A year after its launch, Sony has announced its Home virtual world, accessed through the PlayStation 3, has reached the 10m user mark.
The console maker is also introducing its first massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game within Home today, which it describes as a unique social gaming experience.
It certainly represents Sony leveraging the PS3′s superior technology – Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox Live service and the Nintendo Wii do not have the capabilities to tackle online games and environments of this level of sophistication.
I was given a demonstration of Sodium One by its developer Outso on Wednesday. It seemed like a hybrid game, somewhere between a graphically rich arcade-style shoot ‘em up involving hover tanks of the future, a virtual world like Eve Online and an MMO of virtual goods, tasks and rewards such as Runescape and World of Warcraft.
“This is a first for Home and any other MMO-based games – the grind you do to collect commodity is actually a full arcade shooter,” said Joel Kemp, Outso’s chief operations officer.
“We have a console experience woven into a social experience and we don’t think that exists anywhere else,” said Halli Bjornsson, Outso chief executive.
The social elements include a leaderboard, buddies list, Twitter feed and community-based tasks such as stomping on robotic scorpions.
The first five levels are free to play and it then costs $4.99 to progress further onto 45 more levels, a charge that includes a full virtual pilot’s outfit. Players can also take on other roles such as a bartender serving cocktails to earn rewards.
Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home, told me Sony will earn money from virtual items with a model of putting a retail mark-up on virtual goods it buys wholesale from developers.
It is providing the whole back-end infrastructure, tools and payments platform for Sodium and Mr Buser sees Home as a full-service environment where Sony can help small and medium sized developers create sophisticated MMOs in less than a year for a low financial outlay.
He said Home could cope with expansions to games and the introduction of other MMO environments by other developers.
“Expect to see more. Home started out as a social network – a tool for gamers to meet each other – but then it became a social gaming platform – stick a pool table between gamers and now they’re talking more.
“Now it’s evolved into this very sophisticated experience…it’s so exciting and so different from what we’ve seen in the past.”
Sony now offers more than 100 games to play inside Home, 50 spaces to experience and over 2,000 virtual items to collect. More than 250 community events have been held to date and users spend 60 minutes on average per session in the virtual world.
From today, Sony Home users can access Sodium through a teleporter in the central plaza. A hover tank has been terrorising users there over the past few days in a teaser for the launch.
