Life After Home
by FEMAELSTROM, HSM team writer
Recently the thought was posed to me: “What will we do after Home is gone? After all, it can’t last forever.”
I sat and thought long and hard, as this thought had crossed my mind but was made more ominous, knowing that somebody else had the same thought. I admit, it sent a shiver down my spine. Home has become such a huge part of my life and the lives of so many around me, that the very thought of it ever leaving has to at least be, in a small way, examined.
To be absolutely, 100% clear on this issue, allow me to state this: I have no information or even a hint or suggestion that any entity involved with Home, HomeStation or Sony have made any announcements about the end of Home. This is at this point simply a glance at a possibility posed by a writer. No need to run under the kitchen table.
So what does the future hold for us? Is it the end of the world, as the Mayans have (not really) foretold? Will there be open weeping in the streets, and total anarchy that leads to a “Road Warrior”-esque wasteland wherein one must savagely fight for a tank of gas just to exist?
The obvious answer is no, but it does lead to some questions that we (even Sony) will have to face eventually. Will Home ever cease to exist? Perhaps it will ‘phoenix’ itself into a new console, and gain new life there. What will happen to all the countless dollars we as a populace have eagerly poured into the virtual economy and all the virtual items we have? Will they simply count down to a point then cease to exist? And what of the people here? The close friends we have come to gather around us. Those that we celebrate the good times with and struggle through the bad times with. Those that we have had countless hours of fun running through this land with, exploring and discovering more than just the ‘program’, but instead each others’ lives and existences. Where will the masses go to congregate and meet after?
The issue at hand is that those of us who occupy the landscape of Home, for the most part, don’t want to see it end because we have come to make such a grand world around us. Whether it is the group of friends we have massed and grown to care for, or the items we labored through Home games like Sodium or Aurora to gather around us, the fact is most people who have come to embrace this place as a positive experience will want to see it carry on somewhere, anywhere.
Chances are, most of us have real-world connections to our friends in the form of phone numbers, emails and addresses and these do serve to help lengthen our connections — but for so many of us the added fun of the Home environment is the element that draws us back when we consider that we probably, and in all reality would have never meet some of the fine people we know, had we never ventured into Home.
Will Home ever cease to exist? The logic of technology says that eventually it will cease. All technology comes, develops and eventually gets outdated, but with the thought that Home is server-based and gets regular updates, the technology can be stretched out to a longer life than if it was a disk based game confined to a single console generation. In this, the life can be extended.
A slim possibility is that Home will one day come back through its server existence on the next-generation console. If the technology allows, it may be feasible to simply access the servers through the next gen system, maybe even allowing for PS3 and PS4 users to all access Home. This as well should hold some promise to elongate Home.
One would hope that the small fortunes we have collectively pumped into the economy of Home will transfer to a future Home. There are no easy answers as to what should be done with our commodities on the day Home closes, but considering that we have spent real money to buy virtual items, some will want to see a compensation package of some sort (which is unrealistic), though I would contend that most people would want to keep the virtual items ( less the occasional piece that constitutes buyer’s remorse) and continue in the virtual walk here on Home.
What should be considered the core of this realm are the people, and Sony needs to remember that if it were announced that Home is shutting down, these people will want a Home substitute and will begin to migrate to a place that will offer them that substitute. This is not to say we are a disloyal band ready to scramble to the next shiny thing that comes down the river, but in the absence of Home, the masses will seek a new place to deposit their community efforts, their time and their money. Homebodies want Home to carry on in some form or another as they know it today.
In the end — and this isn’t it for Home, not for at least a couple of years — this place is one that many occupy and want to keep around for a long time to come. We as a community would like to see this go on far into the future, and technology being as malleable as it is should be able to accommodate an ever changing need to make Home something we can enjoy far into the future.
Something I have thought about a few times before. I think some of you have. This was a very good article that I enjoyed reading. Some solid points. There will always be something else to do. I like the idea behind Home a lot. Community. It is nothing new now and I am sure the future has much more for us who enjoy communicating with others online.
As years go by and technology catches up to dreams.. who knows what the future of home will be.. or how many version of home we will see..
Future home http://oi45.tinypic.com/5ygodw.jpg
Thanks for writing this article
cool link Jersquall!
As a guy I dig the boobsy woman, but a cat? Hmm, perplexing. LOL
Didn’t you know? By the time future Home comes out, cats will have taken over the world.
Welcome your furry overlords. Welcome them.
Sushi Restaurants on every corner!
Back in 05 I was in a closed Beta for a huge MMO that I won’t name. I loved the game and saw it through the entire Beta cycle and was very involved. The parent company closed the MMO after 3 years and it’s closing taught me a very valuable lesson about getting to attached.
Home will end some day, I agree 100%, but we have a very unique position here that I haven’t seen at other big games. Our voices here at Home are actually listened to by Sony. I feel the intimidate future of Home is totally in our hands, and although I worry about that Beta tag still being on the game and the PS4 questions, I think Home will be around for many more years. Great article Strom
PS- Where do I sign up for the holodeck Home?
Ted2112…The Enterprise, where else.
Another incredible passionately insightful article from the incomparable Mael (who, henceforth, shall be dubbed the Tolstoy for Homestation) (Sorry I just had to :)). I honestly think that there will come a day when either we become batteries for a super server (as in The Matrix) or we actually jump into the bodies of the characters we imagine ourselves to be (As in avatar) Heh. But until that day I shall take the camaraderie and the sense of the fantastic with me each and every day into the life on the other side of the monitor. Cheers my friends. You are what is most real…
ted21, LOL’ Your HoloSuite is almost ready. http://oi47.tinypic.com/dgjdow.jpg
oooo I want a holodeck! sign me up! Er… um… beam me up?
