Why Spend Money?
“We want to make money because making money means we get to make more games, and we get to make bigger games. And everybody wants to be successful. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to make money. I think it’s a bad thing to want to make money off things that are not a good service or product for your customer.”
–Jay Wilson, Blizzard Entertainment
Why spend money?
That’s a very direct way of stating it, but I can give you several reasons to do so.
I was once a skeptic about spending real money on virtual commodities. As a matter of fact, I remember snorting when I saw that you had to buy a $4.99 jacket to play the full Salt Shooter game. That same night, I went to Dave and Buster’s and spent over twenty dollars in arcade games alone.
I still play the Salt Shooter game, and that night at D&B is only a memory now. Yes, I have had those “Doh!’” moments, after buying items that resulted in major disappointments. However, I am not advocating that you throw your money away, or spend it on gaudy junk you don’t need or want, and will never use. There are a few factors I consider when I spend. You don’t have to follow my guidelines, but they are things to think about.
I encourage everyone to research items before buying them. One of the strongest virtues of the Home community is that — despite the trolls that festoon the public areas — the forums, fan sites, and groups like HomeStation Magazine are filled with friendly people who are always willing to help. All you have to do is reach out and ask someone. It is very possible to enjoy Home without spending a dime. However, a little careful spending can really improve the experience.
So: what should you buy?
That is a question you have to ask yourself. Better yet, ask yourself what you want to get out of the Home experience. There are only three categories of items you can purchase: virtual clothing or portable items, personal spaces and decorative items, and games.
A personal space is a good investment if you get it for the right reason. If you buy it just because it is new or pretty, then you may soon get bored with it, and it will end up as a forgotten space you never visit. Decorative items are a matter of personal taste. A lot of items are unnecessary — they are really just kitchy bric-a-brac. Clubhouses are a great way to get social with friends, but if you plan on starting a club, bear in mind that there is a serious time commitment involved in keeping a club going.
Games are where you really get your money’s worth. You can either spend money on personal space games and cabinets, or on pay-to-play and freemium upgrades for public space games. There are a growing number of personal space games available, resources that Home veterans didn’t have only a year ago. Some apartments are actually built around a game, as in some of the nDreams and VEEMEE spaces.
I am a very picky spender, and downright tightfisted when it comes to spending money in Home. That is a result of being a student, and having a civilian job which hasn’t been the steadiest source of income since the economy tanked. I prefer to spend my entertainment money on real-world items. Nonetheless, I budget for Home stuff as well. What I consider when making a Home purchase is how much entertainment mileage I can get from it.
With clothing and portable items, something has to wow me. I usually dress a certain way to make a statement or reflect my personality. And I only purchase personal spaces when they include a game, or return more items through rewards. This is why I purchased the Aurora space and Mui Mui Island.
I initially had reservations about purchasing the Scribble Shooter arcade cabinet, even though I enjoyed the game, because it costs $6.99. I was also turned off at first because friends couldn’t play the full game in my space unless they also owned it. That restriction has been corrected, although only the owner can receive rewards; a restriction I find acceptable. After all, fewer people would have bought the game if they could get the rewards by playing a friend’s copy. The game has ten rewards, some of which are pretty awesome, which you unlock as you play through it. For $6.99 for the game and ten rewards, you are paying about sixty cents per item. When you do the math, that really is a good deal.
45 items? That is a Steal!
The LOOT Space apartment is $9.99 — pretty high as far personal spaces go. But Loot included 45 items with it, including a D.O.G. companion. The space itself is awesome, and worth every penny. This is a four-level personal space with multiple screens to access entertainment on demand. Add forty-five items, and you are looking at about twenty-one cents per item. That is a steal! There just aren’t enough praises for LOOT on this space. They have set the bar to a new height.
I think one of the best purchases I have made has been the LOOT Modular Stage Set, which includes the LOOT Active Camera and the LOOT Active Light bundled with the space. Individually, they cost $2.99 each — still well worth it, considering how much user-generated content has come out of these two gems.
