Home, Zynga and Community
by Gideon, HSM team writer
In 2008, the doors to a virtual world opened, and gamers and non-gamers alike wandered their way through to find a new landscape of friends and activities waiting for them on the other side.
Once there, this world allowed its players to create avatars to reflect their own personal tastes, and they were able to dress their avatars using a selection of provided clothing. From there, users were dropped into a basic apartment, which everyone received, where they could decorate to their hearts’ content with a small variety of furniture. When the player was ready, they could leave their apartment and meet other players in virtual public spaces. With these new friends, players could spend their time chatting, dancing, visiting various virtual spaces, playing games with their new friends, and browsing the shops to buy new clothes for their avatars or furniture for their apartment. To purchase these items, players could earn coins by working at the widget factory.
Yoville: Home for the third-dimensionally impaired
Wait, what?
Does that last activity seem off? That’s because the virtual world being described here isn’t the much loved PlayStation Home, but Zynga’s 2-D Facebook virtual world, YoVille.
In the years before PlayStation Home, the social media craze was just starting to catch fire, and Sony wasn’t the only company that saw potential for a virtual world feeding off of this aspiring medium. Zynga also saw the need for a way for gamers to connect socially, yet they took a different approach than Sony. Instead of establishing a new social network with which to connect gamers, Zynga released their virtual world, and the dozens of other programs such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Empires & Allies, over Facebook – and the world responded favorably.
Just under three years since its release, Zynga has announced their Initial Public Offering, making them the first public company whose product lines are completely virtual. After all is said and done, Zynga claims a worth of nearly $20 billion.
To put this into perspective: EA – the developer of Madden and The Sims and one of the oldest and most established publishers in the industry – is worth around $6 billion; Activision Blizzard, the owner of the money machines which are World of Warcraft and Call of Duty is only worth about $13 billion; and Sony themselves, maker and developer of the entirety of the PlayStation brand and countless consumer products over the past fifty years is worth about $30 billion.
Zynga's got a lot of bite these days.
So, how did a company become such a powerhouse in the industry in just under three years when their initial offering is so similar to PlayStation Home; a program which, in popular perception, seems to still be trying to find its place in the gaming industry? More importantly, is there anything Sony can learn from Zynga’s success in the future development of Home?
As many already know, PlayStation Home was originally meant to be a social media platform for gamers. While Sony’s original vision of a virtual space for gamers to meet, interact, share content and join games with one another is still intact, its outlook as a social medium has deliberately been downplayed. Aspirations of matchmaking, dedicated external internet-based social media sites, cell-phone connectivity and some of the more advanced social building functionalities for Home have yet to be realized. By October 2009, Sony made the definitive decision to shift the focus of PlayStation Home from a social network to a fully-fledged gaming platform. Sony believed this shift to be the natural progression and development of Home.
What development and activities within Home lead Sony to believe that the average user was looking for a gaming platform and not a social medium in Home? From day one, many users were looking to Home for the promise of a social network and there are many that attest that Home still provides such a service to the community.
(NorseNote: the big challenge that Home faces is that it’s built into a gaming console — but the gaming console isn’t bundled with a keyboard. And without a keyboard, it’s almost impossible to effectively utilize Home as it was originally intended: a social network for gamers. Thus, shifting the emphasis more heavily onto gaming experiences helps to attract and retain more users who might otherwise have tuned out.)
There was, however, an event that may have had a hand in the shifting of PlayStation Home away from being a social medium within its first year of open beta: The Alternate Reality Game from nDreams, Xi.
It was the best of times....
When Xi was released in March 2009, about three month into the public life of PlayStation Home, users migrated to Home in droves to experience the first console-based ARG, and a myriad of gamers became Home users. Many who were on Home at that time remember Xi as being the first time the community felt alive. It not only gave gamers a reason to visit the virtual space, but also brought the community together and allowed Home to stand out as a medium. It seemed as if Home had found its Killer App.
Understandably , the popularity of Xi lead Sony to believe users were more interested in Home as a gaming platform than just as a place to gather and chat with friends. This viewpoint, however, overlooks one of the core concepts that made Xi as popular as it was and has allowed Zynga to become a gaming powerhouse in just a little less than three years: community.
Xi was responsible for bringing the Home community together via various online forums and media outlets. It had its players scouring the internet for hours for minute clues and details, in hopes of being the one to answer the next riddle. Players would bring their small nuggets of information to the community and add it to the collective pool of knowledge, building to the overall synergistic solving capability of the community as a whole. This assembly was even responsible for perhaps the oldest and the most successful of the PlayStation Home fan sites, AlphaZone4.
Zynga’s success can also be attributed to its interconnection with community. Zynga games rely on each gamer’s connection with other players to perpetuate success in most of their games. The gameplay mechanics are designed in such a way so that users are encouraged and rewarded for tempting their friends into playing. This dependence on friends makes Zynga games popular pastimes within the social networks in which they are housed.
Midway offers an awesome single-player experience!
Many of the games released within the new re-focused PlayStation Home gaming platform have provided a single player experience. While there are usually leaderboards which allow Home gamers to compare their highest score with their friends, the games themselves are relatively solitary endeavors. This is an attribute of Home games which is slowly changing, with the release of simultaneously multiplayer games, such as Novus Prime and Sodium2. It seems developers are beginning to understand the importance of community within the games of Home. This, however, isn’t an end-all solution.
Unfortunately, unlike Yoville and other Zynga games, Home didn’t benefit from being built atop an existing social network. This is the single greatest contributing factor to both Zynga’s success and Home’s struggles to find its place within the gaming community. The success of Home relies on its community to be there to purchase and play its games, yet the community itself struggles to maintain its numbers in light of other offerings from the gaming industry, and the outright lack of knowledge about PlayStation Home and its gaming platform capabilities.
