Source: next-gen.biz
"After the announcement that rocked the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Phil Harrison told Next-Gen in an interview what PlayStation 3 fans all wanted to hear: How exactly will the PlayStation Home Beta work?
He revealed that the development team has had Playstation Home in internal Beta for some time, with quality assurance people walking around the virtual world just looking for glitches and bugs.
When someone finds something odd, all they have to do is walk over to a developer who happens to be online and invite him over to the place the glitch was spotted.
It's a whole new level of feedback that assures developers have spotted the glitch and exactly how it's produced. In many ways, it splits patching time in half and gets developers more attached to the community.
That's all and well, but is there a way to get in? According to Harrison, there isn't any official announcement on how the Beta invite will be executed, but he is sure that the Beta will be a closed door affair for a lucky number of users who make the cut. The Beta (and successive Betas after major fixes) should last the whole summer until early fall, where Harrison approximates would be time for Home's final release.
The announcement of PlayStation Home is the single most iconic effort of Sony to publicly deliver good news to its fans, in which was returned with positive fervor from many PlayStation 3 owners around the globe. Amongst the many other bad hype Sony has faced, PlayStation Home just brings the electronics giant back on track with their strategy for the consumer entertainment market. Harrison commented:
It’s very pleasing to get a reaction that is positive to something that you know is really good. I knew, going into the presentations, that we had something really special because of internal meetings and other presentations that we’d done where we’ve had a universally strong reaction. The reaction that we got from the media preview on Tuesday night was extraordinary.
It dawned on him that after the LittleBigPlanet demonstration after his keynote, that the news was going to have a much bigger impact once he delivers the good news to a much larger, anxious crowd of Sony fans. He found that he was wrong: the impact was far greater than he had anticipated. He concluded, "So of course it makes me happy, it’s what we do, you know, create entertainment and try and share it with people. So for that approach to be validated in such a clear way, that sends a shiver down my spine."
03-15-2007
Posted 2 days ago
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