A Detailed Examination of Home 1.6
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
For over a year, this publication has been clamoring for improvements to the social aspects of Home. Such improvements are not easy, quick or cheap; they require updates to Home’s core client, which is a time-consuming and expensive process.
It can’t be easy on Sony’s end of things. Home is running on architecture which is half a decade old at this point. You’ve got to divine consumer trends from the Sony forum and elsewhere, toss out the facepalm suggestions that make no sense, toss out the really good suggestions that aren’t technologically feasible, run a pro forma on the costs associated with the ideas that might actually work, and then spend half a year (or more) developing them. Oh, and while you’re doing so, you’ve got the peanut gallery shouting at you and throwing rotten fruit, and you have to keep your mouth shut and not tell them that good stuff is coming.
(I know this is an aside from the main thrust of this article, but really, the Sony forum is an astonishingly liberal place. They’re far more tolerant of bad behavior than most other forums I’ve frequented for the last twenty years or so. Some of these kids today have no idea how good they have it.)
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smokin'.
In resort development, I’ve endured much the same thing. There was one project I managed — a really lovely Chris Hemmeter property, and to this day one of my favorite resorts — which was several decades old and about to undergo a major renovation. You wouldn’t have believed the abuse that we had to smilingly endure while waiting for legal and PR to give us the green light to start disclosing information about the upgrades. My personal favorites were the self-righteous clots who made it very clear that they weren’t going to spend another penny until they got exactly what they wanted, and how disappointed they were with us. Then I’d pull their file in the system and, sure enough, discover that they were usually our biggest problem children who were cheapskates and frankly didn’t deserve to stain the marble in my lobby with their plebeian feet.
The customer is not always right.
Here’s the thing, though: sometimes the customer is right.
Home’s not a perfect virtual reality. Far from it. And lord knows, just in the last year, there have been some curious marketing strategies which, predictably, didn’t go over particularly well. But in the two years I’ve been in Home (yes, I know, many of you have been here longer — shaddap, Grotto), one thing I’ve seen is that Sony typically delivers a couple of big, customer-facing core client updates per year which really improve Home’s social experience. Updates which more or less directly reflect a lot of what the community asks for, which Sony can technologically pull off at that time.
Number Six is requesting a social update, please.
Before we dive into the latest update — Home 1.6 — I think it’s important to point out why social improvements are so important, because they’re difficult to measure in terms of direct return on invested capital. The primary reason is that Home’s strength lies in its ability to provide an immersive experience unto itself. Home can never hope to match the firepower of a top-notch game title; now, on a PC, that’s not a big deal. PCs have access to social networking sites like Facebook, and people can spend enormous sums of time and money immersed in various Zynga games.
The PlayStation 3, on the other hand, is a dedicated game console. We’re talking about a completely different crowd. Which means that while the PlayStation Network has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven million registered accounts, only a small fraction of them are going to find Home appealing and have the necessary hardware (such as a keyboard) to properly take advantage of it. Home offers two distinct advantages, though:
1. It’s the only social network available on any game console, so social gamers have only one place to go;
2. If sufficiently appealing, it can monetize over a much longer period of time than any stand-alone game title, with much lower costs and barriers to entry.
The key to this success is to make Home more of a game itself. This strategy has two parts: make Home a platform for gaming experiences (Novus Prime, Sodium, etc.), and make Home itself something akin to a massively multiplayer online game.
Part one is easy to achieve, and already taking place. Part two is a bit more complicated. The catch with making Home more like an MMOG is that it requires a significant amount of financial outlay as well as the proper infrastructure, and I doubt you’re going to see Home evolve into World of Warcraft or The Old Republic anytime soon. No, what I’m hoping for is something closer to Ultima Online: a world in which you could do various jobs that allowed you to earn rewards and interact with other fun people. One could play as a blacksmith or a fisherman in UO and have a thoroughly enjoyable social gaming experience that had nothing to do with slaughtering enemies.
If this sounds far-fetched, keep in mind that one developer has already done this in Home: Lockwood. Bartending and Scorpion Stomp, along with their high-profile Sodium games and in-world currency, has made the Sodium Hub the best time-sink in all of Home. For me, personally, the Sodium Hub was Home when I first started. It was the only part of Home that made sense to me.