Can't have a social site without the community!
Does this mean that Home is defunct as a social media network since Sony has decided to develop Home as a third-party gaming platform? Absolutely not. The core of the Home community remains loyal and strong.
However, this does not mean that the service cannot grow and attract new gamers. In order for Home to be a viable gaming platform in the future, Sony must re-embrace the concepts of social networking to reinvigorate the Home community and enable its developers to generate community building games, which keeps its users coming back for more time and time again.
How Sony can achieve this will have to wait for another article, which could benefit from input from the HSM community. So, what do you think? How can Sony re-invigorate the Social Networking aspects of PlayStation Home?
July 14th, 2011 by Gideon | 12 comments
Gideon is a team writer for HomeStation Magazine and likes cheese in all its forms. Whether it be block, slice, cream, wheel, log, string or aerosol, Gideon cant resist the pungent bitter taste of good cheese. Heck, he'll even take mediocre cheese, as long as its slapped between two pieces of whole wheat bread with a little bit of mustard.
Absolutely fascinating article, and yes, I remember being a part of the huge XI game that was released in 2009. It did bring people together, I know of this much, (however bizarre and different the game was)
Sony do seem unsure of which direction they want to take Home into. But I can’t see them just throw games into it, to appease a new audience, in my own view this alone isn’t going to attract a new audience.
What WILL bring back an audience is to shift it’s focus back onto at least 2 things; The target age bracket that it is aiming for. (They have said time and again that it is ‘family friendly’ PG, when I can clearly see it’s not with sexualised clothing and Brimstone dancers popping up all over the place)Either this or an ‘adult’ area of Home which would be more appropriate for this sort of thing.
The virtual companions (Pets) are a fantastic idea, this brought people together, though i think the pets could do more.
Another community based game, similar to ‘Little Big Planet’ in that using basic teamwork and problem solving could be something Sony could look toward, would be another great revenue maker.
(why not use teamwork to ‘Build’ your new Private space? Something fun and colourful, like a fluffy ‘Lego’?)
But I do still believe Sony have hit onto something that is truly unique, with it’s graphics engine and Social networking, Home could surpass, dare I say it current Social King ‘Second Life’ which has been around since the past decade.
Love the article Gideon. I think that Sony needs to have a large scale rpg type of game, one that would be interactive and utilize several people at a time. I had heard that the so called “Steampunker” space was supposed to have something built in like an interactive game. but it seems to have disappeared as an idea since there has been no word about it for quite awhile now. I think that Sony needs to rethink things a bit and ask developers to create spaces with different multi-player games built in. If Xi was so cool to play, why not have N dreams bring the full game out again for the thousands of people who never got to see it. like me? There are many ways to go with this, but the core of it is that Sony has to realize that though games are still important to us all, without the gamer, there is no game and without the social interactivity in Home, there is no gamer.
I enjoyed the article and while I know more about the subject than I did before, I still don’t know all that much about the communities. I suppose one has to participate, don’t they, to know?
Excellent article.
Note: Norse, I wish at times you would put your occasional comments in the Reply section instead of the article itself. In this case it to me anyway, it breaks the continuity of the article.
The article is an award winner.
@Kid Fleetfoot -- Norse’s comments aren’t really “comments.” They’re more in the nature of “disclaimers,” which is why they need to appear in the article.
@Norse -- I’m not really feeling this particular disclaimer. Anyone who buys a PS3 is going to have a PC. Most PCs use USB keyboards. So take the keyboard from your PC and connect it to your PS3 until you have time to buy a 2nd keyboard (assuming that you don’t already have a 2nd keyboard). That’s what I did when I first began to use Home.
Being a computer person, I had extra keyboards laying around. Oddly enough, I have quite a few people on Home who don’t have keyboards, which includes friends that I communicate with on a regular basis.
Also true. I was chatting with someone in the Asian Home a few days ago who didn’t have a keyboard, and if she hadn’t mentioned it I wouldn’t even have noticed. In my opinion the language barriers are a bigger problem than any lack of a keyboard.
I would love to buy a Japanese keyboard for example, but my PC/OS won’t support one. So I have to make do with the virtual keyboard instead.
Gideon, great article. I am with Burbie on this one. I would like to see a really good RPG that you would be able to play with your friends. I know that this would be hugely popular as others have spoken of it as well. The problem that I have found with trying to do a group event with friends (like Siren and Xi) is that some will be thrown out to the beginning or will get separated and lost. This makes it frustrating to pláy as a group as everyone has to exit when one person gets ejected. Something like LBP with checkpoints would be nice. Also group chat is a must and I have found that voice chatting in some public areas results in a lot of garbled conversations and makes it difficult to help each other. A real enjoyable read and I am looking to hearing other reader’s ideas about social/group gaming on Home.
Thanks everyone. Im glad you enjoyed it and learned something. I, myself, learned quite a bit while writing this article and got a lot of ideas for ways Home could better intigrate community and social networking. I’ll pile the concepts together into an article soon.
Burbie… I am totally in agreement, that steampunk game needs to come out! It was totally a team effort adventure.
is Sony have realy this view for HOME ? i doubt halas….
I got sucked into Zynga games by FaceBook friends and relatives needing more “neighbors” to unlock certain upgrades. OMG, this corporation must be owned by descendants of Machiavelli. I have a choice, woo even more friends to these games or sign over my credit card to this gaming company.
I enjoy coming back daily to see your thoughts. I have your page bookmarked on my favorite read list!