A Home Without “Free”dom
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
Home has been around for five years now. Hard to believe, isn’t it: if you’ve been here since closed beta, you have devoted five years of your life to this virtual reality. I’m going on my third year, and I am amazed how fast the time has flown, but I’m having fun and you all know the saying about that.
When I first came here it was my very first time in an alternate reality situation; I never frequented chat rooms or even played games online before in my life. I came into Home on a whim, because my son mentioned it to me as something I might want to look at. Although he is a die-hard Xbox fan, he’d heard about it from a friend. Little did I know where this foray would take me, but I was in awe from the first day, and Home has enriched my life in many ways.
When I first arrived, I saw and met others who’d spent money in Home, and said to myself, “I will never do that.” Well, as they say, “never say never,” and several hundred dollars later, I guess I have to eat those words. Once I got a few good friends and saw their personal spaces and clothing, I realized there really was value to adding stuff to my inventory, as it enriched my experience here. Half the fun of being in Home is decorating both my avatar and homes.
Much has been said lately about the “free”dom idea here in Home. The fact that many feel entitled to get free things from every new game or space or upgrade that comes into our Home environment. I have even written an article about all the free stuff you can acquire in Home in a short time if you know where to look and what to do. There is a great deal to be had, and I’m still collecting things.
NO REWARDS FOR YOU!!!
But try to imagine a Home without freebies. What would that be like? Would Home even survive without them? Lets examine that for a moment.
Imagine that Sony created this place with the intention of having gamers meet others (this actually was their original intent); that all they wanted was to make an environment that was suited to only that task and therefore they didn’t want you to stay in Home at all, just come and meet people then quickly leave to play games with them. If this was the case, they would have never given anyone any incentive to stay, so no free stuff at all. There might also be no personal spaces to purchase or win in games, no t-shirts or clothes to buy, nothing.
How would this have played out? Would Home be a total failure without the free rewards it gives us? Xbox has something similar to this concept with their Kinect characters. They can create avatars and change their appearance, but it is nothing more than a chat room without any free-walking place like Home to go to. So in a way, this idea holds merit as it has worked for them, somewhat. There is a big difference between Sony and Microsoft though – Home is free. If Sony had decided to go the way of Xbox and create a glorified chat room that we paid for, would any of us have stayed here?
If you came into Home and quickly realized that everything cost money, would you have stuck around? When I first came into Home, I didn’t know anything about free stuff being here. It wasn’t until I made a few friends that I learned of the existence of rewards, though at the time there wasn’t much to get, as Home was still fairly new. The rewards we have now and the spaces and games that provide them have increased exponentially since then. But I still stuck around because of the friends I had, the rewards were nice, but were secondary to the experience of Home to me.
But if I was a new person and didn’t have the good luck to make friends who would help me in my first few days in Home, what would convince me to stay here? Curiosity might be one reason; it was what caused me to come here in the first place. I have met a few people who stayed very isolated in Home and didn’t make friends here yet still stayed, so it has appeal on many levels to many different people. When asked if rewards played into them staying, they said no.
Free clothes, companions and fun. What more could we want?
I believe many would still stay if Home was free but they had to buy everything else — in other words, if there were no rewards at all — but Home would be a much different place as many would never come back and I think the population would be much smaller. So rewards have a double edge to them: they give to us but they also give to the developers in increased revenue because people stay and buy. They are the bait that they use to entice us and keep us coming back.
Many people I have talked to say that one of their big reasons for coming to Home is reward hunting. They will spend hours playing a repetitious game they don’t even like to win something in it, something others like myself would never do as it isn’t that important to us. But if there were no rewards given, would this kind of person stay in Home? I asked a friend of mine who does this and his answer was, “Personally I think the free rewards have a great impact on why people go back to Home. It’s interactive and gives you a sense of accomplishment when you finally finish a Home game. Gold Vickie says it all, no rewards equals a chat room like any other.” He also said, “Things that you don’t have to win or play for are nice because not everyone can afford a PSN card. I have a friend on Home who is a paraplegic and can only use one hand so games are hard, but I am sure they like the freebies.”
The real irony of all of this debate about free things is that people complain about Sony being money grabbers and the like, yet expect them to develop not only new content for Home with rewards added, but also a new PS4 console as well, all without any money coming in. Let’s be real! Would you work for nothing at your job?
100 rewards, and many more where these came from.
Yet still, people complain when Sony doesn’t give them something for nothing, like the new No Man’s Land game; but if we were to look closely at all they have done in the past few months alone, we would be amazed at it. There have been so many new items given since I have been here that when I tried to take a picture of them I couldn’t even begin to put them all out for it. I couldn’t include any active items at all, and that didn’t include all of the companions and clothing rewards either. They have to number in the upper hundreds now, between all of the different developers. This doesn’t even include the free personal spaces we have received, and there is even a new free one coming from Juggernaut.
