about 5 seconds for the download to "start", and about 30 minutes for it to download (it being a 1 minute HD preview).

If my video is stored on my PS3 I can see how it could appear in home for me "almost" instantly, but what about for my friends? am I going to blast it to them all individually? how likely is that with upload speeds of about 512kbit typical max in america, and less in some other countries? (The same question applies also to mp3s i want to play in my apartment. But perhaps at 128kbit they are more doable).

What about when sony wants to fill a public space with new game preview movies and movie previews? does entering the space immediately kick off some mega background downloads and we get "buffering" appearing on all the monitors? Will home snarf 10gig of our hard drives to cache video content? we can't even make video happen seamlessly on the web yet (even flash players suck), let alone in hidef, so I'm wondering how they plan to hide all this streaming required for home when people are not all sitting on a 100mbit or gige lan!

This is probably one of the most valid gripes/concerns regarding the Home platform that i've seen in these forums since it was announced..

Perhaps they'll opt for asynchronous streaming of media in a private/public space? (i.e. different player's in the same room will watch the movie at different times..)

Or perhaps they could utilise some form of peer to peer streaming so that all the data isn't being streamed directly from the server alone? (player A's stream data gets passed on to everyone else in the room while the other SPEs continue to stream the rest of the data from the server and from other peers..)

I understand when your saying though about the user bandwidth issue when it comes to HD streaming.. I'm in the UK and my so-called 10Mb broadband connection still can't handle streaming HD video feeds from gaming sites like gametrailers.com (although I think it's an issue with the fact that NTL are Sh**/traffic rather than a lack of bandwidth.. When I was on BT on a 1Mb connection it was fine..)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I take the content streaming to mean 'somethig that'll happen a long time off.' In the UK, most people's upload speed is very low, so they can't host content. And Sony don't really want people sending CD quality audio and BRD quality video to people who haven't paid for it. Sharing music digitally and openly? That'd be a first for the industry! Especially if you don't have to be present for people to go to your apartment and share your content.

 

[one]

Or perhaps they could utilise some form of peer to peer streaming so that all the data isn't being streamed directly from the server alone? (player A's stream data gets passed on to everyone else in the room while the other SPEs continue to stream the rest of the data from the server and from other peers..)

That's what I think likely, a la Peercast or Skype.

 

[Graham]

Open Beta (appx. 50,000 users): August - October
Service Live (50,000+): October

I haven't commented on 'home' yet, however this is my main concern.
That is a significant jump. 50k users is a lot, and I would imagine a lot of problems. However 5 million users by October isn't out of the question. In 5 years? 50 million?
I don't see how this can work as a free service unless it is either mostly peer-to-peer or very heavily advertised. Both of which have serious potential for user backlash.

Wasn't there once talk of PS3's acting as servers when 'powered down'? Or am I confused.

WoW would probably be the closest example, yet it doesn't have the potential user base. And I don't imagine wow is cheap to run. It took a long time to mature in the server reliability sense.

Major nelson had a webcast a while back, talking about the Live 'monitoring centre'. The complexity of the system is staggering, yet Live is - in a bandwidth and server sense - conceptually simpler compared to what sony claim for home, it's bust traffic too, not a constant steam of updates. Live has also taken many many years to mature. These things usually can't just pop up and suddenly work with millions of people... :-/

In short - I'm skeptical that they can go from 15,000 users to ~ 5 million in two months of testing.

 

[archangelmorph]

I haven't commented on 'home' yet, however this is my main concern.
That is a significant jump. 50k users is a lot, and I would imagine a lot of problems. However 5 million users by October isn't out of the question. In 5 years? 50 million?
I don't see how this can work as a free service unless it is either mostly peer-to-peer or very heavily advertised. Both of which have serious potential for user backlash.

Wasn't there once talk of PS3's acting as servers when 'powered down'? Or am I confused.

WoW would probably be the closest example, yet it doesn't have the potential user base. And I don't imagine wow is cheap to run. It took a long time to mature in the server reliability sense.

Major nelson had a webcast a while back, talking about the Live 'monitoring centre'. The complexity of the system is staggering, yet Live is - in a bandwidth and server sense - conceptually simpler compared to what sony claim for home, it's bust traffic too, not a constant steam of updates. Live has also taken many many years to mature. These things usually can't just pop up and suddenly work with millions of people... :-/

In short - I'm skeptical that they can go from 15,000 users to ~ 5 million in two months of testing.

