Home, nDreams Nominated for Industry Excellence Awards
by Terra_Cide, HSM Managing Editor
Recognition.
The word has multiple meanings. The most obvious one is catching people doing something right. Being recognized by people both inside and outside your industry is a phenomenal feeling. It means what you are creating is worthy of others to sit up and take notice.
Develop, a UK-based website and magazine dedicated to covering the global gaming industry from a developer perspective, has announced its nominees for their 2012 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Some familiar names were on the list. While big name studios, like Rocksteady and Ubisoft, were well represented across the categories, in the categories for Best Use of Online and Business Development, Home developer nDreams gets two nods; one for the company itself, and for Aurora in the Use of Online Category. Home itself is also in the running for Best Use of Online, and SCEE’s XDev studio is nominated for a Publishing Hero Award. It should also be noted that Best Use of Online is a brand-new category for the Develop awards, which are now into their tenth year.
nDreams: #Winning
The winners will be announced Wednesday, July 11.
Award nominations are not unfamiliar territory for nDreams, as this is the fourth year in a row nDreams has been nominated for an award by Develop. Just last year they were a “Smarta 100″ winner, and in 2010 were included in UK paper, The Guardian’s Tech Media Invest 100, as well as one of three companies nominated for the Kemp Little award for outstanding innovation. However, this is only the second nomination for an award for Home; the previous being the AskMen Innovation Award in May this year.
There is another side to this recognition, and this is most significant in terms of Home. Since its debut, Home has been largely ignored by the gaming world; at best, they’ve given it the same passing curiosity one would a car accident. Which makes this nomination sort of a big deal. The gamers and game journalists who have summarily dismissed Home and its affiliated developers as a failed experiment still may not sit up and take notice, but as a collective, they really missed the point to begin with. Develop, on the other hand, isn’t staffed by a bunch of enthusiasts theorizing. This is what you read if you want to understand the industry from the inside; the list of sponsors for this year’s awards is proof enough of that. And this is why Home’s nomination here is so significant; Home’s developers (whose core team is in the UK), all their hard work and dedication, are being recognized – finally – by their peers.
From a developmental perspective, Home is ahead of its time; it’s a product created before the market ever realized there was a need for it. The downside to this is that all too often, when a company creates something that is ahead of its time, they feel the prospective returns won’t meet long-term expectations, nor do they know exactly what to do with the product. Then they kill it off, only to have their initial idea reproduced sometime in the future (oftentimes by a competitor) and it becomes successful. While this pattern may or may not hold true for European companies – or even Asian ones – it does tend to hold true for American companies.
“An electric car? We tried it. Bad idea.” – GM, 2002
Take, for example, what happened in the automotive industry with General Motors and what they were doing regarding the concept of the electric car back in the early to mid 1990s. Their EV1 was the first ever mass-produced electric car, but the program was cancelled after only six years of operation, because GM believed electric cars to be an unprofitable niche. Ten years after the first EV1 was produced in 1996, former GM CEO Rick Wagoner was quoted to say that the decision to end the EV1 program, and to do it in the manner GM did, was the worst decision he ever made. To find a similar story in the videogame industry, would anyone care to recall what happened in the games industry around that same time, when Nintendo said “no thanks” to Sony regarding a CD-based console?
Home is five years old as of this writing. There is no telling where it could go or what it could become. Getting recognition for pulling off something that has never been done before on a game console has been long overdue for the core development team. Indeed, it would be a shame if Home were to lose the momentum it has fought so hard to obtain.
Last year saw an avalanche of new content for the platform, this year has seen important infrastructure changes, but all of that would be for naught if the people in charge of Home cannot see the value of it themselves. This starts with recognizing what they have done right. While it is rewarding to be applauded by users and those whose job it is to be on top of, report, and critique all the latest goings-on in the gaming industry, nothing can compare to being recognized by one’s peers. They are the ones who know the late nights, the overtime without pay, the feeling of having a project you’ve put your entire heart and soul into only to have it never be realized, the personal life events missed, the headaches, and the triumphs that go into making a unique experience.
They know what it feels like to be recognized. And win or lose Wednesday, Home will have achieved recognition.
July 9th, 2012 by Terra_Cide | 4 comments
Terra _Cide is the former Community Manager for Lockwood Publishing and Editor Emeritus for HomeStation Magazine.
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Very Cool! It is about time some of the detractors sit up and take notice of Home. And it will only get better as time goes on, that has been proven already in just the past year. With all of the innovative things coming here in the next few months alone, I would bet you anything(and I am not a betting person) that we will see other gaming consoles trying to adopt something similar to Home with their next generation. But we will have already set the bar high for what this type of entertainment stands for and they will have a lot of catching up to do.
Kudos to NDreams and the Home developers, I hope they win! They deserve it.
I am personally glad Nintendo said no thanks to Sony for the disc based console!
I would love to see nDreams win. Should be exciting.
Terra- you make all this techno jargon interesting even to a gaming bonehead like me. Its testament that perseverance in an environment of nay-saying will always lead to success. Why because tenacity will modify to overcome. I predict that HOME and its will lead the pack in the near future. After all it is a beta… so its a way to test and modify games and content. The beauty of it is that it is constantly changing and updating its material… so unlike other games it can reduce the boredom factor once everything has been experienced. I dont know enough about it to speak with much authority -but I do know programmers and when they program its a labor of love. Its always great to get acknowledgement for the things you have achieved. And serving up a little crow to the competition ain’t bad either
I always said we are building tomorrows society on PsHome. So i’m really glad one of the devellopers and sony get some recognition for it. Good luck to all!