Ben-DutkaYes, we're well aware of the frustration involved with waiting for the innovative PlayStation Home service for the PlayStation 3, but we keep trying to nail down reliable release dates for you.
As usual, we don't have an official confirmation, but the following set of dates has popped up in the Home forums . It reminds us that those who downloaded the special Home theme from the PlayStation Store were automatically entered into the drawing for the Closed Beta. However, if you haven't seen an invite to this yet, you'll probably have to wait until the open beta, which should supposedly begin on November 19. The information posted there hasn't been issued by an actual Sony employee, so we can't put much stock in it, but it's consistent with other rumors. The previous release date rumor put the open beta date on November 18, which is pretty darn close. The only interesting aspect of this is the "Final Release" date, which is listed as "December, 2008 – Quarter 1, 2009." Sony has said the open beta release will be "fully robust," and we didn't expect to see the final roll-out this year…
Anyway, here's hoping Sony will issue a concrete release date for Home within the next week or so. If you check the calendar; yeah, we're already in November, so if it's coming out this month, we would expect an official announcement some time soon.
