You know that PlayStation Home feature on your PlayStation 3 that you never used? After years of little traction, Sony has announced that it’s closing the virtual world in the USA and Europe on March 31, 2015. This follows last month’s announcement of Home’s planned closure in Asia. Sony blames “a shifting landscape” for the decision and thanks the “tens of millions” of Home users since its launch in 2008. New content in Home will cease to be published from November this year ahead of the full closure.
Sony is killing one of its weirder experiments throughout its console history, PS3′s PlayStation Home. Yesterday Sony announced that new content would cease for PS Home in November, while the servers would officially be taken down March 31st, 2015. “PlayStation Home has been serving the PS3 community since December 2008,” they say. “During that time, tens of millions of users around the world have grown the social gaming platform into a thriving community of creative and enthusiastic gamers…We would like to thank all of our fans for their support of the PlayStation Home platform over the years.” PlayStation Home as always been one of gaming’s stranger virtual spaces. It was meant to be a sort of Second Life for PlayStation fans, but over the years it turned into little more than a glorified chatroom, overloaded with a copious amount of microtransactions that allowed the niche community to customize their homes and characters for often pretty steep prices.
