After a year-long delay and a closed beta, Sony has promise a “fully robust” PlayStation Home service for this fall.
“The Home open beta is still on schedule for release later this fall,” confirmed PlayStation Network head Eric Lempel.
The planned Autumn launch will move Home, a 3-D virtual world for the PlayStation Network, into an open beta stage. PSN director Susan Panico compared the rollout to Google’s e-mail client Gmail, but Lempel claims that Sony will not be releasing a half-baked world.
“If you think about Gmail and Susan’s reference, Gmail when it launched in beta was a fully functional email service,” noted Lempel. “I personally was using it and it offered everything you’d expect, but was in beta just to say that there’s more to come and maybe it’s not fully polished.”
Since Home‘s announcement at last year’s Games Developer Conference, hype has calmed while Sony offered a stripped-down beta during its development. According to Lempel, delaying the launch by a year will allow Sony to “deliver a high quality service that the users will enjoy.”
He explained, “Even though it will be in beta, it will be a fair representation of what the service can be and its potential, so it won’t be a 0.5 release, it will be a fully robust service.”
