Sony: We Announced Home Too Early

The PlayStation 3's online service Home is starting to realize its promises - two years after its announcement and years after its start as part of The Getaway.

"It's gone through waves. Initially, there was real excitement from people, because we were showing something really different and that had a lot of potential," said game director Peter Edward on development dreams of Home, Sony's virtual world and online gaming hub for its console.

The hardest obstacle Sony has faced since its announcement of the Home project has been the high expectations set by Sony's grand vision that have continually been dropped by the media as Home was mired in repeated delays and buggy betas.

He admitted, "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.'"

"It's changed a lot. Originally it was a lobby interface for The Getaway: Black Monday on PS2 - that was the original goal of it," revealed lead programmer Mitch Goodwin to Develop. "The decision at the time was that there wasn't enough of a PS2 online userbase to justify it, so we were kind of left to explore and take this idea of a lobby system forward."