Register Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/08/15/sony_home_ps3/

Sony threatens to evict naughty gamers from Home

By James Sherwood
Published Wednesday 15th August 2007 10:35 GMT

Woe-betide any gamer looking to cause a nuisance on the forthcoming PS3 Home entertainment network, because Sony’s got its eye on you. The company has announced that it will not hesitate in banning any such gamers and their machines from the service.

For anyone not in the know, the PlayStation 3 Home environment (http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/16/sony_home/) has previously been described by Sony executives as a 3D virtual world inhabited by user created Avatars. It is expected to go live during October.

However, a Sony executive, speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, has said that serious abusers of the service would soon find themselves locked out by the company.

The executive claimed that “ultimately we know a user's details, we know machine details and we know where they live. If you really, really misbehave you can have your console disconnected at a machine level, so you would actually have to move house and buy a new PS3 before you could get online again”.

He stressed that Sony didn’t want to become a virtual police force for the network, but said it would create age-restriction areas within it to keep younger gamers locked out of any inappropriate content. The intention is for Home to be a self-policing network, by granting players the ability to block interactions with any other users as they wish.