Back in 2007, Phil Harrison unveiled Sony's vision for the future of social gaming. It was called PlayStation Home, it was ambitious, and it turned out to be a bit of a mess.
Yet somehow the platform lived to a ripe old age of seven (it launched in public beta in 2008). Now it's 2015, Phil Harrison is corporate VP of Microsoft (Home quickly fell behind the mighty Xbox Live) and Sony has pulled the plug on Home.
We should commend Sony for sustaining its "game" for so long. Believe it or not, Home saw 19 million active users at its peak. Last year I met former Home architect Oscar Clark, one of the people who helped launch the platform. You can read the full interview, in which Clark explained the bureaucratic and technological nightmares that stopped Home hitting its potential.
Ahead of its time?
It could be argued that Home was ahead of its time; it's easy to imagine that Facebook is busily working on its own "Metaverse" now that it's acquired Oculus VR. Who knows? With Morpheus nearing a release, maybe we'll soon see Home 2: VR.
Said Oscar Clark at the time: "Home was the first freemium console experience. There were massive lessons to learn… But they've been forgotten about, they've been ignored, they've been treated, in my opinion, as irrelevant.
"But if you look at what was there, what we did, how people spent money in the console space, the way people engaged in communities… you could completely revolutionise the way you approach consoles as a platform."
