pcostabel said:
Even when Home was presented, the PSN integration was not the primary feature. Besides trophies and game launching, little was promised as far as online game lobby functionality. What was promised and has not yet been fully delivered is user generated content. This is the weakest part of Home right now, and the main reason it still qualifies as a beta. Clubhouses and apartments are useless without the ability to put your own content in them. But this will change eventually: the functionality to put web content inside Home is already there and will be unlocked at the right time.
I fully expect Sony to sell "Personal Home Spaces" that will work like websites: you will pay a monthly fee for a certain amount of server space and you will upload your space that people will be able to visit at any time, like all other Home spaces. Probably they will limit the ability to sell or give away items or clothes, though.
Its position as a 'hub' for content on your PS3 and your PS3 experiences was definitely a primary selling point when initially presented. Indeed, 'hub' was its original name.
Most of the functionality presented at GDC 07 related to this role. Sharing photos in your home. Music. Videos. Pulling unlockables in from games. Launching into external games as a group and returning as a group. Playing games together in Home. Presenting and showing off your trophies within Home.
They went on to showcase many of these features again in latter conferences, and added new such 'hub'-ish features like the internet connectivity with a myspace style site and so on.
These are also the features that were primarily resonant with the press and with most observers, I think, since they seemed to fill the most obvious hole in PSN's offering with aplomb. Via interviews etc. you could see that primary interest communicated to Sony, and them continuing to fan that interest. So they knew this is what was getting people excited about Home.
It was never presented as this self-contained community. The stuff that existed within Home in and of itself almost seemed as if they were snacks between other activities facilitated by Home. Not the main meal.
It was meant to be something that could be plugged into - from a game's POV, and from a user's POV with its own content. Harrison himself admitted in the first reveal that it was in the sharing of user content from the HDD that things started to really get interesting in Home for example.
Home has emerged as a more or less self-contained and closed 3D community where its utility is to be found within its own walls, rather than the bridges it was supposed to build between users' content and ps3 experiences. Users are not allowed share content, and developers are not compelled to plug into it, and thus, have not.
