While some of the excitement surrounding Sony's upcoming online world PlayStation Home has been lost because of lengthy delays to its launch, it still looks like the service could be a selling point for PlayStation 3 when it is finally unveiled.
Gamesmaster last week toured Sony's London Studio and spoke to some of the huge team of hundreds of game developers based in London, Japan and the US who are creating the stylish online world.
Producer Mike Rouse says the project started with just eight people four years ago.
"Selling the concept of Home took a while," Rouse says, "although everyone saw that it had a lot of potential and opportunities."
Console "fanboys" religiously aligned to Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony products regularly argue over the strengths of their respective consoles, but what cannot be denied is that since PlayStation's launch in 1994, Sony has regularly found ways of tapping into the zeitgeist and selling consoles to new markets.
Some examples include introducing CD-quality music soundtracks from popular artists, cutting edge marketing campaigns, and games using simple controllers like the EyeToy digital camera games, the SingStar karaoke series and the Buzz trivia titles.
With PlayStation Home, in one swoop Sony could capitalise on many major digital trends: the popularity of Second Life, The Sims and World of Warcraft, the ubiquity of YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, avatar and virtual space customisation, online chat, in-game achievements, multiplayer larks and more.
But the delays to PlayStation Home have caused many people to question whether Sony can actually deliver such an ambitious online service, and caused Sony itself to scale back Home's focus to concentrate on the gaming community.
Creative Director Ron Festejo says the delays are testimony that for Sony, "it's very important to get something like this right".
"We are very much in close touch with the community of the closed beta and a lot of them are asking for more functionality".
Home users will spend their time customising their avatar, decorating their apartment, admiring their trophies won in games, playing mini-games like bowling, and chatting with other digital denizens.
Demonstrations showed the integration of multiplayer action into the service is impressive, and should help achieve Sony's aim of facilitating online play with like-minded players.
John Venables, Lead Artist on Home, describes the service as a "social layer".
"I can boot up Home and go and find like-minded gamers, maybe form a clan with eight of us, and launch into a deathmatch game, or a racing game, or whatever that may be. For me, it's the community angle.
"You've got to bear in mind that a lot of the match-making services that you see on the PC are essentially just lists of names. I think that's quiet alienating for a lot of gamers. Hopefully we are making a lot more immersive way of doing it."
Prior to using Home, Venables says he would get the occasional invite to "be my friend" from playing games like flight combat title Warhawk, but "you have no real reference point".
"It's just a tag, just a name. That's it. In Home, as soon as I started and we got the first initial tests up and running, my Friends list has grown because I'm communicating to people with voice. Instantly you get an understanding about who that person is."
Home will be available as a free download for all PlayStation 3 owners. It is currently expected to be released in November.