Other than exactly what I said (microtransactions and sponsorships to offset the costs) I am not sure Sony has any other plans -
Sony brainstorming with the Home community - PS3 Fanboy
It's just a platform for advertising with a gimmick social component really. Some advertising will be simpler (Twilight) than others (Red Bull) but that's really all we're going to see.
I joked on another forum wondering how much MS will charge us for authentic football jerseys for our avatars... now the question is who's going to pay to have exclusive avatar apparel LOL.
Whatever they do, it better work -
http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/12/16/downgraded-investment-rating-causes-sony-stock-fall/
Sony expected to have a net loss of $1.6b this year, pretty sure they're going to miss their promise of getting the PS3 profitable to boot.
It was probably a programming issue. First off, developing for the PS3 seems to be about as easy as writing COBOL commands in traditional Chinese, and building an infrastructure to support the amount of gamers that could be on this thing at once is also extremely hard. From my years of programming I have deduced that the two hardest things to program are games and netcode, and this has a lot of both. That doesn't excuse Sony from delivering a good product within a reasonable time frame, but I feel that people are not cutting Sony enough slack about how hard of an undertaking this entire task is. Still, if this all turns out to be crap, don't expect me to be holding back my stones of criticism.
Ya by no means was this an easy endeavor, but I think they built/went about the whole launch wrong. With so little content, they could/should have released just your personal space, able to be decorated with trophies, 9+ months ago. Then roll out additional things like the plaza, bowling area, etc. The problem with that ends up being that with only your personal space to play with you've got all of 10 minutes of entertainmant tops as you stack your furniture in the corner - all 3-5 pieces of it you get access to. Sadly (and without sarcasm) I'm afraid beating Uncharted 2 will just unlock a new store to let you buy Uncharted 2 items with real money or something. You should be able to find a unique relic, necklace, large stone, whatever and display in your space/on your person. Till we get to that point, with little/no correlation to the games and media you use on the console, there's little/no reason to use Home.
but I'm actually serious. What is it that people are so excited about. This just doesn't seem like something that anyone would actually do for more than a total of 10 mins.