But a truly compelling social game needs a good interface. And here is where the 1.6 update goes a long way towards improving things. You can read the original announcement on the PlayStation Blog here. Thus, more than nine-hundred words in, let’s take a look at it in detail:
Furniture Placement Limit
- Doubled the furniture placement limit in personal spaces and clubhouses from 50 to 100 items. Standard and active furniture limits have been merged into the same system. Currently all actives take up 22 furniture slots in the new system. Thus you can now place a variety of different combinations:
- 100 standard furniture items or…
- 78 standard furniture items and 1 active or…
- 56 standard furniture items and 2 actives or…
- 34 standard furniture items and 3 actives or…
- 12 standard furniture items and 4 actives.
Note from GlassWalls: “Altering the personal space virtual item limit is a feature we’ve had high on our priority list for some time now, and it’s finally here! But that’s not all—it comes with more flexibility concerning the active items so users can do more of what they want with their stuff. Instead of having two separate pools of memory allocated to items (one for static items, the other for active items), they were combined into a single memory pool. This allows a lot more flexibility as it doesn’t lock up a certain amount for items that you may not choose to use, thereby freeing it up for the other type of item. No additional memory was magically created; the existing memory available was just reallocated in such a manner to offer more flexibility.”
This is obviously the biggest news, and it already has the Home community buzzing with excitement. One of the universal facepalm frustrations is hitting that fifty-item limit when you’re really into decorating a space, so unless you tend to use a lot of active items, this effectively doubles what you can do with the same amount of memory. My personal hope is that there will be a subsequent core client update in the future which increases the amount of memory available for private estates (as well as clubhouses and public spaces), but there is no question that this is a huge step forward.
I do need to take my hat off to Burbie, by the way, for accurately predicting this enhancement with her April Fools’ Day article about a fake 1.6 upgrade. You go, girl!
Targeting in Personal Spaces
- Targeting in personal spaces has been improved. This means you shouldn’t accidentally target furniture items through floors or ceilings any more.
- We have made exceptions for wall hangings and lights as these tend to be placed quite high up.
- If you find any items of furniture in places you can’t reach then you can always remove them through the furniture browser and place them somewhere else.
This doesn’t mean all that much to me, personally; it’s only a minor annoyance when trying to select a piece of furniture. Where it gets interesting, though, is what implications this might have for the glitching community, and glitched furniture. I leave it to others to report on this.
Don't kitteh hate. Furminate.
Portable Items and Companions
- We have changed the way that companion portables work so they will now automatically re-activate after you enter and leave a game or relocate between spaces. No more having to put your companion away and take them out again when you do this!
A good fix for a minor annoyance. My Lockwood kitten will now be following me around a lot more often.
Help System
- There is a new help system to aid new users as they explore PlayStation Home for the first time.
This is a big deal. It’s easy to overlook this bullet point in the avalanche of news, but this might just be the most important enhancement being rolled out with the 1.6 upgrade. HomeStation Magazine has written at length about the necessity of providing a better onboarding experience for new users, and how this is one of Home’s greatest weaknesses. Various solutions have been proposed — a welcome center, an EOD tutorial in Harbour Studio, etc. — but there’s no question that more handholding for new users is going to go a long way towards improving user retention, average session time and revenue per user.
Arcade Games
- Arcade games are no longer subject to the 3 minute inactivity timeout when placed as furniture in Personal Spaces or Clubhouses.
Wasn’t even aware there was an inactivity timeout. Means nothing to me, personally, but if it helps with arcade cabinet sales, this is a good thing.
Menu Pad
- We have removed the “Community” section of the Menu Pad. The information that used to be contained in here is now communicated via the Message of the Day pop-up at login and the new loading screens.
This is a smart move. The Community tab on the Menu Pad was all too easily overlooked, and by sharing that info via the MotD, it gives users good information to absorb during the sign-in process, and helps camouflage the length of time it takes to sign in.
nDreams' "War Room" clubhouse
Moving away from the 1.6 news, let’s talk about clubhouses for a moment. There have been rumblings of upgraded clubhouses for a while now, and the lid has finally been removed from this pressure cooker with the teaser reveal of the nDreams “War Room” clubhouse. But it’s a comment from GlassWalls which is even more exciting: “If you’re interested in new Clubhouses, stay tuned. There are a few new designs coming, not just from nDreams!”