I have spent about $9.48 for the Aurora Island space and the Auroralite Contraption to speed leveling up in the game. I am now six levels away from level 100 and the coveted Aurora Champion’s Apartment. My purchase price is getting me two spaces, a companion, two avatar costumes, and 21 other items. That comes out to just over 35 cents each. The value is there, even if you don’t itemize things. Yes, I could have earned most of those rewards in Aurora without buying a thing. But it would have taken a very long time, and I would have lost patience and probably have given up on the game. A few of my friends have done so, and they are still at the level they were a year ago. Spending a little on upgrades helped me level up and earn the rewards.
Bundles are also a good spending strategy, as you get much more for your buck than if you purchased items individually. Don’t forget to check what is available under the bundles tab each week. The PSN store accessible from the XMB also has several value packs. My biggest issue with those is that they often don’t list what the packs contain. I like knowing what I am getting, personally, instead of buying a mystery pack. I don’t really care if it’s one thousand items for $1.99 — if I don’t really want any of them, they just become a thousand items cluttering my storage. Also, research the packs carefully, since some of them contain the same items. For example, there is some item overlap between the Anime Pack and the Animals Pack, and between some of the Starter Packs and the Furniture Packs.
One guilty pleasure I have indulged in is companions. I know they are an extension of your avatar, and there are plenty of free ones, but I can’t get enough of them. I love animals in real life. If I could maintain a zoo, I probably would.
Something else that spending in the virtual world provides for me is the thrill of shopping. Shopping can be a lot of fun, but in real life you often get a lot less for what you spend, and the logistics of shopping can be a hassle. It does give me a vicarious thrill to shop for my avatar, though.
I am not a materialistic person in real life — in fact I am very much a minimalist. Yet in digital goods, I have become a hoarder. I have managed to fill three external terabyte drives with music, TV shows, movies, books, and work files. I am a firm believer in digital content, because it can last forever, is accessible from anywhere, and is easily transferable as long as we have electricity and our entire civilization doesn’t collapse.
Besides acquiring virtual items and games, the other main reason to spend money in Home is that Home is free-to-use software. Most major video games cost roughly sixty dollars, and with DLCs that can add up to ninety or more. Popular games are sold in the millions of units. That is huge, and profits can be quickly made. Home, on the other hand, is largely a collaboration of several third party developers. There are over twenty-million registered users on Home, but not all registered users are active or even regular users. Out of the small percentage who are regular users, a smaller fraction actually spends money.
Sony is often accused as being a money-grubbing corporation. But let’s get real here. Sony is a company. They are in the business of making money. Yet, with all the ways they could make money, they have offered a free online network, and a free-to-use online social forum like Home. They could easily have charged a subscription fee for both these services.
That’s not to say they don’t make questionable choices. I mean, seriously, in real life a business would be laughed at or sued if they spray painted a item gold and sold it with a thousand percent mark-up. But Home isn’t just about Sony. The independent developers include Lockwood, nDreams, Codename, Mass Media, Hellfire, Juggernaut and many, many more. Even sharply conservative spending on premium items and games supports these companies, which in turn results in more development.
I’m not saying you should buy out the store. By all means, shop responsibly. But when and if you can, show your support for the developers. They need our purchases to continue building the social platform of Home, which has spawned multiple fan sites, countless community events, and user-generated content that fills thousands of web pages with pictures, text, music, and video.
May 24th, 2012 by BONZO | 6 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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Nice article!
In my really real world, I loathe shopping, but on Home, my avi seems to be just the opposite. She goes to bed early on Tuesday nights just so she can get up early to see what new and exciting things await her in the store Wednesday morning. I think it is because unlike me, she can rock any outfit she puts on. However I don’t buy her things just to have them, we do have standards
As for spaces, we both love those and my furniture collection has grown leaps and bounds over the last year. Each space we decorate allows us to express our creative side in ways I could never do in real life. At times I think it would be really fun to be able to decorate like this in the real world too, but then I would have to spend entirely too much money buying homes, paying taxes, mowing lawns, and picking up little yard bombs left by my tons of companions
I guess it is better if I just keep my material girl in Home where she is limited to $5 a week for her shopping allowance. Well, at least until I get a real job with a real paycheck LOL!
