First and foremost, the Home closed beta is scheduled to kick off in April with 15,000 users. This first stage of the beta will run through August, at which point it enter the open beta phase and opens up to approximately 50,000 users. The free service, which Sony is trying to get under 500MB in size, is scheduled to go live in October.
The Central Lounge, which is a starting point for virtual meet-and-greets, will have a cap of 64 concurrent users.
Currently, meeting someone in Home and then playing a multiplayer game with them requires both parties to exit Home and enter the game manually, but Sony says that eventually, everything will be seamless. Likewise, Home will eventually become accessible directly through a game that is being played.
At the present time, Home is not a persistent world. Gamers can not visit their friends' apartments unless their friends are logged in. "We are working on the persistent aspect of Home, and expect to implement it in the long term," says the note.
Among the other tidbits of information: users will be able to make money through online user-to-user auctions, there will be no child avatars, and lobbies will likely be localized and divided by region.
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