Clubhouse improvements are easily one of the most oft-requested items in the Home community. For those of you who didn’t have the chance to read SealWyf’s outstanding April Fools’ Day article on fake clubhouse improvements, I highly recommend it. The basic clubhouse is woefully out of date, and considering how clubs are an integral aspect of Home’s social experience, I’m somewhat surprised developers didn’t start rolling out their own clubhouses sooner (the answer probably lies in some sort of technical hurdle that was only recently overcome, if I had to guess). Whatever clubhouse gets rolled out first — and it’ll probably be the War Room, from the look of things — will undoubtedly make a killing, as it’ll be the only alternative to the the basic clubhouse for a while. What I’m hoping to see — and this is what it sounds like — is that there will, in time, be a variety of clubhouses to choose from, just as there are a variety of personal estates. Two questions emerge, though:
1. Given the proven popularity of clubhouses, will we see premium pricing for these more advanced designs? Some will complain, of course, but I can easily see a developer charging a hefty premium for a really superlative clubhouse. If anything, given the way human beings work, it wouldn’t surprise me to see premium pricing driven by a desire to have a more exclusive clubhouse than someone else. Hey, it worked for the Mansion. Just don’t come crying to me when this prediction turns out to be accurate.
2. How is this going to work for existing clubs? If I buy the War Room, for instance, do I have to set up an entirely new club and re-invite everyone from the old club, or is there a smoother method? If I have to re-invite everyone and set up a new club each time, that’s an incentive to be very picky about purchasing only clubhouses I’d really want. If an existing club can be in essence “reskinned” with a new clubhouse, then the sky’s the limit here.
Needless to say, 2011 has been quite an amazing year for Home. Between the Hub, these core updates and some of the new gaming experiences that have been introduced, Home has undergone a remarkable transformation. We, as a community, must remember to be patient; the things we ask for now probably won’t show up for a good six to nine months. Possibly longer if it’s more technologically complicated. But if you needed any further proof that Sony and the other developers listen to the community, the 1.6 update and its associated news should lay those concerns to rest.
Bring on 2012.
December 7th, 2011 by NorseGamer | 8 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
LinkedIn
Twitter
When I read about the update on the blog this morning I had to check the date. No, it’s not April 1st. I couldn’t believe it… 100 items per space? Reading further, the news was not so good as I first thought, since I usually have two active items in my spaces (something for music, for one), but still I want to say “Thank You!” to Sony for the effort.
Your to witty for your own good Norse. It’s so amazing watching it all just grow and bloom. Again,thanks to you and all you do in getting this to the masses.
My biggest concern with Home right now?..The Hub.
I picked a really bad day to quit smoking crack.
(I laughed out loud at the pics)
I think you covered the update pretty well. I know there are questions regarding the club houses that are incoming and it will be known soon. I think the best thing about the update is the fact that the Sony teams do listen to it’s user base. This is very important.
I recently said that Home has nothing left to prove. It has everything that was ever mentioned way back in it’s infacy. everything else from here on out is just icing on the cake now.
The cake is not a lie.
All I can say is WOOT!!!!! 100 pieces of furniture! Wow I can’t wait til tomorrow so I can get to decorating my spaces the way they should be done, especially the Luxury Lakeside and the Silicon and Penthouse. This is going to be a fun weekend!
all I can say is WOW
Great article.The new targeting system also affects machinima makers as we are now un-able to re-target to a distant camera.http://community.us.playstation.com/message/36476640?tstart=0#36476640
Let me just say from the production side, 1.6 will make a lot of things possible that it is not easy to explain to the public. So they didn’t. Let’s just say you will see things coming soon that could not have been done before 1.6. As good as 1.6 is for users, it is also as good for developers.
The basic timeframe on releases for new items using new features on a new HDK is 4 months for the simple things, six months for the more complex and 9 months for anything started today. The next year is going to be really exciting.
Still no invisibility button though !!
That’d be the biggest and most popular item/button on Home and keep people coming back !!