From one angle, Home is like a brochure, press junket, trade show and marketplace rolled into one; in short, everything about games but the games themselves. Remember the bit in Fight Club with the walk-in Ikea catalogue? That’s how it feels sometimes, right down to the vanilla walls and sofas. For advertisers, publishers and developers, it’s a promotional smorgasbord. There are lobbies, posters, malls, stages and cinema screens – all the PR tools.

From a mere 80MB client, around four gigabytes of dynamic content is cached as you come and go, wrapping you in proximity audio and smooth HD video. And not to forget the most important publicity machine of all – you. While brands like Diesel sell clothes for the tremendously detailed avatars (for real money, spent via PlayStation Store), games will offer tangible rewards like costumes and accessories.

So instead of a T-shirt for eating a 40oz mixed grill, maybe you’ll be wearing a Kevlar codpiece for finishing Killzone 2. You can already deck yourself from neck to toe as one of Echochrome’s poser models.

“The games are the flavours,” says Van Der Meulen, which begs the question: who, exactly, controls them? Is there a governing style to Home? What if a publisher started handing out, say, combat equipment?

“We keep some things in mind. So with the Echochrome outfits, we don’t keep the head, so people know it’s just a suit you’re wearing.”

“That’s an important point,” says Hill. “We don’t want people walking into some Star Wars cantina and being scared off the moment they come through the door. The Killzone 2 outfit, for instance, would still be clearly humanoid, not like the Predator or something. You can add colour in subtly different and creative ways.”

He grins: “I guess a bazooka probably wouldn’t be the best of them. We don’t want to offend anyone, obviously. But Home is a 16-plus environment, so we trust our community and developers to exercise good grace. We do have final right of veto over what gets produced, and we tend to work with those studios as closely as possible to come up with rewards and items that’ll add value to people’s experiences. It’s no use giving people a flower pot just for the sake of it.”