PlayStation Home confirmed

Well no surprises that the rumour was true after the Kotaku incident but Sony confirmed it today and announced PlayStation Home. It's like a blend of Second Life, The Sims, Nintendo's Miis and Xbox's achievements.

Basically it's a virtual world in which you have your own customisable house (you can hang your own digital photos on the wall as pictures) and all of it can be explored using your avatar, which can also be customised like a Mii but in far more detail. But this is not just some ramshackle or cartoon-like world, it's full on PS3 graphics and looks pretty impressive.



See more photos in the Joystiq gallery here.

You can chat to your buddies, play in-built games like bowling and pool, or arrange online multi-player games. There are also loads of public places where you can watch move trailers in a virtual cinema, for example, or admire game trophies in great halls.

Sony are thinking of it as Game 3.0, kind of like Web 2.0 for games, bandying about terms like social, localisation and customisable. That's a bit odd, I'm not sure it's quite that ground-breaking, there are plenty of MMO games out there that offer a lot of these aspects already but whatever, this does seem quite interesting and certainly brings the PS3 much more in line with what Nintendo are clearly trying to do with the Wii.

Having said that, those people that want it (and I'm not one of them) have plenty of options for MMO already and if Sony has proven one thing it's that cramming every conceivable piece of functionality into things doesn't necessarily translate into a compelling experience; people tend to like simplicity and elegance. The PS3 needs to be good at games first and this sort of thing is a great added bonus second.

At the end of the day, we'll just have to wait and see. PlayStation home goes into beta in April and should be launched properly sometime in the Autumn. Now if Sony would actually just release the bloody PS3 over here, people might just have one more reason to go and buy one.