14 DAY TRIAL // The console war is series of very fierce battles waged between the top three console manufacturers, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, with each of them desperately trying to give its product more features and make it more attractive in the eyes of the average consumer, who, in the end, makes one console or another the winner in terms of sales.
Sony has been trying for quite some time to prove that customers can be won over using different methods, like adding more and more features, but it seems that Microsoft's price cuts are the ideal strategy. This doesn't mean that the Japanese company is admitting defeat, as it has announced its newest online service made especially for the PlayStation 3 owners, Home.
This promises to give all the PS3 owners a unique online meeting place where they can get together with friends and interact with new people. Launched a short time ago, the service is still in open beta stage, but hasn't really met all of the expectations that fans and other industry people had. This is because it was announced a bit too early, and the anticipation for it, although very big, slowly began to fade away as more delays appeared, at least according to Sony.
“Initially, there was real excitement from people, because we were showing something really different and that had a lot of potential. And then there’s the realisation that, well, we probably announced it too early – GDC 07 was a long time ago. I think there was sort of recognition amongst developers of ‘Oh, this is interesting, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” said Peter Edward, a game director at the Japanese company.
Although the announcement of Home promised plenty of new features, it seems that a lot of users are a bit disappointed at the online service. Let's hope that new partnerships with various other companies, like Red Bull or EA Sports, will make the service more attractive to PS3 users.