No matter how you look at this issue, when the rubber meets the road, Sony and the other developers are choosing to do this. They don’t have to, but are doing so because they want to. I think many times they have gone over the top with their generosity, like the huge “welcome back” package we got. Sure, it was good business to offer something in return for the PSN’s outage, but what Sony ended up offering was much more than I think anyone anticipated. So rather than point out the negative stuff we think they do and throwing up our hands in disgust when they don’t meet our expectations in some way, we should stop looking a gift horse in the mouth and be happy they care enough to do this.
There is another freedom we can exercise in Home too: the freedom to act as an adult. I always look at what I get through either game play or otherwise as a gift I have been given, and I for one will be thankful for them.
July 6th, 2012 by Burbie52 | 6 comments
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
Haters will always hate, and they will never be satisfied, so even with freebies, they hate on, but for those of us that are level minded: that Home even gives us anythingn at all is amazing and a great gesture. Great read Burbie. Your picture only proves that you can have oodles (did I actually say oodles)of fun just collecting and that they give one lots of extras that can range from forgettable to outstanding. I love that Sony and the devs all take great strides to make free things and appreciate the time and effort from them.There would be a void if we didn’t have “free”doms here in Home, so I tip my hat to Sony and the devs for being so generous and I love hunting for the ‘freebies’.
The challenge of any social network, even Home, is keeping users engaged. Home is at a distinct disadvantage, because it’s a way to connect with strangers rather than with friends, which is the hook for online applications like Facebook and Twitter.
So you drop a bunch of gamers into a nicely designed virtual space. If all they have to do is talk to each other, very few are going to stick around. What do you say to a complete and virtual stranger? Where do you go after “Hello. Nice pixels you’ve got there.” Nowhere, unless someone says, “What games do you like?” Nowhere, if the answer is “Medal of Honor” and the other person hates shooters.
Rewards don’t just give people a reason to visit Home; they are a catalyst for the social interaction that’s needed to build the community. “Where did you get that?” and “How does this work?” become the basis for opening up conversations with strangers, just as all the ways of personalizing the Home experience through purchases help us establish individual identities.
I would be very surprised if more than 20% of new Home users bought something within their first five visits, because at first glance, those items have no real purpose and no value. So in addition to fostering social interaction, freebies help to establish the benefits of having particular items or clothing, which lowers the innate resistance to buying. New users don’t know if they’re going to spend any time in Home. Why pay for it? Rewards and free-to-play games open up the possibilities.
I don’t find the expectation of rewards to be at all misplaced. Lure people in with free items and they’re going to expect more free items. Does that mean every Home game should include free items? Ultimately, I believe the answer is yes, because Home games will always need to compete with the PlayStation Store for customer dollars, and the perception among customers is that the games in the Store offer greater depth, not to mention the trophies that all Home games lack.
I do think developers should create more merit-based rewards that unlock for achieving certain objectives, rather than rewards which simply appear when you buy an item. The success of the Midway spaces shows the value of merit-based rewards. They encourage gamers to play longer and extend the enjoyment of the game.
At the same time, I strongly disagree with the entitlement mentality that some Home users possess. No, everything should not be free, and no one has an innate right to get every piece of content. Virtual items have value based on the entertainment they provide, and those who create them deserve to be paid for their efforts. That doesn’t mean everything is priced fairly, we can find plenty of exceptions in that department, but it does mean that Home users need to recognize that some content is going to come with a price tag.
Great point, HIW. Personally speaking, the potential for more rewards as a result of my purchase has been a major incentive to motivate a purchase. Particularly with nDreams and the Midway games. Groups have been developed based on the concept of rewards hunting, I belong to a few of them, where we help each other out particularly when there are cooperative based quests, or multi-player game rewards. It has served as a catalyst for social interaction, helping each other to find freebies we may not know about. Not all games need to have freebies, but the initial assumption on a game is, “what can I get from it?” the entertainment value of the game itself sometimes becomes a second thought.
I would like to think Home could continue to grow based soley on it’s social experience. Getting rewards “is” an incentive for more social interaction, however building quality and much richer experiences, not based on rewards could possibly be a reward in itself for developers.
For example, LOOT continues building on the social experience! Thats why I keep coming back, and spending.
That’s a great example of a non-rewards situation that works. Yes, stuff that lets people do stuff together is great stuff.
Great article Burbie. I love that picture of all the rewards. The rewards keep games fresh. The free stuff is also a great way to draw in people and let them sample a game for free before they start spending! That alone is awesome!