That rambling Penny Arcade fanboy drivel is hilarious in its desperation to try trash Home. Home does generate an insane amount of terror in the fanboys of other platforms where they start lashing out incoherently.
The scope of Home and the amount of work Sony has done is staggering.
There are 18 million PS3 already worldwide with 14 million PSN accounts. So the massive amount of traffic on the Home servers yesterday was understandable. No other MMORPG or online world has ever been build to handle such a gigantic userbase.
So other than the initial login servers getting swamped for the first few hours the service went live it was incredibly smooth and lagfree even though every single space in Home was maxed out with people. It has been one gigantic party going on for since yesterday.
Everyone is filling out their friends list with people they've met. People are playing the in Home games together, checking out the initial game spaces for Uncharted and Far Cry 2, dancing in the social music area, or just hanging out chatting with their old or new friends.
There are things to unlock in the various games throughout Home for your avatar or personal spaces. And of course there are things you can buy if you wish to.
The party/matchmaking/game launching is incredibly cool - although more games need to patched for support. There are about 10 right now.
If you are a solo player you can setup up an online game and then invite or have people join you while you are in Home. It shows which game you have setup under your name for other to see. Once you are ready you all launch together right into the game as a party. When you are done you all drop right back to where you were in Home together. So if you have a group of friends you can all hang out at your personal space before and after games or anywhere inside of Home.
But for clans it is even cooler. You can setup a clubhouse for your clan and everyone can come and go when they want. For clan gaming nights everyone goes to the club and you are all able to jump into games together and come right back to your clan clubhouse. Eventually you will be able to stream movies up on your wall or screenshots of various games up on the wall of your clanhouse in addition to having it decked out in the style of your clan.
And then there are the third party game spaces that almost every console developer is in the process of creating. You don't have to have the game to enter these areas. Each of these spaces look just like the real game and give you a feel for what the game is like with the overall art style of the space, pictures from the games up on the walls, and movies streaming from the game.
Companies like EA are creating entire pavilions for their sports games with every game having separate areas inside the space. There are mini-games inside of the game spaces that unlock items for you or let you into special areas. Anything you can do in a game you can do inside of Home.
And there are already third party non-game Spaces going into Home like Red Bull's space that is going live next week.
A year from now it looks like there will be easily more than a hundred different Sony, third party game, and third party non-game company spaces in Home.
Sony has been working on this amazing world since the early PS2 days and it shows. Looking over at it right now with people everywhere inside of Home running around having a blast already, it is hard to imagine how insanely cool Home will be as it continues to grow with the huge number of additional spaces and content over the next five years.