Huh?

Where are you getting millions from?

The post says 50, 000+ by october..

Or am I missing something..?

 

[Graham]

Huh?

Where are you getting millions from?

The post says 50, 000+ by october..

Or am I missing something..?

Well one would hope they have sold at least ~6-7 million units by october. And one can expect that a sizable portion of their user base will want to try out the new system's free killer feature.
Ok maybe not 5 million, but certainly a larger percentage. 50%+ shouldn't be unreasonable. It depends how heavily it is advertised.
And It will almost certainly be bundled with new machines or a firmware update.
Even 1 million would be a serious challenge (20x server load). It also doesn't change the fact this number will be constantly increasing at a fairly steady rate.\

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't see how this can work as a free service unless it is either mostly peer-to-peer or very heavily advertised. Both of which have serious potential for user backlash.

I presume the bulk of costs will be covered in premium content. Advertising I don't consider to be a worry. This isn't like a game where Coke ads will be out of place. It's a virutal world where you expect virtual advertising. In fact it's abswence would makethe world look empty! What's most important for ad revenue to work is getting a sizeable userbase so advertisers are interested. As a concept, I think the idea could tank horribly if Sony are unlucky. If users don't care to use it, I guess they save on server fees. If the masses do use it, but aren't keen on buying premium content, and the advertisers don't take it up either, they will be very out of pocket. And moreso if people atart buying less games because there's more Game 3.0 user-generated content extending the games they do buy. That's a bigger concern for me. Why buy another new game when the one you bought already keeps getting better and better...?

 

[patsu]

I think there is a strong element of P2P in Playstation Home. Your HOME and possessions will be offline when you are not logged in. LocationFree is already a product for > 1 year, so they may be able to reuse it here somehow, or just adopt (background) download model. The point is to facilitate sharing; not to provide a uber, free theater experience amongst users. They have premium content and marketing events to sell afterall.

The FAQ also talks about persistence later (Server-based services ?). Business-wise, it's ok/prudent for them to scale the platform as it expands. As per all network services, it will evolve with more user feedback and participation.

 

[Npl]

I doubt your private HOME will ever be fully persistent. The basic interior maybe, but your custom photos hangin on the wall wont. Sony wont host user content and make themself guilty for hosting possibly illegal content.
What could work though is your friends having those images in a cache and therefore see your full interior.

 

[patsu]

I doubt your private HOME will ever be fully persistent. The basic interior maybe, but your custom photos hangin on the wall wont. Sony wont host user content and make themself guilty for hosting possibly illegal content.
What could work though is your friends having those images in a cache and therefore see your full interior.

They might want to charge for the space...

 

[Npl]

They might want to charge for the space...

I dont know what exactly you are refering to?
In case of persistant private Spaces (with interior from Sony or 3rd Parties), yes, this could be a monthly/yearly fee if you want/need that.
For your own "custom" content like pictures on the wall I dont see Sony facing the trouble of monitoring copyrighted/illegal content and the hassle of adhering to different countries laws on a global scale.

 

[Arwin]

They might want to charge for the space...

The impression I got is that a basic space will be free, but you can purchase larger appartments at a premium. I could imagine that you could also get a hosted appartment for a fee, although yes that would introduce your basic copyright related problems that current web-hosting services have to deal with right now also. Still, they could basically be dealt with in the same way.

 

[patsu]

I dont know what exactly you are refering to?

What I meant was...

According to the FAQ, Home initially will not be persistent (i.e. your possession goes with you once you log out). In order to make it persistent (i.e., people can visit your Home or certain parts of it when you're not around), someone has to cover the cost.

So people may have to pay for a storage service if they want to keep their personal stuff perpectually online for sharing (or leave PS3 running perpectually, like what I do today). Some of these cost may be covered jointly by Sony and the developers too (I don't know). We shall see.

As for legal issues, I think Sony and the users will have to monitor shared content together. I don't think Sony can run away from it (even if they just keep a cache that happens to contain pr0n when a kid sees it). The regulations in different countries differ too.