Sony's ambitious virtual world has been so long in coming because it was for a time lost in a no-man's land between software and hardware developement, said SCEA president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America Jack Tretton.
"I think it is in no-man's land," he said. "We know how to develop software, we know how to develop hardware. But Home is not a software title and it's not necessarily a service. It kind of sat in the Worldwide Studio Group, but it really needed a lot of software support. It didn't get wok on that until more recently."
"There was a lot of learning and naivety."
Tretton said the company isn't bothered by Microsoft's recent announcement of avatars and a sort of virtual space of their own on the Xbox 360.
"I think we are going in a bit of a different direction in Home," he said. "We made a line in the sand (about not releasing Home yet) and made a strategic decision on home. It's a road we are going to go down."
A major reason behind the delayed release now is that the company needs to fill the space they've created, Tretton said.
"I would rather ship it two years from now and have it populated by a lot of neat stuff and be competitive than open something that is a ghost town," he said. "The shell is there but we need to get the real destinations from the third party publishers and the Nikes of the world."
"It's like you open a mall and they're only two stores in it."