The Joy of Spawn
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
We’ve all experienced the embarrassment of spawning into a public space and realizing we’re attired completely inappropriately. We’ve also been forced to spawn into locations against our will, forcing us to navigate away — and, in some cases, causing system freezes and hard restarts.
Ah, the joy of spawn.
Before we dig into this, let’s set some ground rules. I’ve seen too many people bleating and caviling over this issue, as though it’s some inalienable right to not be forced to spawn somewhere. Grow up. This is a service being provided by Sony, and they can put us anydamnwhere they want. We are consumers, given access to a free wonderland, and the people who built it all are trying to figure out ways to generate more revenue. Social games in general have a difficult time with this; just ask Zynga, which can only get three percent of its userbase to actually spend any money.
That said, there may be better methods of going about this whole spawning issue — and it is incumbent upon any business to explore such options if they can increase user satisfaction without dramatically increasing cost or reducing net gains.
The biggest complaint I’ve heard deals with forced spawning into a predetermined location. Two recent examples of this would be the Uncharted 3 Total Game Integration and the Hub Mall during Christmas. The general reaction from the community on the Sony forum was, predictably, negative: everything from minor nuisance to outright condemnation of SCEA’s business practices. The perception of heavy-handed marketing is perfect fodder for yet another round of moral outrage that a for-profit enterprise is trying to make money off of a free service.
Is forced spawning a form of heavy-handed marketing?
You bet your asterisks it is.
It’s also damned effective. Forced spawning effectively means that practically everyone who signs into Home (except for those few who know the cumbersome workaround involving invites) will be exposed to a particular space, event, set of commodities, et cetera. That’s huge. Even the most popular spaces in Home, on the first day of their release, can’t guarantee such numbers on their own merits. It may even be a contractual obligation between SCEA and whichever party has agreed to promote itself on the platform: we’ll incur the cost of developing a promotional space for Home, but in return we need X-number of accounts to visit it over Y-number of minutes for Z-number of days.
Well, the only way to run a pro forma on that, in order to set revenue targets, is to have a fixed data point to work from — and having every Home account touch a space means that you can predict, with a fairly decent degree of accuracy, the percentage of them that will stick around and check it out.
I suspect it’s much the same story with the Hub Mall. Was it a blatantly commercial move? Like, duh. I’ll also bet it helped drive sales revenue over the holiday season.
Keep in mind that social games have a very sharp power-law distribution: most of the revenue is being generated by a relatively small group of users. While I’d love to see more emphasis placed on how to get Home’s committed spenders to spending more, it seems that most of the recent experiments with revenue generation have focused on how to get people who aren’t spending money to open up their wallets.
In short, Sony’s trying to broaden the spending curve, rather than deepen it.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with this strategy, but there is logic to it. Home is viewed in the gaming industry as a niche product with limited broad-spectrum appeal. So enormous time and resources have been put into remaking Home into something which might generate revenue from a wider audience. And let’s keep in mind that there’s no real template for Home; no one’s ever tried a console-based virtual reality social network before.
Which brings us back to the mall. The Hub doubtlessly helped increase Home’s active user base. These people are brand-new to Home, or revisiting it after years of absence. For every “power user” like us, there are a lot of new users out there. Who knows what the ratio is? Ten to one?
How about ten-thousand to one?
See, here’s the problem with some of Home’s power users: a horrible attitude of self-entitlement. I don’t care if you’ve been in Home since Day One of closed beta back in 1847, and you’ve spent eleventy-billion dollars to own absolutely every single thing ever offered for sale: you are not a unique and precious snowflake, and your consumer habits do not qualify you to dictate how a business should operate. If Sony concludes that by spawning everyone in the mall for a month they can generate a projected revenue increase of X, is that worth some forum ranting and empty threats from people saying they’re going to leave? Of course it is.
And what happens if a few power users leave, because “it’s not the same Home it used to be any more” or some other such nonsense?
Again, it’s numbers. I’m one user account; contrasted to the increase in revenue brought on by spawning everyone in the Mall for a couple of weeks, my opinion on the matter frankly ain’t worth that much. And if this harsh reality bothers you, then I suggest you take your unique, special self and do actually leave.
Now. That said, it’s also Sony’s responsibility to try to cater to both groups. And in this regard, their grasp of behavioral economics is surprisingly weak. I mean, seriously, x7 as a loyalty program? Francesco Schettino didn’t fail that hard.
Which brings us to the technological issues caused by forced spawning. Home ain’t the most stable platform in the world. Yes, it’s amazing what it’s able to do, particularly given how old its underpinning architecture is, but let’s face it…there are times when Home’s about as stable as Britney Spears. I give Sony a lot of credit for improving the platform’s stability in recent years, but there’s an overwhelming perception — probably accurate — that force-spawning everyone into a set space causes more problems than a Joe Biden speech. Your PS3 is trying to build your avatar and build the space and download all the other avatars and download all the ads and other bells and whistles — all at the same time. Maybe a modern computer can do that with ease, but the PS3 has less RAM than a bag of pita chips. This causes what is known as a problem.
