Officially 'Home' is still in Open Beta but you must have seen a very early demo of it from your description above. It all works very slick now. The downloading of areas you haven't been to only happen once. Occasionally they update the areas and it will download them again but its not very often and they usually aren't that big of a download. In Europe there is now the additional Red Bull Air Race area, the Capcom Resident Evil area and a couple of FarCry areas to explore as well as the original 'My Apartment', Home Square, Bowling Alley, Movie Theatre and Shopping Arcade. With any luck, EA's sports stadium area will be out soon.
Quote: "Okay, big empty lots and empty TV screens that just scream "commercialization"."
Yes, there are billboards with posters for upcoming games on them and video screens showing game trailers etc. but they aren't empty. They are actually quite cool and make the world seem more real. You are bombarded with more adverts walking down a high street than in Home! They aren't intrusive or 'in-your-face' and you can easily ignore them. Considering the whole thing is free I am certainly not complaining.
The movie theatre area do show higher quality trailers than you normally get on the Web and sometimes exclusive content. It would be nice to see TV episodes or proper films in there and maybe that will come - especially as some parts of the world already has pay-per-view content for the PS3 available.
Quote: "Join the mass crowd of people, who all look like twins because they don't want to fork over real life money for decent clothes."
The character customisation - even without paying a penny - is enormous! Everyones 'avatar' is different and you can change pretty much every aspect of your face and physical features. I have never seen so much customisation for a virtual world character. There aren't that many items of clothing available to new users but you can unlock/earn new items by doing things like playing arcade games in the Bowling Alley, if you don't want to buy anything.
Quote: "Xi sounds like an inventive way to get Sony to push more ads on you, really."
I haven't seen any advertising in the hidden areas of Home used for the 'Xi' game, or in the mini games or puzzles. I may have missed it but I don't remember seeing any advertising or product placement at all associated with 'Xi'. It really does add a big 'gaming' aspect to Home. It provides those who aren't really into the social networking side of it (like yourself by the sounds of it) with tasks to do and the incentive to work collaboratively with the rest of the community to solve puzzles. A great concept and well executed.
Home itself is a social networking system so the whole idea is to walk round, talk to people, make online friends, play multiplayer games with them etc. much like social networking sites but with the added twist of it being a full 3D virtual world. The closest thing to it is probably Second Life on the PC, but Home has already passed that in terms of functionality in my experience with lots more features coming soon. Even though it might not be your cup of tea, there are plenty of other people into social networking. For example, In February Sony announced that 4 million people were using Home (which will have increased by quite a lot recently), Second Life has 16.5 million residents and Facebook has 130 million active users. Both MySpace and Facebook have around 115 million unique visitors per month. In fact, 44% of 18-24's apparently use social networks (source: Future Laboratory - MySpace 08).
Chart data provided with kind permission from
ELSPA