At some point in the future, Home must inevitably come to an end. Who knows if there’ll be a clean-sheet redesign of it for the PS4, but even if there isn’t, Home still has, at the very least, a few years left. Just as PS2 consoles continue to sell well even after years of PS3 availability, I suspect much the same will be true for the next generation.
How much new product development will there be for Home after the PS4 rolls out? Who knows. But, like Friendster in America, it will soldier on for a good while.
Even so, the inevitable end must come. I won’t regret the money spent, nor will I expect a refund. I’ll simply look at it as an experience which enriched my life for several years — a trick that’s very rare to pull off in the gaming industry.
Will there be further improvements to the social interface of Home? Perhaps. But I must confess a deep curiosity as to what could Sony could deploy to supersede it using today’s technology. Time will tell.
I find it interesting how willing people are to assume Home will simply cease to be when PS4 hits. Will Home always be the Home we know? I doubt it, but I think Home is laying the foundation for the future of the Playstation Brand. I would be very surprised if the Home formula, structure and content aren’t used for a great many years to come.
I really feel sorry for some of these developers if Home just stops with the PS3. I hope that Lockwood will generate enough revenue and experience to develop full games by then.
With all the comments about Home coming to an end, this sort of feels like a living wake for Home.
Reminds of that time Stephen Hawking was scheduled to give a cosmology lecture and was asked, ahead of time, not to discuss the end of the universe because it might adversely affect the stock market!
LOL! I wish the stock market hinged on my musings!!!
The end of Home huh, something that goes through my mind a lot actually. If it’s something that life has beaten me into submission with, it’s the logic that EVERYTHING must end. Funny you mentioned the Mayans and their umm “predictions” however, I have come up with a theory about that! But I won’t go into it here, apparently (according to those I’ve told this to) it’s too plausible and therefore too scary to contemplate. But Home, like everything else, will end. And I may or may not be there for its final song.
I think Home has taken Sony to unexpected places, and so far it’s a pretty original template for the idea of a virtual world. Even Second Life can’t match it for visuals because of the many-and-differering PC models that SHOULD be able to run it. Yet I have a feeling Sony won’t just whip the Home rug out from under our feet, instead I do see a transition over to the PS4 platform. If you can run or adapt old PS2 games to run on PS3 or even PSP, Vita etc then you can tap into the Home servers with a PS4. the fundamental difference will probably in the item qualities (ie visuals), lighting effects, texture detail and load speeds. I’d imagine the two platforms would be able to reach onto the same servers, only difference will be those with PS3s will see a LOT of ghosts as the PS3 struggles to load up the finer detailed clothing or personal spaces of the items available for PS4 owners. Eventually through frustration people will jump ship to the better, faster machine.
Home makes Sony (and all the Home-based) companies too much money to just switch off the servers on a whim. Oh, and whoever said about LW making their own games; I think they’ve been creating their own music based version of Home for PC for quite some time now! Shame about the real world ending at Christmas this year though, think we can get a refund on THAT!? lol
Yes this makes sense.
100% agreed. The thing people need to remember is that Home is server-based, which essentially makes it future-proof as long as Sony maintains compatibility with it on the PS4.
We can still view websites coded in the 1990s on our modern browsers. Why couldn’t Home work the same way? Sony has proven itself adept at developing future-looking technology; how many of us thought we could use a PS3 as a 3-D movie player back in 2007?
The real question to ask about Home is when we’ll get tired of its graphics, and how the transition to the PS4 will be handled. Adding more features, more customization options and new types of games will be a given on that platform, but a change in the graphics engine would raise the question of what happens to everything we already bought. Do we just start over from scratch? Would we want to?
Ultimately, Home content is like any other kind of DLC…it’s only valuable as long as we’re interested in the game that runs it. We’re paying for the experience and buying something that on its own has no measurable value. There’s nothing wrong with that, but consumers need to be aware of what they’re doing when they spend their money.
I wouldn’t expect a refund for DLC for a disc game if the disc stopped working, or if the console I owned could no longer play the disc. I look at Home content the same way.
Nail on head Wow. I’d imagine we could easily take our stuff from the “old Home” into the new, but the difference would be a bit like looking at PS1 graphics within a PS3 game; nasty and ugly. The statue that you bought for your garden in Home that took pride of place for so long would look like a pixelated pile of crap when you set it down in your new Eden Garden Space you just bought on your PS4’s version of Home. It’ll all run similarly but it would be like someone from Home now, visiting someone in Home in 2009;
“Nice bed, but what’s going on, you can’t lay down, or do emotes or even hug each other!?”
Or
Avi 1: “Hey, look at that dude. What’s wrong with his eyes?”
Avi 2: “Oh, he’s on a PS3, that’s why they look so dead and lifeless lol. He should get a PS4″
Yes, but that is happening right now in Home. It is why they are retiring spaces and stop selling items.
I can tell you right now that a lot of my items are ready for 1080p. The Mysterious Doll for instance will look amazing in 1080p. But it will still take up 22 furniture slots unless someone updates it.
The PS2 is still selling over 4 million units a year. If the PS3 hangs around for another 6 years or more (even after the PS4 release), I see Home still having new things coming out for a while.
Remember that Second Life is still alive.
I believe that Home is in for the long haul. I really don’t see Sony shooting themselves in the foot and not translating this money making proposition onto the PS4 when it surfaces. I think that once the time is set for its release, they will be creating items for us that will easily work in a better format, like the doll Deuce mentioned. They will have many months to do so as they will know well in advance when the PS4 is going to come out. The thing I would miss the most if Home did leave is the friendships I have found here, if its demise was eminent I would have to find real world means to keep in touch with many of them, email,phone, ect. I would also miss writing for this magazine as that would signal the end of that as well. This was a very thoughtful article Strom, as always I love your style of writing.