Apply for PS3 Home Beta Access with Free Download
To apply for the latest round of testing for Studio London's online social-networking software, North American PlayStation 3 owners simply need to download the free PlayStation Home theme that will be available in the PlayStation Store later today.
"We will be using a variety of criteria including activity on the PlayStation Network to determine eligibility for the Beta community," director Jack Buser wrote on PlayStation.Blog, noting that current beta testers will be included in the rollout, and that SCE Europe will be contacting active PS Network users for beta participation.
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araczynski
replyi'm still not seeing the point of this, but then again i only use the ps3 to play games, not socialize, or whatever this is supposed to do.
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I'd rather they spend their resources on improving more important things like the core dashboard/online features before doing something like Home.
While the endless delays and IMO misguided intentions make Home a bit of a joke to me I don't think it will make anything worse. Heck, I might waste an hour or two messing around with it, why not. But I don't thing it will make things much better, and there's obvious room for improvement in important areas of the PS3.
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The point is that Sony wanted something that was unique to the console space that people couldn't point at and go "ah, I see what u did!". It's sad that the best they could come up with is this. The fact that the first iterations were such crap they had to keep going back to the drawing board is not a good sign. I'm betting that if this hadn't gotten all the hype, they would have quietly swept it under the rug and it would never see the light of day. As it is they now have to try to live up to the hype due to their increasingly tarnished image of not living up to expectations.
The other main reason for this (The REAL reason) is it is a clever marketing tool. If you don't think the "free" home will not be branded to hell and back, chock full of flashy advertising and Minority Report style bill boards shouting at you as you walk by (tailored to your respective tastes of course) then you are in for a shock the first time you set foot in your new "home".-
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Good post.
I hope they can deliver all those ads more smoothly than their network seems to send the game lists & icons for the store. (Microsoft's can be very poor at sending the icons, too, though it's less of an issue since you can read the text labels on their own, unlike the silly design of the PSN store.) Otherwise we're going to be walking around in a world full of "Loading Image" placeholders. :-/ (Or waiting a hell of a long time for it to pre-load everything, depending on how it works.)
Why can't Sony and MS improve that stuff? Surely it's no different from running a web server that hosts the images?
(Note: I'm in the UK. Maybe other countries are different.)
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Thats a good point. All that content is likely not static and comes from many different places just like website advertising. Going into a 3D space like home and seeing red Xs and placeholder graffix while the live stuff loads would be kinda rank. We've come to expect that on web pages but not so sure how that would look in an open world. I'm sure this streaming stuff is part of what is taking so long to work out properly.
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