Even Sub-Zero is tired of freezing.
Topping that off, we have a lovely little social problem called freezing. I sincerely hope you haven’t experienced this. I know I have. The wonderful hard-reboot of the console, corrupted files, and cache rebuilds. Yes, there’s no question Sony’s working hard on trying to fix this issue. But at the same time, freezing and forced spawning are a combine-to-form-Voltron problem, and at present, the only way around it is a loophole in the system involving sending invites from one account to another. If accounts are going to spawn anywhere other than the navigator or a preset personal estate, then this really does need to be addressed.
That said, the solution I’d love to see, as part of a core client update: a new Navigator option which allowed me to set where I want to spawn — the Navigator itself, a personal estate, a public space, et cetera. Sony doesn’t even have to advertise this feature beyond the formal announcement; Home’s power users will quickly take advantage of it, and the vast majority of the user base won’t even know it’s there.
Are there times when special events will override account preferences? Sure. It makes sense to me that I should be force-spawned into a new promotion — once. After that, it should be my choice.
Place name of Sony forum user here.
Or, barring that (because it may be infeasible due to business arrangements behind the scenes), I would strongly advocate for advance notice of force spawning, at least in the Sony forum if not the official blog. Nobody likes to be unpleasantly surprised, and if it’s at all feasible to disclose a force-spawn event ahead of time, along with the projected length of time in which it will occur, that might go a long way towards mitigating the public perception that users are simply chess pieces being moved around at the whim of some callous and capricious corporation.
Am I in favor of forced spawning of any kind, including my last location? No.
That said, I get it. If Home was a subscription service, I’d be righteously honked off about it — but since it’s free, I don’t have much room to complain, beyond the necessity of fixing technological problems which interfere with my ability to use the service and spend money on it. And while I do wish some of the people on the Sony forum would tone down their self-importance, it would also be nice to see a little more community outreach on this topic. Sure, some of the hardened trolls will shout down any SCEA announcement as being full of lies and deceit, but I (he said, smiling) have a solution for that, too: ban them.
Ah, the joy of spawn…
April 19th, 2012 by NorseGamer | 7 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.
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I don’t mind spawning at the last space i visited, but I miss spawning at the personal space as we used to in the Harbor studio, I did like the system we had going for a while where we spawned at the navigation menu. If i had a choice though i would opt to spawn at whatever default personal space I chose. But this current spawn system works ok as well i just have to remember to travel to my default personal space before i sign off. Just an extra step but not a big deal.
Spoken like a true debater! BRAVO and well said…*tipping my hat while applauding.* (Honestly, I am not being sarcastic, VERY good points!)
Default spawning to the Navigator is alright by this Homeling.
One time forced location spawning is a non-issue.
The first time I heard the term power users was by GlassWalls on the forums. An interesting term thought I but of little importance to me, at least at the time. But that’s neither here or there. I sure hope no one thinks power users are better or more important than anyone else. GlassWalls didn’t say that and neither does the articles.
As far as spawning, I have a right to like or dislike where I spawn and to speak about it. And that’s all.
I did not like at all spawning in the Hub. My preference is my preferred home space where I can bathe and change to proper clothing if I choose.
The navigator option is probably the option all the way around for everyone although while surprised when it first happened, spawning in the last space we were is more than acceptable. I just have to remember to log off in the Log Cabin by the lake in Finland.
Now that I know I will spawn in the last place I went I use it appropriately and go to one of my spaces before logging off. Or if I want to check on something first thing in the morning I will leave from that space and spawn there. it is actually quite convenient at times as it saves a step of navigation. Spawning into the base navigator is all right as well for me for it gives me a choice on where to go.
I didn’t mind the other spaces much when they were used as I just bounced out to my Harbor space most times to change, but the Hub can be an issue because it is well used and can be a bit laggy.
Nice article Norse and something that hasn’t been talked about much.
I was on in the day of the forced spawn into Uncharted 3, and though I really didn’t care for it, I did not get too disturbed because in the end , it’s only a few button clicks away from where you really want to be. Norse is right, this is a ‘for- profit’ enterprise and that being said, we don’t have to buy, or even stay in the commerce based spawn point, but they do need to make a buck off us in anyway they can. We should feel lucky that this is the most they push the commerce on us. I have heard tell that casinos make it easy to enter but hard to exit. Let’s be thankful Sony has not thought of that…wait maybe I just gave them the idea. Delete that! We still have the power and advantage that if you don’t like the spawn point , it’s just a few clicks and ‘poof’ away and you go to where you want.
the only problem i had with the force spawnings like the uncharted space was my internet was slower, so i would get some MASSIVE lag just trying to go threw my navi. it would slug down to nothing. then any space i would try to go to would just sit there, or load at the speed of christopher columbus crawling to the new world. and thats if it DIDNT crash out in an error…..which just brought me back the the death trap i was trying to get out of….maybe someone there should realize alot of people dont have high speed internet. some internet providers are slow at the most for some people. and this kind of shinanigans just kills it for them. ….food for thought