Playstation Home Beta Now Live

Sony's new social networking community, Playstation Home, has now gone live in it's beta stages.

PlayStation Home is a new social networking site, it's free to use for Playstation 3 owners and it allows them to create an avatar, create your own apartments, join other players in online games, chat and soon the ability to stream music and video.

This release of their new virtual community comes after Sony announced that they are planning on cutting several thousand jobs. However, their new social networking venture could help them bring in some extra cash. Ideas have been floating around in their heads that they can soon start to offer different apartments to buy, new cloths and start selling advertising on the various billboards and screens around the site.

One major reason why the new social networking community has been released now is to try and sway some of the potential customers during the Christmas period. Sony is trying to compete against Microsoft's latest Xbox Live update which allows Xbox 360 owners to create their own avatars and play social games online.

However, will their new social networking clubhouse be enough to sway the buyers? I very much doubt it. Simply because of this new Playstation Home, I don't think it will sway the minds of buyers, considering the price of the Playstation is still high, and not planning to be lowered.

By searching around, you can get an Xbox 360, with 4 games and 2 controllers for around £130, but with the PlayStation, you can get the PS3 and only 3 games for a whopping £270.

Even though the whole idea of PlayStation Home is good, and it's a great idea for current PS3 owners who want to interact with the games that they already own, I don't think it will encourage more buyers, unless they reduce the price of the console. So, good try Sony, but I don't think it will have much effect on the sales.

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Full Game Downloads Coming To Xbox 360?

During an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Peter Molyneux, maker of Fable, hinted that Xbox owners could soon see full game downloads coming to Xbox Live.

In the interview, Peter said: “I think it would be a great thing for this studio to work on. I can’t say anything else of it – I would be killed to death”.

Currently, if you download a game from Xbox Live or the Playstation Network, you would be limited to older and games that take up less hard drive space.

Although some people may think that this is some sort of heaven, the idea of being able to download the latest games without having to leave the four walls of your home, the reality will bring you back down to Earth.
At the moment, if you were able to download a full game onto your hard drive, it would drain around 6GB of space and take a long tiresome wait time to download.

Although these problems could be worked around, considering the Elite Xbox has a 120GB hard drive, also, the option to download the games over night, however, there are still problems that need to be considered.

Firstly, as there would be no second hand games, this would cause 2 problems, one, the second hand market would disappear, and second, the price of new games would not go down in price.
Also, because a game would take around 6GB of hard drive space, many people would be required to buy the £100, 120GB hard drive, which still will only hold 20 games.
This will all lead to people deleting their older games, they won't want to buy a new hard drive just for a game, and because of this, many people will become more choosy when buying a game.

Plus, the idea would not work for the arcade systems which have no hard drives.

Even though there are several downsides to full game downloads, there is one upside. Because they are downloadable, the prices may go down as there would be no cost for packaging of the game.

Overall, I thought the idea to be rather pointless. The only advantage I can see is that you don't have to leave your house, but if your order online, you don't do that anyway, plus the post would probably be faster than download.


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Video Game Tester Jobs – Get Into The Games Industry By Becoming A Beta Game Tester First

Behind every game is a tester. You can make use of all those hours spent in front of the screen and convert it into cash by getting a video game tester job. This way, you get to amuse yourself all while fattening your wallet.

Video game tester jobs are available with many gaming industry giants such as Sony and Microsoft. Even smaller game companies often hire freelancer beta game tester to play test their games.

Some are conducted in a full time basis while others may experiment on different people and make the testing job a one-time contract. Upon signing an agreement for the job, you become an important voice representing a bigger market to the development and appeal of both active and potential gamers.

Every video game tester faces the challenge of identifying the capabilities and shortcoming of the video game as well as the bugs that need to be ironed out, thus maintaining communication between developers and quality assurance team.

However, too much criticism is definitely a pitfall. Designers value a tester´s opinion but do not necessarily make minor or major changes basing from a single person´s suggestion. Crossing boundaries of your job might be a tad to much as other departments are also created for different functionalities.

Working as a video game tester can also inspire creative juices. Who knows? You might get to design the next big thing in the world of gaming. Many people often use the video game tester position to get into the video gaming industry. From there, if they have the talent, they can progress to become game designers, animation specialists, level game designers, video game programmers and even to video game producer.

Imagination and creativity are the investments of good game designs. As a video game tester, you get to develop and practice that a lot. Stepping into this cyber domain can be the start of further gaming advancement for you.

Click to discover how to apply video game tester jobs. If you want to get paid to play test games, learn how and where to apply for video game tester jobs.