Room for PlayStation Portable

» see jp.playstation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sony Computer Entertainment Japan announced Room for PlayStation Portable on 24 September 2009, timed to Tokyo Game Show. The press release styled the name R∞M, with an infinity symbol sitting where the two Os go, and described a community service coming to Japan that winter. The short version everyone reached for was PlayStation Home for the PSP, and that was accurate: a 3D apartment, an avatar to put in it, and other people's avatars arriving over the PlayStation Network to stand around and talk.

Signups opened the day of the announcement and closed on 5 October, eleven days later. The requirements were specific. You needed a PSP that could reach the internet, a PlayStation Network master account, and you had to be 18 or over, which is a strange gate on a product built around decorating a room. Selected applicants got an invitation and the details. The closed beta started in October 2009 and the service was launched from the PlayStation Network section of the PSP's XrossMediaBar once you had downloaded and installed it.

What Sony described for the eventual release was free to use with premium content on top. Avatars, room spaces, blogs, albums and chat, on every model of PSP. None of it got there. Development was halted on 15 April 2010, and the stated reason was the feedback from the beta participants themselves, with SCE Japan thanking them on the way out. Siliconera's headline that day was the plainest summary available: Sony pulls the plug on PSP social network service.

~ the dossier ~

~ the case for it ~

The comparison to PlayStation Home is the whole case, for and against. Home had shipped on the PS3 in December 2008 and was already demonstrating the problem: an avatar space with no activity in it becomes a lobby people walk through on the way to a game. Doing that on a handheld meant a smaller screen and a battery you were spending on standing still, with one analog nub and no keyboard to type with.

Against that, the PSP in Japan was a social machine in a way it never was anywhere else. Ad-hoc play on trains and Monster Hunter sessions in groups, on a platform people actually carried around and used near each other. A persistent room to come back to was not an unreasonable idea for that market. It was an idea aimed at the one country where the hardware behaved that way, which is also why nobody outside Japan ever got a login.

~ 15 april 2010 ~

Canceling a service during its beta is an unusual kind of death to file. There was no shutdown notice to users at large and no final day of service to point at, because the user base was an invited test group and the public had never been let in. What ended on 15 April 2010 was the development of a thing that had been promised in a press release seven months earlier.

The Japanese page at jp.playstation.com/psn/room survives only in the archive, captured eight days after the halt. The logo survives too: four characters with an infinity symbol in the middle, which turned out to be the wrong unit of time to promise.

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