Home to finally make its debut this year?
PS3 owners have been looking at Home much the same way the rest of us look at Duke Nukem Forever: it’s the sort of thing that is constantly promised, but the lack of any substantial new info relegates it to the reality where unicorns exist and the awkward nerd actually gets the girl because of his "personality." It seems like Sony is ready to pull Home out of that Utopian fantasy and bring it into the cold, hard real world, as the company is promising that it’s going to be done and ready by the end of the year.
Sony’s Martijn Van der Meulen gave a 100% guarantee that Home will launch this year, no doubt about it. Therefore, a lot of people were surprised when Sony, the console manufacturer with the largest presence at the Leipzig Games Convention, didn’t seize on the opportunity to make any Home-related announcements. Some assumed this meant that things had gone awry and that Home wasn’t going to make its end-of-year launch after all, but Sony Europe president David Reeves quickly squashed those rumors, telling Videogaming247, "I can look you in the eyes and tell you everything is on track."
There is a pretty extensive preview of Home available over at IGN, detailing what users can expect both in the open beta and the eventual full launch of the service. Perhaps the most important revelation is that Home will remain a free service at the basic level, with the only costs being associated with premium content. So it looks like the long wait for Home is nearing its end, as Sony has given us every reason to believe it make its debut sometime in the next four months. However, we continue to wait for the existence of leprechauns, unicorns, and Duke Nukem Forever.
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