Sony's public Home beta is actually quite private

We knew there was supposed to be a public beta in addition to Sony's invite-only private beta for Home, but we thought it was going to be similar to an open beta, where most anyone could join in and report bugs. Not so. Sony's own Jamie MacDonald described the scenario as this: "At the moment the closed beta is employees, trusted third-parties and people like that. An open beta will be a wider audience but it won't be open to everybody ... We haven't worked out the exact way of doing it but it will be invites to people to ask if they want to be part of it, and then depending on what the response is, we'll have to have some way of deciding who can and who can't take part."

So the next stage of Home will still be invite-only, but it'll reach a wider audience. After that beta concludes, the program will simply pop up on our XMB's after what we assume will be a low-key firmware update. MacDonald implies this by saying Home isn't the typical game, so it won't get a typical launch. "There isn't going to be this 'big bang' launch. That's how you do it in the web 2.0 world, if you're familiar with the launch of Gmail or something like that." Initially scheduled for an October release, with a public beta not yet out, we're estimating that Home will get pushed back to November. We could be wrong, though.