PlayStation Home to get social revamp

Sony is to give its PS3 virtual world, PlayStation Home, a thorough redesign, with a greater emphasis on social elements.

The move is designed to ensure Home stays relevant despite the decline in popularity of virtual worlds. The new-look Home, set to launch this autumn, will feature not only social games but quests, community events and user-generated content.

"This is a giant leap in the evolution of the platform," Home director Jack Buser told VentureBeat. "We are going to 'up level' games as the heart of PlayStation Home. This means that Home itself is going to become a game. The first things you see when you get into Home are games."

Home's Central Plaza is to be replaced by The Hub, which integrates new and old features and will house a bulletin board showing current games in progress and quests on offer. From The Hub players can travel to areas themed by genres, with users able to join games in progress, the idea being that players can quickly find, and join, the types of games that interest them.

One game planned for the new-look Home is a multiplayer, social version of Cogs, Lazy 8 Studios' indie darling that was included in the third Humble Indie Bundle, which launched late last month.

The move is a logical consequence not only of the general decline in popularity of virtual worlds and rise in interest in social games: it puts into context Sony's release in April of Home version 1.5, which added new developer tools for graphics, physics and multiplayer gaming.

It will also serve to build on the momentum gained since the PSN outage in April. At E3 Buser said Home hosted a record number of weekly unique users in the week of the service's return, and now the average Home session time is 70 minutes, up from 56 minutes two years ago.

Source: VentureBeat