Frankly my Home budget isn’t even that high, but I do end up buying something every update. Specially this year that has see so much awesome content. Particularly from Lockwood.
I remember my firs days on home, not understanding why would people buy virtual items with real money… Now i spend most of my “off time” on home, with a clutterd wardrobe an furniture. I justified myself saying to my “physical” friends “it’s real stuff in a virtual world”
LOL i like that. Ill have to remember that one.
I guess I’ll be the oddball. I haven’t bought much since update 1.6. Glitching personal spaces was my #1 favorite thing to do on Home. Before 1.6 I rarely ever glitched a public space. I just gliched personal spaces. I bought spaces for the sake of gliching them. The furniture I bought was for the same reasons. But not the usual reasons as most. Those of you who know me know my gliches took lots of time and thought. Multiple drops Like the gargoyle at paris where you jump three times and each landing gets you closer to the finale which is the street below. After the 1.6 my usual addiction of buying a space, and spending weeks of hours on end to create a masterpiece were all gone. I found myself hanging out with a new set of friends, but now we’re gliching public spaces. So why buy anything? I mean my wardrobe is so far beyond bulging that it becomes a real hassle with every single free reward to track down what was sent to storage. I sent ALL shoes, ALL costumes (except a few used for other purposes), all jewelry, and nearly all hand items to storage. All to keep my current items as I want them. Some tell me to fav them. I could, but all those hearts annoy me. So Id rather leave them and complain. Hey at least Im honest. So Ive been buying Home avatars so long now that my original avatars are becoming “new items”. I wore the glowing E3 suit the other day with some glowing accessories and got 3 different comments that night by Home users wanting to know where I got the cool new avatar. Its what… 2 years old? The new stuff is stretching the limits of the character. The old stuff doesnt. So that the old stuff now looks “retro” and in return, the noobs think my “old as beta” avatars are new avatars. So why BUY?
I cant glich my spaces anymore even with multiple bundles of 100 items of furniture. I’ll admit I bought a couple spaces that were on sale for the sheer joy of decorating. But without space merges and the shock and awe of a floating rug a mile up and out, my guests were somewhat bored. So I thought to myself.. OK this is finished. I’ll hang out in public and just talk. Pretty-much everything else I enjoyed is gone, so if I hang out I have plenty of avatars. Heck I have stuff I bought in bundles that Ive never even worn. My newest avatar fancy is bringing the oldest stuff I have out to the light of Home again. I’ve been going through my storage and giving some of this stuff a new look. And I’m liking what I see. So again i have to say “I’m not buying”. Besides. Less money spent on PSH means more money spent in Disney World.
In a means not to sound like a butthole I’ll add that there was a point in time when I bought all the newest avatars and all the newest spaces. I enjoyed the thrill of being the first one to wear it, and the attention one gets from it. Now, the hassles of the wardrobe overpower that joy. So unless Sony expands the wardrobe drastically im stuck in a timewarp. I cringe at sending avatars I spent REAL money on to storage. I guess Im a cheapskate. But thats my take on it.
Bonzo, if it makes you happy then buy it. Home is about having fun. Thats the ONLY reason for Home in my opinion. So kudos to you
I agree with you Bonzo, I am very picky as well about what I buy in Home. Lately I have only bought clothing and the Clusterpuck and Mini Bots games, all well worth their price. The bundle packs of new clothing that Drey puts out are always worth the cost, you get so much for the $4 spent, way more than if you bought them separately. I am all about decorating and fashion so that is where my focus has gone now, personal spaces have lost their luster for me now, if I want to decorate I will redo the ones I have.