Sony's Home platform is yet to deliver on its promises. We return 'Home' to find out why…

The return rate for PSN account holders on Home is only 25 to 30 per cent, we discovered at the Develop Conference. That’s hardly the figure Sony would have been hoping for from its new social-networking platform. So what has been scaring visitors away? Perhaps we need only look back to our own coverage of Home when we were invited to visit the new space in an exclusive developer session.

Even Sony admits that Home is still yet to hit its stride.

“It’s those first moments of aimlessly walking around that can be quite alienating,” Play Magazine said a year ago. “It was like walking into some kind of nightmarish, Sony-generated dystopia.” A harsh appraisal perhaps, but one that we continued to feel held true as PSN members around the globe complained of loading times, limited content and abandoned areas. But is all this beginning to change? We spoke with SCEE Home business manager Dan Hill to get an impression of how Sony feels about it all.

“Our community is crying out for things to see and do in Home,” Hill admitted to us, perhaps hitting upon the key reason so few players return to Home. “Whenever we launch a new space, we see a big spike in traffic. The key is making that consistent, and trying to ensure the content we release is going to make people come back for more, so they can interact, meet their friends or take part in experiences that they can’t get anywhere else.” This is an area in which a great deal of progress has been made. It seemed that throughout this summer you couldn’t go a week without a new Home game space being launched. There will be plenty more where that came from, too.

“It’s safe to say that there are a lot more spaces planned to support our own first-party titles and key titles from our third-party partners over the coming months,” Hill reassured us. “Watch this space!” But this wasn’t always the case. Hill believes Home is now integral to the way publishers and developers think about the marketing of their biggest titles. “People are building Home into their thinking by default now, and there’s a lot of content coming down the line,” he told us.

Home sometimes feels like a very lonely place.

Heading back into Home ourselves, we found it to be a much more inviting place, bustling with activity, but it still had its faults. Even the most basic of areas needs to be downloaded when you begin your journey. Simply stepping out of your flat is an additional download. Why the central plaza of Home isn’t all a part of the initial download still confounds us and many other Home users, but Sony promises it is listening. “We regularly talk to our community,” Hill insisted. “Without them, we haven’t got a platform. Wherever possible we try to listen to what they are asking for, or what’s important to them, and build that into our planning for future releases.”

However, Hill does not believe that these maintenance issues are really going to be what makes or breaks Home. In his opinion there is only one thing that will keep people returning. “It’s going to be high-quality content that brings people to Home, and keeps them coming back time and again,” Hill insisted. “So our main focus is on developing and commissioning as much of that as we can. We’ll also be ramping up our events schedule, adding to the amount of titles that support game launching from within the Home environment and improving the features that enable you to find your friends, and group together for games and activities.”

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